OMG this guy totally fell for the loser salesguy ...how sad! - Susan Beebe
hiring decisions can kill your firm - Bill Sodeman
Really enjoyed this, though felt bad of course for the author. Really shows that doing as much legwork/homework/digging up front as possible is a good thing and well worth the time put in - Eric Berlin
While reading this, I kept thinking about your job titles "senior executive vice director of VP coordination & vision".... funny - but sad article. - Erin
Similar experience: My employer hired a supposed "expert" from a BIG 5 consulting firm. This person was a Global Manager and was going to come to our 30 person IT shop and do us right! Boy, that hiring manager was sooo excited! I about died when I learned that person was coming on board to be my new boss. Long story short: She left 90 days later with her tail between her legs when it was abundantly clear that she completely lacked requisite skills for her position. Couldn't even use PPT or email! - Susan Beebe
we need a salesperson for our business and this is exactly why we haven't hired anyone over the past 4 years. we're terror-frozen. - faboo mama
Interesting story. Thanks for sharing Paul. The hardest thing for an entrepreneur is to ask the hard questions. - Edwin Khodabakchian
Lesson 5: A turkey was chatting with a bull. 'I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree' sighed the turkey, 'but I haven't got the energy.' 'Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?' replied the bull. They're packed with nutrients.' The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree. He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree. Moral of the story: Bull Shit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there.. - Alan Cheslow
This is why I'm not usually impressed by resumes/titles. I want to see real work. Then I'm impressed. It can be a catch-22 though hiring people (for a guy, like getting a date with a beautiful lady - how do you have conversations, until you've had some). "Consultant" can be for real...or mean that someone is "out of work". - Mitchell Tsai
As a 19-yr-old college grad, how did we get clients that $500 million companies couldn't get? Well, the experienced CEOs know that McKinsey and other consultants just hire sharp (but inexperienced) people from Harvard, Stanford, etc..., and it's a total crap-shoot who you get (for $500-1,000/hr). If we did a good job for CEO of X company, he told VP friend at Y company, and we got the work. There are so many fly-by-nights in this world. Experience isn't worth much if it's "bad experience". - Mitchell Tsai
Another example of how people with great charisma but no skills can be promoted far beyond where they should be. Another great example is a guy who will be leaving his current job on Jan. 20th. - Robert Felty
This is really sad isn't it. So difficult to get it right, yet it is the most important success/fail factor for any company. It starts with great people. - Alexander van Elsas
Dang, that story was rough. I mean did you even proof read it? (LOL) - Drew Lucas
man, this could've been taken straight out of the E-myth revisited. Definitely a book that guy should read. - Vincent van Wylick
i just wish i couldn't tell so many similar stories of hiring senior execs w/ great looking experience, resumes, and references who turned out to be completely incompetent - Deva Hazarika
Actually he was lucky that the guy was so obviously lame and came clean in the end, and that his business wasn't destroyed. What's far worse is a somewhat competent person with great political skills. Much harder to detect and so they have time to do a lot more subtle and potentially fatal damage to the fabric of an company. - Robin Barooah
"$25K in stuff he said we absolutely needed -- slick brochures, sponsor some conference, ads in the trade journal, coffee mugs, pens with our logo -- I readily paid for." This entrepreneur should have been tipped off right then. Mugs? Brochures? Everyone knows you close the most business with T-shirts. - Ginger Makela
It raises an important question... how long do you need to wait for your hire to deliver. This guy had to wait for an year, since most startup founders dont have time to baby-sit their employees... how long do they wait before concluding, that they have a bad-hire. Is it 1 month, 3 months, 6 months ( sounds too much for a startup ) - Krishna Gade
"REST is Newtonian physics. XMPP Data Services: Quantum Mechanics & General Relativity" - ⓞnor
From the slides: FriendFeed's crawler sent 2.9 million requests to Flickr in one day to get updates for 46K users. "Polling doesn't scale." - Bret Taylor
Nice :). Polling scales just fine though -- it just isn't very efficient (regardless of scale). A good public feed would work just as well for us though, and it would be a lot simpler than xmpp. - Paul Buchheit
"We're spending a huge amount of resources ... for what is really a small trickle of data. we thought about calculating kilowatt hours, and dollars spent on electricity. But we didn't get to it" - let us know if friendfeed ever gets a bill. :) - David Vasileff
Paul - "polling doesn't scale" is definitely a generalization. But, at least in the case of FriendFeed's API, it does present opportunities for incomplete/non-contiguous data streams, which may be problematic for some API consumers. We've been discussing this on the API google group :) - Patrick Lightbody
Great quote - "It's very, very difficult to wear both the developer and the evangelist hats at the same time: being a developer requires that you be very pessimistic, so you can see and fix all the problems in your design, while being an evangelist requires that you be very optimistic, so others can feed off your passion. I suspect that if I tried to do both, the cost would be my sanity" - Eric Kerr
"Linux started as a terminal emulator".. !!!? Or not. - Nick Lothian
Definitely a lot of points that rang true for me, especially the "Chicken and Egg" point. - Adam Thorsen
I myself have worked on two start-up concepts and a revitalization effort, each of which bombed, but each one taught me something different. I finally threw in the towel on my last start-up and picked up a full-time day-job because I couldn't find anyone willing to share hats. We were already incorporated, so I was the CEO, book keeper, technology evangelist, sales guy, support tech, development lead, and development team. Needless to say I fried myself within a year and nearly went off the deep end. On a happy note, I'm loving my work now and haven't given up the entrepreneurial bug yet; I'm preparing myself to be the best co-founder in the world, knowing that the time will be right when the right team comes together to solve the right problem. - Chris Stewart via twhirl
Haven't read the article yet, Nick, but Linux didn't start out as a terminal emulator. Linus Torvalds deliberately started working on implementing a "practice OS" called "Minix" from a book, and it grew from there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... - J. Phil
Funny, I recently judged a science fair project: "Rockin' & Rollin'" with Java" even though the kid knew that they're different languages. But he said," who wants to rock and roll with Javascript?" - Cornelius Toole
Drop.io is an amazing site. They really got it right. It's a site I find myself looking for a reason to use all the time. Fax and conference call have come in handy. - Kevin Shannon
Neat idea. I hope they get enough premium subscribers to actually pay for it... - Garrett Fitzgerald
This site is so simple and so efficient ... This is the way to exchange big files ... and much more - Christian Farley
No usernames/accounts? Anarchy, web2.0 style! VERY easy to use. - Alex C. Williams
thanks for the tweet - just give us a few months, we are amazingly psyched about the pipeline of upgrades we have to release - sam
What is your take on efforts such as infochimps.org, theinfo.org and freebase? - Aviv
I had never seen the first two. They look interesting. How are the data sets edited and updated? Freebase doesn't interest me from what I can tell. They seem more focused on the relationships between data items than the data itself because of all the "semantic web" stuff, and most of it seems to be relatively uninteresting data from IMDB and other existing web sources. - Bret Taylor
Unfortunately they rarely get updated and most data sets cannot really be used reliably. theinfo.org is essentially an indie scraper's paradise and the intended use is controlled lab experiments. Perhaps a fresh, well-publicized effort will stand better chance. - Aviv
Google already has access to at least 5 of the data sets you listed... sure, licensed and all, but at the end of the day shouldn't face great difficulties bending arcane usage restrictions. Let developers play with the data inside the cloud... - Aviv
Right. The big obstacle would still be the whole issue of usage restrictions and copyrights, and as you said in your last point, it won't work without the backing of big companies. Developers can have access to such valuable data sets today - simply by scraping. It's far from ideal, but it works, and it can be kept up-to-date with extra effort. But then how do we go about using the data - and actually telling people about it? :) - Aviv
@Bret you should talk to Freebase. This is precisely what they're trying to do. It may not look how you want it to now, but I think a conversation between the two companies makes a whole lot of sense. - Carla Thompson
"The most important part of an environment that encourages innovation is low barriers to entry. The moment a contract and lawyers are involved, you inherently restrict the set of people who can work on a problem to well-funded companies with a profitable product. Likewise, companies that sell data have to protect their investments, so permitted uses for the data are almost always explicitly enumerated in contracts." -what memories ;) - David
I'm not a developer, so I'm curious what the engine means for app consumers like me? What kinds of cool stuff can you do with this? - Ginger Makela
@Ginger: I'm in the same boat as you. What it means is that we can expect to see a wider number of choices for web applications. Things like this and the Amazon AWS offerings allow more developers to turn their web app ideas into a reality. - Rob Safuto
I've got FriendFeed Stats up and running (locally) using Django + Google App Engine, this is really cool. Spoke too soon - can't use sockets which means I can't use urllib2...grumble grumble - Benjamin Golub
I think it means we'll see lots more small apps that try to do one thing well. They won't need to make as much money or get as many users to stay in business and so there will (hopefully) be a greater diversity in the range of people who build these apps. - Adewale Oshineye
Benjamin: yeah, those restrictions leave no choice but to use EC2 and the likes, especially when it comes to crawling. But nevertheless, AppEngine is actually fun. I personally still prefer a more traditional setup for a web service/product, but it seems ideal for smaller pet projects. - Aviv
Thanks Adewale -- I'm all for diversity and smallness. - Ginger Makela
I'm going to give Django a 2nd chance sometime - haven't used it in a while. I like the bare-bones feel of web.py - Aviv
Soon, creation of web apps and services will be available to the same subset of computer users who still have to phone up the family techie every time they forget their XP login password. I'm changing my phone number. - Slippy Lane
@Slippy: haha, I doubt my mom or grandmother will be using App Engine any time soon. :-) - Voyagerfan5761
Nice post Bret. Keep it up. Seems like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and learn Python... What the best book I can buy for a weekend crash course? - Alex Gawley
@Alex, I learned Python from the 2nd ed. of "Python Essential Reference" by David Beazley. If you liked K&R you'll like this book (I did). - ƃuɐʞ
GAE looks very interesting. The many restrictions are a problem, though, as many others have said. I had an idea for an app that would need to use some of Python's networking libraries like urllib2. UPDATE: Ok, I saw here: http://code.google.com/appengi... that GAE has an URL fetch service - that may work. - Vasudev Ram
sweet blog bret, Its amazing that you did it under 100 lines of code, im sure you could even shorten that a bit, do you have any advice for future web app developers on what to read? Thanks for sharing your knowledge! - d e f c o n
I've suddenly realised that this is going to lead to a new PerlGolf style game: reimplementing popular online services in as few lines of code as possible. See: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Shortes... for where this eventually leads. - Adewale Oshineye
haha, i guess pauls interview didnt make the cut... - bob
"Hey do you think we should this. If other people say yes, then we just do it" What a novel concept! Also releasing quickly and often tweaking & fixing for each iteration... all great processes that make smaller dotcoms awesome and easy to drink the large ones' milkshakes. - Mark Krynsky
And why exactly did they decide to sedate her for the interview? - Richard Hemmer
Works great. When one clicks on advanced search, please keep the current query in the box though. (E.g. someone just may want to switch from "friends" to "everyone" but keep the same query.) Quote search would be nice too, it seems to be ignored right now. Also nice you offer an feed for results, though it kind of takes the fun out of screenscraping :) - Philipp Lenssen
this immediately gives one leg up over twitter - MG Siegler
Maybe you should only show the comments that include your query and also search the shared posts. - Ionut
FriendFeed just leveled up! Good job guys! - Bwana McCall
Nor, it might be just the bold highlight that's wrong then (it highlights word parts instead of the full phrase). - Philipp Lenssen
I underestimated the coolness factor of the new search until I searched for john adams to see what people thought of the hbo show, found some people who loved it, and discovered some cool people who have similar tastes that I never would have probably been aware of otherwise. Love it. I'm sending ya'll a box of cookies. - Ginger Makela
jim++ for search! i tried to use the friendfeed bookmarklet to share jim's superman photo but it vomited some broken HTML in the top right corner of the page. - Jess Lee
Man, you know what's funny? Yesterday night I posted about how Friendfeed *so* needed to get filtering and search - 24h later, here it is! I am delighted! http://blog.webreakstuff.com/2... - Fred Oliveira
Search is great and will make a big difference. There is still a great need for filtering as well. When I say filtering I mean service filtering, This would help with service redundancy. - Turker Keskinpala
Hey Bret ... congrats on the continued evolution ... didn't hear from you the other day, but figure you may not have my digits. So if easier, just DM me on Twitter or old fashioned email great too: cathy[at]seesmic[dot]com ... truly looking forward to talking with you! - Cathy Brooks
i was beginning to get worried that a company founded by people with good google dna would not add search :-) now i need to find some other feature to request..maybe de-duplicaiton of shared items? - Charles Hudson
Great to see you guys constantly adding really important features, in very short order too. - Dion Almaer
FriendFeed has consistently been moving up my bookmark heiarchy. First, it was in a folder in my links bar. Today I moved it out of a folder and into the links bar as a single link (which is a very exclusive club.) Soon, it may even be made my home page! And all this within 24 hours! - Bill Bittner
I just realized, I don't even have it as a bookmark.... because it's always in an open tab! On a somewhat related note anyone know why the browsers don't just remember their state when they exit? - Chris White
Chris, Firefox has an option to "Show my windows and tabs from last time". I wish that were the default. I used to kill -9 it to get that behavior (because I didn't notice the option either). Eventually someone told me about the option... - Paul Buchheit
Paul, yeah I've used that before. Safari has it also. They really should allow this as the default, and using kill -9 is pretty funny. :) - Chris White
Tab Mix Plus' session saver is better than Firefox's (imho). - Tormod Haugen
I have the mobile verision of FF (http://friendfeed.com/embed/go...) so I can make the page any width and wrap, and I put in the Outlook browser. I have a wide monitor and usually have my inbox on the right side. Now I have FF on the right side, and click to my inbox when mail comes in. However, I haven't noticed if the feed will auto-refresh. - Bill Bittner
Looks like it not longer auto-refreshes under Safari 3.1. - Steve Rubel
Wow. Whole new world of functionality! Oh, Chris and Paul - I find the Google Browser Sync addon's session management even better than Firefox's AND TabMixPlus' - Slippy Lane
If there are any devs still listening to this thread, I'd like to suggest a universal search box that's available on every page, whether it's everyone, a specific person's feed, or even just one item. The single-item pages are missing a search box right now, and there's no link to the search page in the header. The same kind of box as is available elsewhere (the short one on the right) would be perfect. - Voyagerfan5761
becoming dependent on the search feature with sticky search and other gm scripts, i really really REALLY need a hide feature in search results please. plus agreed on the search box everywhere - use an additional dropdown for where to search. ;) - Nicole Simon
What would you want the hide feature to do there? - Aviv
I use the search feature to work in batches, but it is then when i decide that for example I really do not need to see your tweets. now I have to go to the normal screen and try to find that there, as your personal page does not have the hide feature either (why not btw?) - Nicole Simon
Bret, look forward to u speaking at AltSearchEngines on Mon at 11:00. Call me to discuss! Twitter:@elliottng fouronefive-nineeightseven-eightysix-eightysix - Elliott Ng
"1. Don't start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.
2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession." - Paul Buchheit
Paul, re #2, that's what I don't understand about a lot of folks in the Valley who look to an IPO as the "exit"... after all, the first word of an IPO is "initial", which should be the "beginning". - Louis Gray
I think the exit is suppose to be for the investors, who eventually want a way to realize their capital gains. Also, if you're trying to hire and motivate employees,stock options and grants won't ever be worth anything to them without an exit, unless you institute some kind of revenue sharing. I think a mistake larger companies make is after the initial 4 year vesting period, they don't incent their key employees to stay, so after an IPO that occurs beyond 4 years, many from the original team leave. - Chris White
The math one (from http://random.irb.hr/signup.ph...) is the best. I love reading everyone's wrong answers. Also, is there really a practical purpose which you'd use the QRBG service that /dev/urandom (or equivalent entropy-seeded crypto-PRNG) wouldn't suffice? - ⓞnor
I saw a google captcha long ago that said "pigrape" - Lilly Irani
My favorite entry so far: More rounded corner images. Why must corners be rounded? Why, Web 2.0, why? - Frederic
There isn't even such a thing as Web 2.0. It's just media hype. Get over it, and think of the supposed new version of the Internet as a simple increase in understanding and use of advanced technologies. - Voyagerfan5761
@Paul: Figures. I wanted to look at it. :D @Benjamin (we really need the ability to insert line breaks in comments!): I saw that one. It's quite amusing, isn't it? The things developers put in their version control commit comments... - Voyagerfan5761
Is there a friendfeed-changelog user or should I just imaginary-befriend it? - ***™
I just added it to my feed, so you can subscribe to me - Bret Taylor
Sneaky way to get more subscriptions :) - Glenn Slaven
thx, @bret, you already were in my deck of subscriptions before. :) - ***™
Slippy approves of the phrase "Delicious factor", as well as "better error reporting" when it's immediately followed by "even better error reporting" - Slippy Lane
Oh, and I vote we rename Web 2.0 to Web Country. - Slippy Lane
@Frederic: Sharp corners hurt. Rounded corners are safer for kids. - Amit Patel
So how many cuss words in a changeset description does it take to get filtered? - David Vasileff
At my last weekly meeting my boss asked our group that we not swear in our commit logs anymore; he was concerned about someone reading them and using it as a way to say "John Doe has a history of aggression, look at these logs!". But sometimes you just need to vent when committing at 3am :P - Benjamin Golub
I find swearing in comments and commits admirable and often very funny. - Chris White
I actually got an entire team of folks canned one time because of my variable names and comments. When I worked at Nokia, my team was all under the same contracting agency. I was laid off with about 500 other folks, but a lot of my immediate team members were kept on for another month or so after I left. I had a habit of when I coded using wrassler names for my variables - and one of the Finnish higher ups got a hold of one of our code reviews and slated the rest of my team for removal based on the fact he "didn't find it funny or professional." - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
@Mark: lol. @Benjamin, Chris: I agree that venting in commit logs is something that is just fine. I see all kinds of stuff in the revision history (Subversion) of MediaWiki. - Voyagerfan5761
btw, i really like that you can't insert line-breaks in comments. It helps keep them short, and I think the current range of comment lengths is just about right for what ff is. - j1m
Bret, did you really work for 24 hours straight on 2/23? Did that IE spacing bug really take 5 hours to fix? Or do you only need 3 hours of sleep a day? :) - Marc Chung
Love it love it love it! How about letting us see the source code too? Or maybe a write up about the general design? - Neil Dunn
i have watched A LOT of cat videos (when i'm bored, i often page through the Pets & Animals section of YouTube) and this is definitely one of the best cat videos. - Jess Lee
