My Blog

Feedback

claw — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 07:13:10 GMT

I had a message go out to all the Tribe members on the system last Wednesday and since then I've been getting a ton of mail. It's been really fun to be able to hear from people that I've never seen on the site before. Sometimes you get caught in a little bit of an echo chamber on some of the "official" forums like Tribe Ideas or the Tribe User Profile tribe. It's been great to hear from some of the other folks on the site too! And ofcourse it's gratifying to hear from people that have had positive experiences on the site and who have shared their excitement at being able to try the new features we have rolled out on the site. I was struck by the fact that even when people didn't like some of the changes that there were some good constructive suggestions that people had. I hope that we can keep up the level of conversation and that people continue to mail me. I can't promise that I'll keep up with it but I'll try!

New Stuff is Almost Up!!!

claw — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:47:02 GMT

We're in the final stretch to get the site up and there's a little buzz in the air as everyone is cranking to find and fix the last minute bugs that have creeped in.

Listening to other people's conversations

claw — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:16:41 GMT

I was reading Eric's latest blog post: http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/template/pub%2Coc%2CDetail.vm?plugin=blog&inst=147&r=10535&topicId=408ed35b-6fa1-4052-903a-78e832037911 It made me think of the times that I've eavesdropped on other people's conversations. It's always an interesting moment when both you and the person you're with are eavesdropping on someone else's conversation at the same time instead of having your own. Then you notice that you haven't been talking for ten minutes. Look at each other in that vaguely guilty way and start talking just so it's not as obvious that you've been listening to the otehr people...

If you thought Baby Name visualization was cool...

claw — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 17:54:58 GMT

This is much cooler! Being able to dive into data like this is so awesome! http://www.socialexplorer.com/maps/Census2000Maps.asp

Almost up!

claw — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:56:08 GMT

We're in the final testing stages of getting the new profile system up. I hope that people like it...

I want one!!!

claw — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:32:41 GMT

Ok this has got to be one of the neatest things I've seen in a while. http://www.gnr8.biz/glowbrick.html It's a glowing lightbulb encased in lucite or plastic or something that is totally solar powered. Ok ok so it's probably just a phosphoresent material stuck inside something that's transparent but the lightbulb is just so cool. Have to restrain myself from running out and buying it. Must Not Click

Destroying the Earth

claw — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:53:33 GMT

This has got to be one of the most hysterical websites that I've seen in a while. http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html#current Too funny!

Toolsets

claw — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 03:53:36 GMT

Ron just posted a comment on my last post about how Tribe really needs to focus on creating toolsets for users. I think that is a really interesting position to take and one that many of the folks that I talk to think about. For example Marc Canter is a huge advocate of toolsets. Of empowering users by giving them the tools to create and express and then getting out of the way. One question that comes up is what are the toolsets that our users would want? Another that immediately springs to mind is how does that benefit the company? Can Tribe survive as being an open tools company? What are the other companies out there that do this?

Hard choices

claw — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 03:04:46 GMT

Part of me thinks that I should probably just post this over to the Tribe User Profile Preview Tribe (say that 5 times fast) but I figure that this might be a good spot to get my thoughts out without creating huge waves. One of the toughest problems we face is knowing that we have lots of cool things that we COULD do but choosing which ones are really the ones that will be most valuable for people. Do we let users have more customizability around their photos and photo modules? I know that many of users have asked for this (from the very beginning in fac) and yet we hesitate to prioritize this at a super high level compared to say letting users have more customization capability over their new profiles. Let me explain - ultimately the question comes down to: which one will get people more excited to join tribe? The problem with the photo module is that even if we got it up to snuff and gave people the ability to have multiple albums, order the photos however they wanted and have permanent URLs for them... we'd still never be as good as a dedicated photo site at handling photos. If you cared about photos - you'd still go elsewhere and not to tribe. Our hope is that the idea of an Open Profile will break us out of the logjam. That we will be able to integrate other people's functionality into our site so that our users get the best of all worlds. I'll talk more about that later.

Failure

claw — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:10:19 GMT

Ok it's been 4 days and I've missed a day already. <sigh> Blocking out time to go and blog is much more difficult than I could have imagined. It seems as though the day just rushes in with all sorts of demands on my time and the next thing I know it's over. I'll have to ask some folks how they find time for this activity. Seems like all some people do is blog all day!

A Post a Day

claw — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 02:58:47 GMT

Well I've decided that since we've launched blogging on the site that I will start posting every day. Well every weekday at least. My friend tod has inspired me to do this because he's started on that path. I really enjoy reading what he writes and because he's writing all the time I find myself constantly checking to see what's new.

First Post

claw — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:23:49 GMT

Well I've never really played around much with blogging before but I'm excited to be giving it try now. It's strange to think through what it is that I want to blog about and what kind of "voice" that I'd like for my blog to have. It's not really that clear to me what people want to read about or for that matter if I'll even have any readers at all! If anyone's out there let me know what you think.