Toluu : THINK / Musings

THINK / Musings

occasional thoughts by john borthwick

We just pushed out the new bit.ly bookmarklet. You can still go to bit.ly and shorten your URL’s and get all the information about the URL — but we have also made all of this functionality available without you having to leave the page you are interested in.

#1. Go to bit.ly and drag the link circled below into you browser toolbar.

#2. When you are on a page, click the bit.ly link in your browser and automagically a tile comes up that shortens the URL, lets you send it to someone (email or twitter) and see information or conversations about that page.

#3. There is no third step. See the screen shot below of a post on AVC — with bit.ly showing information about where Fred’s post got shared and how often.

Clever interfaceYesterday

My wife got me a Chumby — interface is surprisingly well done, this is how you authenticate the device — clever, you can see the pattern across the room, no typing necessary:

firef.ly goes public betaJuly 30

We are pushing firef.ly into a public beta today. Exciting stuff for us here at betaworks. Firef.ly is a light weight messaging layer that sits on top of a site — permitting a real time perspective on who is where on your site and basic chat. It’s intentionally light weight — no sign in, no install for users — one line of java script for the web site publisher (available here: http://firef.ly/install). You can use firefly on this page — just slide the slider to the left and have fun.

Couple of thoughts here — first this is another layer application, something i have posted about before, second this is for me a return to days when you could just chat on any page — without the encumbrances of today, captcha’s, sign in etc. Yes yes i know it might get some spam — but web site owners have the ability to ban spammers and our hope is that the lightweight, spontaneous nature of firef.ly may open up some new conversations. As it did a while back when we first trialed it on a Scripting post. Last point — try the twitter feature — it sends out a message to your followers that you are on a particular page, its pretty powerful. Have fun.

Summize acquired by TwitterJuly 15

As announced this am, Twitter is acquiring 100% of Summize. Deals between two private companies are easy to consider and hard to close. In this case we had both companies on a tear and the teams on both sides who were interested in a partnership — the hope here is that what makes sense today only makes more sense down the road. Search on twitter will evolve into more than search — this is starting to happen today (more below), but bringing these teams together will only accelerate the pace of that evolution. The deal started with a conversation with Fred Wilson about how conversational search can evolve into navigation, about how important navigation becomes for UGC as you go mainstream — it concluded with the deal that was announced this morning. Betaworks is now a twitter shareholder, and excited to be one.

Finding a pain point
The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment

Summize growthJuly 12

Summize organic traffic growth, week over week. Its astounding to see the Summize business grow from 0 to 14M queries a week in over the space of two months (note I updated the chart with the past week) — traffic over the past 2 weeks has made the insanity of WWDC hard to see on the chart.

A testament to what a great product and UI can achieve in no time at all. This past week with the launch of bit.ly I spent much of my time on Twitter, Summize, Friend Feed and a handful of other services. Google is playing nxt to no part in the now-web that is emerging out of this ecosystem. Rafer also pointed me to this chart on compete. More on search and navigation to come, for now some pictures — Summize traffic and a wonderful fireworks display from this evening in Shelter Island.