Geodog

Fun at the San Francisco Web Innovators Network

Tonight I hoofed it over the city to check out the San Francisco Web Innovators Network, organized by Chris Law of Aggregate Knowledge and friends, and hosted by the not as evil as the past Microsoft (they are learning from Scoble). I'd only met Chris Law a couple of times before, usually in the company of his smooth talking business partner Paul Martino, and I took Chris for your typical technically brilliant guy with limited social skills. Boy was I wrong. Chris Law may look like your typical geek, but he wheels and deals and schmoozes with the best of them. His social skills vastly surpass my own. I predict that he will be a VC with one of the marquee firms within a decade, doing what David Hornik described at ETech as the recursive VC dance of email, introductions, schmoozing, meetings and email.

The first hour was a mob scene of people walking around, glancing at name tags, and introducing themselves. Since I didn't know many people, and am not in the habit of introducing myself to total strangers, I mostly watched the social dance of geeks, entrepreneurs, VC's, and various lawyers and service providers to the technology industry. I did meet a nice accountant who was shopping his wares as a part-time CFO, and managed to apologize to Ted Rheingold for a Dogster joke I blogged a couple of years ago. I listened to almost everyone who came up to him make some kind of Dogster joke, all of which he put up with very politely. I chatted with him a bit about business -- he says it's great, so maybe the joke is on us jokesters. I've decided that next time, if I want people to come up and talk to me, I will put on a name tag that says "Tim Bishop, Yahoo! Acquisitions", which would be sure to attract lots of people, although extricating myself from the false pretenses might be a little tricky. I also noshed on some surprisingly great hors d'oeuvres -- I don't know who the caterer was, but she did a great job. After the first hour of the awkward social stuff, the real fun began -- demos.

First up was a quite useful looking and reasonably priced remote usability testing tool/service, Ethnio, from a local usability firm, Bolt Peters. This might be something that my team could use at work, now, so I exchanged business cards with the presenter. It's worth checking out, especially if you have a distributed business application and want to test with some of your real users, not just people who will come into your office or lab for a couple of hours for a gift or small fee.

Next up was something called GoGhetto.com, marketed as "A place to confess your ghetto ways," which according to the founder supposedly includes such things as "One time I stole toilet paper from work because I ran out of it at home." and "returning an item after you have used it." Now it may just be a function of my age and old fuddy duddy ways, or my emotional attachment to the civil rights movement, or perhaps my ongoing disgust at the way America tolerates an immense disparity in opportunity, education, and health outcomes based on skin color, but I find the equation of "doing ghetto deeds" with doing unethical deeds that people are embarrassed about profoundly offensive and racist. Given the black site design, you might as well call it a "black thing" to do. I found it surprising coming from a human interaction designer and SIMS graduate, somebody who presumably knows exactly what are the connotations of what she is doing. I'd give her an F- for branding.

Next was MindRetrieve, by Wai Yip Tung. A cool tool for saving, tagging and organizing web pages -- kind of like a local Furl. I'd be surprised if there was a business there, at least in its current incarnation, but I didn't think much of either delicious or Flickr the first time I saw them, so what do I know? I certainly it looks interesting, the kind of geek tool I'd build for myself (actually, I did once cobble together something considerably less sophisticated, using swish and Lucene, combined with the Slogger FireFox extension). At the very least it should be good resumeware. I've downloaded it and intend to play with it a bit.

Then came a demo of Zvents, the Bay Area events database. The site is a good one, that I have started to use, but unfortunately the person demoing was doing her first demo of the site, and it showed. Enough said, she'll do better next time.

Last were two interesting photosharing sites. The first was Zooomr, which is positioned as Flickr with better metadata -- the special sauce in the demo seemed to be geotagging, very nice lightboxing in place, and voice annotations. I liked the lightboxing and the general feel of the interface, but the other features didn't particularly wow me. I was disappointed they don't have support for IPTC, although they are working on it. Unfortunately the site was way overhyped by the Henry Blodget of Web 2.0, Mike Arrington, as an amazing and better than Flickr site built by a genius 17 year-old programmer, Kris Tate, as his night hobby when not working his day job. That is too much hype for any person or site to live up to, but it is an interesting site and Kris seems like a really sharp 17-year old, who knows how to do a good demo.

The second was Bubbleshare, which the CEO, Albert Lai, positioned as photosharing your mother could use. Since my mother seems to be able to navigate Flickr just fine, that wasn't a huge selling point for me, but the site does have a nice clean UI, no registration hassle, and a cool bubble zoom feature. However, there are no tags, nor does there any real attempt to foster a developer community, or a community in general.

As an experiment, when I got home tonight, I created accounts and uploaded my photos from the San Francisco Web Innovators Network to the two new sites, Zoomer and Bubbleshare, as well as to my Flickr account and my personally hosted Gallery account. I will let you judge how well the same photos are presented on Zooomr vs. BubbleShare. As far as the admin experience, I will say that creating an account on Zooomr was a nightmare, and took me half an hour, and this is by someone who has a Gmail account (that I never use) and an i-name. I had to revive a dormant Live Journal account to get it to work. Uploading photos on both systems was slow and painful -- I never saw the batch uploader on Zoomer, and the batch uploader didn't work for me on Bubbleshare. To my disappointment, unlike Flickr and my personally hacked up version of Gallery, neither application used the IPTC metadata I add to my pictures (copyrights, captions, keywords/tags) using Irfan View to populate tags, captions, or descriptions. So I don't think that I am going to be abandoning Flickr or Gallery for either of these new contenders anytime soon.

At the end of the night, I was delighted to have attended the San Francisco Web Innovators Network. While there is way too much buzz around Web 2.0, and I am not sure if any of the companies that I saw tonight will be around as companies in a year (I am sure 90% of the people will still be around in a year, trying to build new things), I love the energy and the democratic nature of the event -- anyone who signs up on the wiki can attend, and anyone who lets Chris know ahead of time can demo (and there were a few drop-in demoers). Parts of it are a little over the top, like 25 year-olds standing up and introducing themselves as CEO's, or in the case of Zooomr, 17 year-olds introducing themselves as CTOs. Myself, I think you need at least 20 employees before any of them need C before their titles. Otherwise every corner store would need a CEO, with a CTO of stocking, and a COO of bagging. Still, it was lots of fun to see all the creative energy, hard work, and innovation, and I salute the innovators, and look forward to coming back again next month to see what they have been up to.

Posted by Geodog at March 24, 2006 03:20 AM | TrackBack