Your Friends

I sat on a panel last week at a WICT conference in Denver, and it forced me to crystallize some thinking we've been doing at Me.dium over the past year or so. I posted those thoughts over on Me.dium's blog. If you're into the social networking space at all, give it a read.

Complexity and web document delivery.

On the drive home from picking up our kids from my parent's house tonight, I recalled an exercise we went through at AOL a year-and-a-half ago or so. We were in the midst of an SEO fire-drill to ensure our dynamically generated web content was as crawlable and indexible as it could be. Someone asked the obviously question: "how many pages/documents do we have?" It took about three weeks to come up with an estimate that could be reasonably explained and believed; give or take roughly 100 million documents, AOL had approximately 500 million pages it could potentially respond to an HTTP request with.

While that number, whatever it actually was, has changed dramatically over the past 1.5 years, its an interesting one. In the world of highly dynamic content, the number of pages that can be served is effectively infinite. That poses some interesting scaling problems (caching "dynamic" content for example) as well as product problems (users don't want to interact with randomly generated content when they're trying to find something from a productivity standpoint (stumpleupon is entertainment for the most part)).

Drawing the line between what should be expected contextual structure (the header at the top of a Google search results page for example) and variable content is an artform.

I'm rambling... I just thought it was interesting to compare/contrast those 100 million document level product/technical challenges with Me.dium's website (relatively small). Designing a tight, compelling, intuitive product is a fascinating challenge no matter what the size.

Me.dium Map Web Widget is here!

Check-out the Me.dium widget at the top-right-hand corner of my blog! Now you can see the activity and people around my blog. I've been wanting to post this on my blog for a long time; it's finally here!

You can get your own by signing up at me.dium.com.

Lonely

My wife took the kids to Texas to see her father on Friday; it's Sunday night. I was really looking forward to the time alone as I haven't really had much time to myself in years. I used to travel frequently for work, and that gave me some "breaks" from homelife, but I was still always surrounded by people (restaurants, hotel lobbies, offices, cabs, etc).

I have been bowled over by the emotions that have overtaken me this weekend. The crew won't be back until tomorrow afternoon, so that will mean that they've been gone for a solid 72 hours.

Night 1: initial temporary bachelorhood high. it felt great to have some space and peace and quiet. being able to do whatever I wanted on my schedule. went to dinner with a friend.

Day 1: lost. temporary bachelorhood euphoria wore off in a hurry. busied myself with errands, and spent a fair amount of time hanging out downtown. good bike ride in the morning. plowed through the epic Gladiator. friend shuttled me around to get my car in for regular service (thank you!). decided to do a fair amount of work to keep my mind focused on something; wrote a "vision" document/statement for Me.dium. never bothered drawing the shades.

Night 2: "guy's night out." good food, good dessert, general carousing (we are so harmless it's almost funny). fell asleep watching the "making of Gladiator" disc.

Day 2: decided to plow through laundry backlog; washer and dryer have been going non-stop all day. went for a killer mountain bike ride up the canyon; one of my all-time favorite trails; nice and technical and dangerous. tea and scones with my parents in the morning; very nice. I need to do a better job staying connected to them. lots of work. visited some friends and their newborn (third child); hadn't seen them in ages.

Evening 2 (right now): heart is aching for my family. bring on the chaos and non-stop talking, crying, banging about. I want my kids in my arms. I want to see their faces. I want to hear their voices. slideshow of kids keeps going off on computer; each image sucks me in.

Anticipation of morning 3: the third morning in a row not waking up to my son asking me if I can "get up now" is going to be a doozy.

Aside from Gladiator, no television watching (we've had our TV disconnected for over a month now; feels great).

There has only been one other time in my life when I've felt this alone; doesn't feel good.

Without my family in this house, there is no life in it.

With all that said, I'm sure I'll jump at the opportunity to spend time solo again.

I'm the type of person that needs breathers and space from time to time.

Bank in Boulder!

Last week we announced $15 million in financing from Commonwealth Ventures. We are happy campers right now.

From a selfish perspective, I couldn't be more excited that the bet I placed on Me.dium several months ago continues to look strong.

From a local community standpoint, I'm ecstatic that Boulder is showing the national Venture Capital community what it is made of; there is great talent here!

From a Me.dium standpoint, this is yet another major validation point around our idea. The fact that this validation comes in the form of a financial investment, particularly of this size, means we'll be able to bring the idea to fruition and ultimately global domination.

Me.dium is building/revealing the people dimension of the internet. Being a part of Netscape early on was sea-change #1. Being a part of Me.dium today will bring sea-change #2. Something major was left out of the internet since day one; a sense of real-time community. There were attempts here and there to bake in the presence of others around you, but nothing took. One of the reasons the notion didn't stick was that everyone was just so excited about using the web, that they didn't consider the longer term ramifications of doing so alone. Now that things have matured, there is often a sense of desperation amongst our users, to be around other people online. Me.dium is removing the blinders that we've all been wearing online for a decade. Once the veil is lifted, amazing things can happen, and Me.dium's working to build those amazing things.

Me.dium; it's a startup life.

Why did I leave my phat Technical Advisor job at AOL six months ago to join Me.dium? I took a 60% pay cut and doubled my hours in the process. I'm stressed to a degree I didn't know existed, and my general physical health has taken a nose dive (I can now catch a cold faster than you can sneeze).

I left my previous cushy job for a variety of reasons. I'm relatively young in my career, and several months ago I realized I didn't want to go through life exclusively in an advisory capacity from large company to large company. There is more to life. I'm also in love with my hometown, Boulder, CO, and I was spending way too much time on airplanes traveling around the world on business; multiple years as a United Airlines 1K member is a bad thing, not a good thing. I needed to establish some "local currency" as I call it. Boulder's a technical town with lots of great companies and smart people, but few of them were aware I existed in my previous telecommuting capacity; I was a ghost in my own town, and that needed to change. I needed to broaden my horizon and seek out new challenges, both personal and professional.

My first response to all of the above was to start a local AOL technology office to get control of my own destiny. In the process of setting it up, my sponsor (then AOL CTO Maureen Govern) was fired, and I had to slam the brakes on the whole thing. I had offer letters out to prospective team members, and got a hold of one of them just hours before he was putting in his resignation at his current employer, to tell him if he signed, he'd be signing into treacherous waters. I wasn't about to pull people out of their current, stable, work environments into the severely unstable situation at AOL. I gave AOL a couple of months to stabilize and it didn't. At that point I started hunting around for something that would change the world, and satisfy my needs in the process. Me.dium emerged, and I locked on.

I'm Me.dium's Director of Product, and I've done more in the last six months than I could have ever imagined. I've grown my threshold for pain several fold. I've re-learned how to work in an office environment (I had been telecommuting for 7 years); never thought that would have been an issue, geeze! I've also gained priceless experience in juggling several product lines in an incredibly fast moving environment, while being immersed in an Agile development shop.

I used to view the world almost exclusively through technical eyes. I liked to believe I was measuring and blending business priorities along the way, but I had no idea! Me.dium has shown me how rapidly priorities can change, and how to adjust quickly.

While bottomless budgets in large companies have their own appeal, it's too easy to get lazy. The pressure of financing, combined with marketplace forces that can crush you like a bug if you're not nimble and paying attention, has given me a lifetime of experience in just six months; again, priceless.

While working as hard as we are certainly rears its ugly head in the home-life now and then, I've been amazed at how useful a lot of what I'm learning about myself at work, has been at home. I'm much more accepting of curve-balls at home now than I ever have been.

I've learned more about who I am in the past six months than I had in the previous six years.

No pain, no gain.

Blending technology and marketing.

At a Me.dium company all-hands meeting the other day we talked about the necessity of having marketing expertise as well as technical expertise in order to get the job done. I've long believed all you need is good technology in order to succeed. While I still believe that you can "build it and they will come," regardless of marketing effectiveness, I've seen the light that can shine from solid, calculated, marketing/branding campaigns. When you plot out your look & feel (from color palette, to logo, to overall design) as well as your availability strategy, you can have tremendous impact on the marketplace.

I'm also re-evaluating my perspective on whether or not it's technology's fault, or design's fault when a user doesn't understand the value in a product. I'm the type of consumer/user that will jump over lots of hurdles and bad UI in order to leverage the power of a product or utility; if the value's there, I'll dig for it. However, most user's aren't like me, rather, they need to be led to the value via effective UI design. The value in Me.dium is phenomenal; we just need to ensure we get the technology & design right. Lot's to do.