Stickis and BlogRovR: the conversation is everywhere

Yes, we’re moving. It’s lucky we love the food at the restaurants around South Park though, because we’re going to continue being daily visitors there: we’re only traveling a couple of blocks. But there’s more: unlike the food, a lot else is going to change in the move.

Here’s the short, Twitter-friendly version: we’ve just been acquired by Buzzlogic. We’ve been talking to the team there for over six months: they rock. So we’re totally excited, elated, ecstatic, thrilled, stoked, and psyched about the deal. Did I mention we were excited?

A longer version follows, and you can also get more details about the news from all the usual suspects.

We started Activeweave, the company behind our two products BlogRovR and Stickis, back in late 2005. Ever since, we’ve been focusing all our energy on building technology that would delight our users and help them as they go about their busy lives online. We’ve been working on doing one thing well: making it easy for you to stay informed in the face of ever growing quantities of content (some signal, some noise) fighting for your attention.

BlogRovR in particular has resonated with close to 200,000 of you, faithfully fetching posts relevant to the page you are visiting, from the bloggers you choose, and bringing them right into the browser as you go, for just-in-time context. BlogRovR connects readers and bloggers anywhere on the web where they have something of interest to say to each other. For a reader, it means seeing what your favorite bloggers have to say anywhere you surf, and for a blogger it gets your message to your readers beyond your blog or their feed reader, everywhere on the web where you have something to say.

We do this with an on-the-fly, personalized, contextual search. We’re nerds. But we don’t mind that others have thought this a mouthful and called us Techmeme on steroids, the Muhammad Ali of feed readers, or web 3.0 today instead.

We met the folks at Buzzlogic a while back and hit it off: they’ve been preoccupied with the blogosphere as well, working on technology to map conversations in a fine-grained fashion, tracking influence, and allowing their customers to better target their research and advertising. We saw the right synergies, we saw complementary business models, and we saw a great team in action.

We also saw a novel business opportunity. Buzzlogic is using an analysis of the blogosphere similar to ours to help advertisers identify its most influential regions, on which to message potential customers. Buzzlogic calls this conversation tracking. Both their current technologies and the directions in which they’re taking them align well with what we’ve done and the kinds of products we’ve been building. The more we talked about possible collaborations, the more areas of overlap emerged. It soon became clear that our technology could help inform Buzzlogic’s influence tracking, and that we would also be able to contribute personally to their future.

So, we’re moving onto even wider challenges from the ones we’ve been facing: Jean will become the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzlogic, and Marc will become Senior Vice President of Product.

The last two and a half years have been a wild ride. I remember reading on someone’s blog (where else?) only weeks before launching the company, that being an entrepreneur requires a hefty dose of irrationality: one has to find a way to brush off the countless near-catastrophic failures, the endless doubts, the crazy daily grind, and the reality of doing everything on half a shoestring, in order to thrive instead on the rare breakthrough, or the occasional unsolicited friendly message from a happy user. Indeed, we experienced all of this first hand. But as Winston Churchill put it: success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

There have been innumerable of you who’ve helped us along the way, and we can only really name a few by name. Many have helped with ideas, enthusiasm, exposure, and guidance. We’re particularly grateful to our investors, who’ve supported us financially and who’ve continued to believe in us throughout. Special shout-outs to Eric Di Benedetto, our lead investor and board member, and Esther Dyson, a key investor and advisor.

And fear not: BlogRovR isn’t going away. If anything, it’ll benefit from the improvements we keep making to the underlying technology, from the talent at Buzzlogic, and from their mighty hardware too.

Just as importantly, we remain committed to respecting your privacy: we’ve been clear all along about what value we deliver as you browse, and we’ve been equally clear about how we use the data we come in contact with in the process of delivering that value: we only use it anonymously and in the aggregate. We don’t store individual clickstreams, and instead derive aggregate attention metrics based how you interact with RovR.

Great news on the BlogRovR front: we have been nominated as a finalist, in the browsing category, for the 2008 edition of CNET’s Webware 100. Yes, we’re up against some serious competitors: Firefox, Google Reader, Internet Explorer to name only a few. Given that we are a browser add-on to Firefox and IE, and have worked to integrate tightly with Google Reader, the last thing I think of these guys as is competition. But heck, who could ask for better company? The good news: this year, you all get 3 votes in each category, so even the little guys (that’d be us in case you’re wondering who’s the underdog between BlogRovR and, say, Adobe AIR) can get some of your love!

The New York Times always entertaining consumer technology columnist David Pogue has a post today I loved. He reviews the Flip, a stripped-down, bare-bones, one-button camcorder which has taken 13% of the camcorder market in no time.

He attributes this product’s amazing stickiness to its being able to be used in places and ways a traditional camcorder can’t, and to its simple appropriateness.

A quote:

Great lesson: make your users first experience of doing something successful and they will start out motivated to use your product.

It’s hard to escape kitchen metaphors on Thanksgiving day, especially as smells of an imminent dinner are starting to get very distracting. So there you go: we’ve been working on the 3.0 migration since the early alpha releases of Gran Paradiso were made available, so as Firefox 3.0 Beta is rolling out, our BlogRovR addon for it is just about fully baked (so far, no animals, turkeys or otherwise, have been hurt in the process); it needs just a few more days in the oven to reflect the platform changes since 2.0, and we’ll release it to the Mozilla team. Meanwhile, happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Here’s the response I left for Pete Cashmore over at Mashable regarding two of his articles, Google Reader Stats are Bullshit (With Proof), and ActiveWeave Blogrovr: Screwy FeedBurner Stats?.

Hi Pete, Marc Meyer CEO of Activeweave BlogRovR here.

Congratulations on an excellent piece on the problems with subscriber statistics from blog aggregators.

Our stats show you to have dipped by only 4k BlogRovR subscribers, not 35k!

If you show all our users disappeared it may be due to a reporting glitch. We’ve had a few days in which technical difficulties have prevented us from pinging Feedburner, causing all our subscriber base to disappear for the day. We’re working on resolving that.

At the time you asked me to remove Mashable from the default Technology recommended blogs you had 35k BlogRovR subscribers. You have about 31k today.

As part of our Technology recommended blogs, Mashable was being shown to new BlogRovR subscribers who were counted as subscribers when they chose to sign-up for the Tech bundle.

When Mashable transitioned to a non-bundled blog, we began to count explicit actions only: an explicit subscription to Mashable or opening a Mashable post summary from the BlogRovR tray. Not all of the subscribers who’d subscribed via the bundle would have yet pulled content from Mashable, accounting for the drop. Over time, these users are still shown your post summaries and as they open them will be subscribed.

BlogRovR is an everywhere-on-the-web medium for blogs to get exposed to real readers; readers who actually see your blog post summaries whenever they browse something on the web related to what you’ve written. Any BlogRovR user reading Techcrunch is likely to see a Mashable post treating the same subject right there. Some blogs we liked from the get-go and bundled early (like Mashable) have been exposed to 10’s of thousands of new readers, as you indicated.

For the record, we believe that BlogRovR subscriber counts are more reflective of real readership than the conventional counts from other blog aggregators, though we recognize that we share vulnerabilities regarding counting inactive users.

Thanks Pete for shedding light on this issue!
Yours,
Marc Meyer

Pete Cashmore has written a dynamite post about the validity of subscriber counts from blog aggregators, and by extension from BlogRovR which deserves a considered response and an explanation of how BlogRovR approaches this task.
Stowe Boyd and others have also joined in the conversation.

The short story:

Being bundled in something like Google Reader doesn’t mean that a subscriber will ever see your content.

With BlogRovR, being in the default bundle means as people browse anything on the web about which you’ve blogged, they’ll see your blog posts. Which in my book is excellent value to both bloggers and readers alike—contextually relevant posts.

When you write about something I care about, that’s when I see what you’ve written, even if I don’t read all of your blog all the time. And if I did read something and forgot, I’ll see it again when I need to remember.

The advantage that BogRovR provides is that today’s scenario for dealing with RSS feeds is:

With BlogRovR:

Occasionally we get an email or a review which is too good not to share. Some of these we quote on our homepage and download pages. I’d like to quote a cool and funny review of BlogRovR which we just found on YouTube. It was written by Jack Humphrey, from the Friday Traffic Report, and can be found here: “BlogRovR Rss Feed Masher Review”. Jack really gets what BlogRovR is about!

Choice sound bites:

“BlogRovR is the freakin’ coolest RSS feed subscription manager I’ve ever played with. Want to see what Web 3.0 looks like?â€

“This is the Muhammad Ali of feed readers.â€

“The coolest tool since the beginning of time!â€

“The same feeling I got when I bought an iPod.â€

“Is that bad ass or what?!â€

Hot off the presses, BlogRovR now supports searching within the blogs you’re subscribed to from the top of your RovR homepage. Not the first time we’ve done that in our products (Stickis has it), but this time, with a little help from our friends at Google, development was a lot quicker.

Arguably, there may well have never been such a thing as ultimate geek power; fine.

But I remember a slew of fluff pieces back in the first bubble that were all about the geeks’ role in the economy. More specifically, about how software programmers had suddenly taken over the kingdom and how they were, for the first time, in charge! How they were finally enjoying some of the fame once reserved for business types (if that means crisscrossing the world at the back of a plane, I don’t know that we benefited all that much in the bargain).

Ugh, right. You didn’t buy it either, did you? Still, from our twisted vantage point in the middle of the valley, it is clear that the rise to prevalence, in the last decade or so, of all things web, has allowed many a software engineer to contribute solid technology, innovation, and ultimately build very successful companies.

Is this still going on today? Are software whizzes putting their skill to the same use? Or are we, instead, seeing a shift away from that trend?

I think geek supremacy is at risk! Or rather, I think we need to wake up and focus, or face complete irrelevance. Why? Commoditization (a good thing) and complacency (a bad thing) are combining to create massive distraction.

Here’s what I mean: in the current advertising-driven web economy, a hit mentality has developed and spread everywhere. Eerily similar to 1999’s startups, today’s ventures ride on eye-balls. So far, so good, but what’s troubling for geeks is that technology doesn’t seem to be playing a significant role in what makes or break many of the services in that new crop. In other words, there’s no technical barrier to entry in a lot of the companies monopolizing the airwaves these days.

Hence the distraction: drawn by the current frothiness in the startup scene, we have lots of entrepreneurial engineers coming out of the woodworks, trying to join in with this or that project. But they’re not competing on technology. I am not saying they ever purely were (the mysterious art of marketing, for instance, has always played a decisive role). But things are exacerbated today, as engineers find themselves competing on something where they don’t have any unfair advantage: taste.

Take Facebook’s applications, for example. All the rage these days! It’s a great eco-system with lots of potential for rapid, viral growth, and instant monetization via ads. This sounds like the perfect, low-hanging fruit for your next startup. And it is, in some ways. But is there really anything predisposing a geek to succeed better than anyone else in that arena? Is a geek particularly equipped to anticipate how this or that app will appeal to and stick with various Facebook constituencies? I think not.

Here’s an even better example: Kawasaki’s Truemors. I attended one of his very engaging talks last night, where he covered the launch his latest startup. Whether or not you think truemors stands a chance is not relevant here: the site works, it’s functional. It was built in a couple of months, and for $4.5k initially (Guy threw in another $10k later; he jokes that should he need a second round of funding for the company, he could cover his operating costs for a year from the fees of a single talk). So he built and runs the site pretty much for free. It obviously stands on the shoulders or many giants, the top of the stack being Wordpress and a bunch of plug-ins, but that’s precisely the point: in that venture, technology is a commodity. So if you’re not competing on technical execution, you’re competing on marketing and idea. How many software engineers are better equipped than Guy when it comes to generating buzz and ideas?

As he keeps saying: the point of entrepreneurships is not to level the playing field. It is to tilt the playing field toward you as much as you possibly can. I couldn’t agree more.

There’s lots of technology to be built and invented, and I think software engineers certainly have an unfair advantage with that. So it’s about resisting the tempting calls of the low-hanging fruits, and investing instead the cycles required to grasp the harder-to-reach ones. As Twitter’s Ev says, you have to decide what game you’re playing: picking is also about knowing your strengths.

By the way, technology innovation is what we strive for here at BlogRovR. It sure feels like we thrive on technical barriers, especially those we can’t quite figure out how to climb at first! If you want to help, come join us.

(cross posted)

Damn. I did it again: it’s not even noon yet and, just like the car talk brothers always say, I just wasted another perfectly good hour. Except, this time, I spent it tweaking my buddy list on Twitter and answering a deluge of invitations from folks on various social networks.

As an entrepreneur deep in the trenches of the evolving web (take that, web x.0 versioning zealots!) I should love that stuff: I started our company in that space precisely because I want to make the web a more social, participatory place. And at first glance, it seems we’re finally getting there, with the Internets chattier than ever. There are more and more fantastic options available to publish all sorts of content, from concise status updates to events to full-length blog posts to podcasts to video. And tools to share the goods with friends are mushrooming as well. What’s not to love, right?

Well, something about the pattern emerging right now bugs me. As a whole, I fear the social web ecosystem is currently amplifying the pain rather than actually helping users communicate and interact better. I read an interview with Aaron Swartz a few weeks back, where he mentioned that early Reddit users wrote about spending too much time on the addictive site. Like Aaron, I am not sure this is a good thing. I am hooked on Twitter, for instance, but I hate loving it.

Why? Because as someone not merely out there to kill time, but rather looking for valuable information nuggets, I don’t feel empowered; quite to the contrary, I feel played: since when does it count as progress that I have to manually sift through everybody’s mundane whereabouts just so I don’t miss the rare piece of signal in the noise? Sure, I want to know where the party’s at, but there has to be a better way to find out than following 1,234 users just to catch the few valuable announcements between countless quips about cappuccino runs and BART delay.

Twitter (or Jaiku, for that matter) isn’t a worse offender than others, mind you: I am frantically trying to keep up with numerous meeting trackers and calendars, from Outlook to Google to Yahoo to 30boxes to upcoming, not to mention old school evite. And should I update my profile and connections on Facebook today and on LinkedIn tomorrow, or the other way around? If I also have to watch the life-casting of my 50 closest friends, I might just as well give up on work right now.

My point: massive production overload, lack of any potent filtering. It may be fine for a while, or for die-hard exhibitionists and voyeurs, but I feel like we’re letting users down severely when it comes to having the stuff that matters to them bubble up to the top of their attention.

To answer Mike’s diatribe about the Valley getting rotten because of too much cash, too many parties, I’d say that in terms of innovation, we’re barely getting started: in my view, the point’s not only giving users yet another megaphone, but facilitating interaction, collaboration, online or even (let’s dream a little) in first life. While the promise of a web more participatory is what fires me up, I think we need to seriously ramp up the consumption side of things. And search in its current state is not the answer; it simply isn’t keeping up right now. Yes, I keep tabs on who’s writing about my company with blog search, but what is the Technorati tag for personalized “cool stuff, cool events, or cool people� What’s really hot, in my view, is a chance to build and deliver that kind of filtering value for users, beyond gimmicks and raw entertainment plays just adding to the noise. What do you think?

(cross posted)