Monthly Archives: August 2006

Dare depressed about unoriginality… yet works for Microsoft?

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I think a healthy dose of cynicism is a good thing and I’ve really enjoyed Dare’s blog over the years. In fact RSS Bandit was my first reader and really got me into the whole blog thing. I stopped using it when I realized it was too big of a pain keeping client readers updated and syndicated and switched to BlogLines. Anyway, I about choked on my lunch today when I saw his comment about Web 2.0 sites being unoriginal in their use of AJAX, Tagging, APIs, etc. This coming from from someone who works for a company (and even team I think?) that this week released Windows Live QNA, which is perhaps the most unoriginal app I have seen in a long time (hello, yahoo called and what’s their app back), and is perhaps one of the most unoriginal companies ever (ok, they invented AJAX, I’ll give them some credit).

Admittedly, Microsoft has executed unoriginality better than anyone in history and better than the current crop of Web 2.0 startups, especially since they have paying customers. But, my point is you don’t have to be original to be successful, and Web 2.0 founders will find their way with experimenting with these features. We should all think hard about the value of adding these types of features and strive to come up with innovative stuff, but it’s certainly not sad or depressing to see people give entrepreneurship a go.

Movietally – keep track of movies you’ve watched

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I Discovered MovieTally today (via eHub). It’s a real basic, neat little app that let’s you keep track of movies you watch and ones you want to see. I was thinking of something like this just last week as movies are a common/easy discussion starter around the water cooler and I always seem to forget what I’ve seen recently. By keeping an inventory, it will be much easier to remind myself.

Now, I’m not a Netflix user, so I imagine there’s something like this built-in to it? I know Blockbuster online had this, but who uses them (other than for the free trial anyway). And, of course there’s also IMDB which has some ability to make lists of movies.

As far as Movietally goes, I dig the basic idea, and see some potential there to be an extremely sticky and fun site. But, there needs to be a lot more data to seed the system. There is a very small amount of movies in there, requiring users to build the database. It would be a whole lot nicer if the data was already in there (movies, directors, actors, acresses, etc) making the search more effective and decreasing the amount of work a user has to do. Perhaps using IMDB data which is available (but maybe not free) would be good start. There are continuing rumors of an IMDB API too, and Movietally would be an excellent use case for it. But, who knows where that’s at? The tagging approach is ok, but tag suggestions (what other tags have people used) on the add page would be helpful. I wouldn’t mind seeing clean urls too, making it easily hackable.

Other reviews:
PostBubble sinks MovieTally, with a focus on the movie review aspect, which I barely took notice of in my first pass. Though the reviews could be valuable long-term, I looked at it as solving my problem with remembering what I’ve watched and hopefully finding some related movies to check out, which while minor, is still a pain-point.

Update
MovieTally got written up by TechCrunch this week. Turns out it was built by a 15-year old. Nice work.

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Oregon baseball makes another run

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Just a couple months after Oregon State’s run through the college world series, another team from Oregon is making a run. This time it’s Murray Hill (Beaverton) shooting for the little league world championship, having now reached the US final. I actually lived in the area when I first moved to Portland after college and still work just down the road, so it’s a very close connection.

I think it’s awesome they’re doing so well. But, there needs to be some sense talked into those coaches, letting a 13 year old throw 115 pitches or whatever it was in Monday’s game. Yeah, Jace Frye is a great pitcher, it would just be shame to see his arm finished before he even gets to high school. I can understand this being a once in a lifetime opportunity, and doing what you gotta do to win, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere.

BTW, did you see that 13 year-old from Saudi Arabia who was 6’8″? Unbelieveable!

List of Seattle startups

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Here’s a list of Seattle internet startups ranked by Alexa traffic (via Mike Davidson). Wow, that’s a long freakin’ list! P-town has a long way to go, and this is a great example for my point at the nPost event last week about how Portland’s a great city, but we just don’t see the same level of startup activity right now.

Also interesting to note that the UserPlane (company acquired by AOL last week) fouders are from Oregon. Glad to see the local connection.

Cambrian House – Are ideas really worthless?

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I signed up for Cambrian House last night in an attempt to see if ideas are in fact worth anything. Cambrian House is attempting to capitalize on the “crowdsourcing” movement, which merges a few concepts like “Wisdom of crowds” and open-source software, to enable teams to come together and develop commercially viable products.

I’m intrigued because I’ve got a few ideas kicking around and figure it’s worth a shot to see if they can be developed through Cambrian House where otherwise they would languish in my project queue probably never to see the light of day. I submitted one idea and it’s currently pending, so I’ll update its progress here as the experiment progresses.

For freelancers (designers and developers), I also see this as a cool way to perhaps pick up some work. But, I believe it’s way too early to tell how lucrative this all will be.

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