Entrepreneurship is like a chronic infection – once you get the bug you usually have it for life. I definitely have the bug and have always enjoyed the fun and challenge of growing a business.

Recently while reflecting on past startups I had been involved in I caught myself in one of those would have, could have, should have moments. Fleeting thoughts about all the things we did right or wrong, things I would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight etc.

Even though every startup I was involved in was different, I came up with three simple guiding principles that should apply to every startup. While I can’t guarantee success, these values are some pretty basic cornerstones for an entrepreneur.

Control Your Burn Rate
A common theme at the startups I have worked for is that those that get funded tend to not be as conservative with spending as they should be. Spending too much on things like furniture, computers, phones, etc. Ancillary items that increase your burn rate without necessarily benefiting the core objectives.

When I first started at Inforocket back in 1999 we actually did everything as cheap as we could. Our chairs were simple cheapo chairs – some of them even metal folding chairs. Our development team worked at a big shared table (pictured above) that was made with saw horses and wooden doors bolted to the top. Our office PC’s were assembled by our team from components we bought in bulk. Everything was done as cost efficiently as we could.

As the company grew we eventually closed a second round of funding which we used to bring in some new hires. These folks came from more established businesses and were accustomed to deep pockets and nicer digs. With this we lost our discipline. In came the Herman Miller Aeron chairs, fancier desks etc.

Sure these things are nice to have but when you are an early-stage startup focused on getting the most out of your initial investment capital these things are not worth it as they do not directly benefit the goals of the business.

Save the money for the essentials.

Managing Expectations
You’d think most people would understand the concept of not over-selling themselves but sometimes the zeal of bringing in the business clouds better judgment.

Want to kill your young business fast? Promise something you can’t deliver to a customer and then string them along with excuses. Watch what happens. In the era of social media you’ll be dead in a matter of days.

This is yet another lesson I have unfortunately learned firsthand. Back in 1998 I was a co-founder for a small web development company called Fourth Degree Media Group. We were four friends with a small startup and we landed our first big client – a business that published continuing medical education (CME) materials for doctors.

We promised the client this full-blown ecommerce site where doctors could order materials, do online quizes, and get CME credits, etc. Problem was none of us had ever implemented an ecommerce site before. While we had a substantial amount of web development experience, we did mostly B2B or product marketing sites. We did not know the nuances of shopping carts, SSL certificates, security, etc.

Needless to say this was a huge failure. We wasted months of the client’s time, months of our time, and in the end we ended up giving them the money back and dissolving the business.

In retrospect the better way to handle the situation would have been to bring in help to meet the client’s needs or to ask the client initially to split the project with another shop who might be more well versed at the ecommerce implementation details.

Simply put, don’t promise the moon unless you can deliver it.

Stay Passionate
Last but definitely not least, you will probably not be successful in business if you are not passionate about what you are doing. I am sure there are some exceptions but in general your passion for what you do has a great deal of influence over your work.

I find that people with a passion for what they do will work harder at it, produce higher quality work, and don’t burnout as easily.

This is something I have really seen a lot of while working at Princeton University. Some of the scholars I work with love what they do so much that they do work from home on their days off and sometimes work on the weekends despite no pressing deadlines or pressure. They simply love what they do.

This passion for what we do also makes us better at what we do. As a developer I am constantly on blogs, mailing lists, etc. I enjoy reading about what others do, discussing with my peers the best (and worst) practices and sharing our “war stories” – this is all part of bettering myself. And there is an element of competition to in that you don’t want to be the guy among your peers producing the poorest quality work.

The moment you no longer enjoy what you are doing, it’s time to find something new.

Cheers,
–Jon

I am going to make a bold statement here: Google+ is the social network many of us have been waiting for.

A good way to think of Google+ is not simply as a site, but as a meta-layer that lays over top of many of Google’s different properties and glues them together to form a really nice social platform with a nice selection of tools to control visibility of content and privacy.

At first glance Google+ seems to be similar to Facebook. The layout will be familiar and intuitive to you, utilizing a standard three-column layout. The main content area has Google+’s stream which functions largely the same as Facebook’s news feed. Here you will see posts by people you have in your circles, photos, videos, etc.

The only negative thing I have to say so far about the stream is that in this early pre-release test phase a user does not have a lot of control over sorting and display of content within the stream but I am pretty sure from stuff I have been reading more changes and features are coming to the stream before the service goes officially live. For the time being the best control I have over the stream is viewing it by circle.

As for circles, this is one of the core features of Google+ that differs it from other social platforms out there. Circles is what allows a lot of the magic to happen.

Circles are groupings of people we add and follow. Anytime you add a contact you can add them to one or more circles. The people you have in your circles have no idea what circles you have them in at all – it is invisible to everyone but yourself. This gives you the ability to group friends from different parts of your life that you may or may not want to come in contact with one another.

While we may not consider it so, our real, non-digital lives exist within a real life social network. The difference between our real life social network and our digital one is that in the real life social network we live within is comprised of many different circles of people that may never interact, but on a site like Facebook they do and sometimes this may not be desired.

A good, basic example would be work vs friends. What if you play hooky from work to go to the beach with some friends and one of your friends innocently tags a photo with you from the beach or checks you in to the bar the day you were supposedly out sick? Oops! Your boss who you added as a friend will be none too pleased.

How about that conservative brother and your liberal friends? Sometimes even something seemingly innocent you post could end up setting off a firestorm of drama.

With circles those awkward, inconvenient moments can be mitigated quite a bit. Google+ won’t save you from the idiotic late-night drunken post or the mis-fired angry missive but every piece of content you post on Google+ gives you control over visibility and sharing.

When you post something, you select which circle(s) you want it to be visible to. You can also control if you want people to be able to comment on it or if they are allowed to share it on their own stream. You can even set an item to be public for whole web visibility or name specific recipients of a message by plussing them, ie ‘+Jon Niola’ to make a post into a private message ONLY visible to those people. And all of this is very easy and user friendly to figure out.

I think it is very easy to see how this platform can be a direct challenge to Facebook, especially once the SDK and API’s are out and developers can integrate apps, games, and pages as with Facebook. Even in this early stage of the product lifecycle it does most of what Facebook does but with more focus on user control of their data and privacy. Hell, if it does not work out for you, Google even has a tool to take all of your data with you to a competing site if you choose.

Google+ is a threat to Twitter as well. The ability for you to post content to the public for anyone to view or to specific circles of followers but without the limit of 140 characters is pretty nice. As a user you can choose if you want to make the given post read-only or allow comments and make it an actual conversation.

Your location-based social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla etc are on the line too. With the Android app for Google+ users can check in to places (with photos, video etc) and geotagged just like these other services, only with the granular privacy controls of Google+’s circles.

Another cool feature are the hangouts. Fire up your webcam and join folks in your various circles in a video chat right in your browser window. Quality and functionality are similar if not a little better than Skype.

What about LinkedIn? Well, nothing stops you from using Google+ for your professional networking now either. Create circles for various jobs you have worked at or your current job and isolate your posts between friends, family, work etc.

Google has a lot of web properties people use daily without much thought. Google Maps is so ubiquitous it is easy to take it for granted as yet another piece of web infrastructure. But integrate Google Search, Gmail, Maps, Places, Youtube, Picassa, Blogger, the Chrome browser, Google Docs, etc with the Google+ platform and you have THE social web.

Despite all these highly successful properties there has been so little connecting them until now. Right now we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg with what Google will be able to do with this platform as it evolves.

Am I saying that Google+ is going to crush everything and take over the world? I don’t think that will be the case. I believe all the various social services will continue to co-exist in some form. What will happen though is some will either innovate and evolve to better compete, or some may integrate themselves with Google+ via API’s as Foursquare, Twitter, and others do now with Facebook.

It is hard for me as a tech geek to write about Google+ without getting excited. I have been a fan of Google’s various offerings for years and now they are finally coming together. It does not take Nostradamus to see the enormous potential in the Google+ platform to take the Internet to the next level. What we are witnessing is yet another incremental evolution of the web. I think the next year is going to be quite exciting.

Cheers,

-Jon

Now here’s the thing I am still hung up on – as awesome as the Tab is, and as much as I enjoy playing around with it, I fail to see where a tablet is a must have device. There is nothing that jumps out at me that says “THIS is why you need a tablet” and no real killer app that is a unique enough of an experience on the tablet to make me give up my laptop.

So far it has found a niche for me as a luxury, fun device. I use it to check email when lounging on the couch and surf the web occasionally. I read my Nook or Kindle books when my reader is not charged and play a few games on it as well. Pretty much anything I was already doing on my phone, but now on a bigger screen. That’s not to say it is bad – far from it. It’s just that everything I do on my tablet I can do on my phone, just without the awesome screen.

The difference for me between a tablet and a phone is that I personally consider a phone a must-have device. If you are out on the town what will you check to see show times or find directions? The phone. You sure ain’t going to carry around a 10-inch tablet without people thinking you are a bit odd.

I’d really like to use the Tab for more productive endeavors, but other than email and web I am still chained to the Macbook Pro for any serious work.

There are a couple of apps on the Tab though that do stand out above the rest in my opinion. – Gmail and TweetCaster HD (currently in beta). Both of these apps are optimized for the tablet screen and make excellent use of the the new user interface fragments introduced in the Android 3.0 software development kit.

Gmail on the Tab is an example of an excellent user experience. I’d even go as far to say it is a better Gmail experience than on the web or any other device. The layout, the flow of the interface, the simple design. It just works and is really well thought out.

TweetCaster HD has become my favorite Twitter app on the Tab. This of course is very subjective. You could ask five people with tablets which app is their favorite and you might get five different answers. But for me, TweetCaster HD is what I use on the Tab. The interface is very simple, it loads tweets quickly, and for any tweets that contain links it has a little preview box so you can get an idea if it is worth clicking through or not. A close second would be TweetComb which uses a different approach to the interface using multiple columns for tweets, mentions, lists etc. I used it for a bit but found I preferred TweetCaster HD.

One area I find the Tab shines is games. Not sure I’d personally ever want to play a hardcore arcade game on it due to the controls being weird, but for puzzle and strategy games it is great.

Plants vs Zombies (via Amazon’s app store) and Angry Birds have both eaten a lot of time and battery.

The game I been enjoying the hell out of the last few days is Grave Defense HD. It is your typical tower defense style game, with awesome graphics and sound, and a fun story. Some of the levels are pretty damn tough even on a low difficulty setting so it is addictive.

So do people need a tablet? Not really. Should they get one? If they have the means, then sure why not. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is awesome and it really raises the bar for Android tablets in the big battle with Apple which up until now have been getting smacked around pretty bad by the iPad and iPad 2.

Consider this a big escalation of the tablet wars. When it comes to hardware, the newest Android tablets are on par or exceed Apple’s offerings. But Apple has a huge leg up with not just quantity of tablet-specific apps, but the quality. Some of their iPad apps are polished to desktop-quality and unfortunately most Android apps are not there yet. It’s all about the apps. Give it time though.

What a great time to be a consumer and have so many great choices!

Cheers,
–Jon

I have seen the price come down time and time again. I almost pulled the trigger last year when it went down to $199 bucks. Then this year they finally got me – on DNA Day they had a special deal – the sample collection kit was FREE for the day with only money you pay is the shipping and a one year commitment to a subscription service that was 9 bucks a month.

So needless to say, the kit was ordered that day, I provided my spit that day and sent it back ASAP. According to their web site I have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for the results but I know some people who got it a lot sooner. So now I am just waiting for it with my curiosity burning away!

When I finally get the kit I will do a full review of the service along with plenty of pictures and screenshots.

Cheers,
–Jon

So far so good. I eat a low carb diet (<30 grams of carbs) Sunday through Friday, and Saturday is my "cheat day" where I eat what I'd like and enjoy myself. For the most part Sunday through Friday I am eating no sugar products at all, staying away from starches and glutens and primarily eating a diet focused on healthy proteins and fats. Chicken, beef, turkey, eggs. For greens mostly spinach and broccoli.

I also gave up on drinking calories - chocolate milk, mochas from Starbucks, etc. If I get thirsty now I reach for water or unsweetened iced tea or green tea.

Here are some of the numbers so far:

Weight
January 1: 261.2
March 31: 212.4

Resting Heart Rate
January 1: 90bpm
March 31: 57bpm

BF (body fat percentage via bioelectrical impedance)
January 1: 34%
March 30: 20%

Fasting Blood Glucose levels
January 1: 110 (pre-type 2 no bueno)
March 31: 80 (healthy range)

VO2 Max (ml/kg/min)
January 12: 26
March 30: 48

Blood pressure is pretty consistently around 110/70 too both before and after.

Overall I am pleased with the metrics. Still have a LONG way to go and the pace of weight loss has been slowing down as of late. The next 25-30 pounds will be tough, but I am optimistic I can and will do it.

Hardest part is getting yourself into the mindset that not only is it the right thing to do but that you can actually do it. Once you get to that point mentally the rest falls into place. And once you see results, it becomes quite easy to stick to the routine.

Cheers,
–Jon

The main music library screen in doubleTwist

I absolutely love the OS, the open nature of the platform, and the plethora of apps that have been coming out for it in recent months. As the platform has matured and gained market share (and along with it development resources and investment dollars) the quality and usefulness of applications has really improved as well.

AirSync Options Screen

One of my new favorite apps is doubleTwist. doubleTwist is a free media player for Android that I’d rank as one of the better ones. There is also a desktop version I use on my Mac that is basically an iTunes replacement that is currently free, though if you like it you can donate to the developers.

An optional but VERY cool addon app that they sell for Android called AirSync expands the functionality of doubleTwist to allow wireless syncing over wifi. It is currently on the Android market for $4.99 and is a real gem. I absolutely recommend it as it is really useful and at $4.99 it is hard to beat the value. Never hurts to support an excellent developer who does great work either

Installing the client on my Mac was painless and I have it set to use the same location as iTunes for the library. So if I buy a song on iTunes or on Amazon it is available to either application seamlessly.

Once I installed the doubleTwist player and AirSync on my HTC G2, the first thing it does is gives me a passcode. This passcode is entered into the doubleTwist application on my Mac to pair up them up so that they may sync over my WiFi network.

So far, so good. All very easy. Next I created a simple test playlist, AirSync Test. For my test I selected only the AirSync Test playlist, and pressed sync and boom. Over a fast WiFi connection it synced my four test songs in a couple of seconds. The playlist and songs were now identical on both my Android phone and my Mac laptop.

You can also set this to be automatic as well so that anytime your computer is running doubleTwist and your phone connects to the same WiFi subnet they will check in with each other and will sync up automatically. Unless you have a lot of space on your device you will probably want to specify specific playlists for it to sync otherwise by default it will try to sync it ALL.

One thing to note – while doubleTwist can play files encoded in both MP3 and Apple’s AAC, it won’t play the .m4p files from iTunes, only the .m4a files. The .m4p file extension is for songs still protected with Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management and can only be played within iTunes or Apple approved devices such as the iPod or iPhone. Thankfully, all music purchased on iTunes since March 2009 no longer has this restriction giving us the ability to play our music on other devices such as our Android phones.

I have been getting a lot of use out of this lately syncing tunes onto my phone for the car. Many new cars these days like my 2011 Honda Civic EXL come with a USB connector for use with media players.

At this point I simply connect the G2 to the cable on my phone, click the “turn on USB storage” button when prompted, then click the Aux button on the car’s stereo. Now I can play songs through the car’s stereo directly from my Android phone, navigate tracks, set volume etc via the steering wheel controls.

The only thing I have not quite figured out when using my Android phone with the car stereo is making track names show up on the display like they do when I use the iPod with the car. I am not sure if it is an issue with how files are set up on the phone’s USB storage or if it is something proprietary it happens to do with the iPod.

This is one of those projects I plan to research when I get some free time.

Cheers,
–Jon

I am just as guilty as the next person of these lapses and unfortunately once I fall off the wagon it is hard for me to get back on if at all. Big difference this year though is that my life (or the quality there of) really depends on my follow-through this time.

This year I am trying yet again focused on a goal of not just losing weight, but becoming a much healthier, fit person. The number above (261.2) is my current weight as of today, January 1st 2011. I was kind of shocked when I weighed myself because as recently as this fall when I was making an effort to be more active and watching what I eat I was down to 230 or so. So I really let it go bad the past few months.

During in my senior year of high school back in 1992 I was at 180 pounds and much more fit due to playing ice hockey in multiple leagues, roller hockey, etc. I did not have a good diet but did have an eighteen year-old’s metabolism.

Now I am 37 but feel like I am 57. I have not been nearly as active as I would like to be or should be. I do not like the way I look and I am tired of feeling tired all the time.

So for this year the goal is to get down to my senior year weight of 180 or so along with a target of 12% or less BMI (I won’t mention what it is now because it is REALLY bad) and ultimately develop a healthier lifestyle that I will stick with.

Wish me luck! I will be posting more details on methods and progress as the year goes on.

Cheers,
–Jon

One app that I had never heard of until a friend mentioned it is Google’s own My Tracks. In a word, this app is awesome.

I should also mention, My Tracks is also available for iPhone but I have not used it on that platform yet so my focus here is on the Android version.

In a nutshell, the app can record your movement, or “tracks” using GPS and then allows you to share the map on Google Maps for others to see (or not.)

When you record your track, you can set markers for landmarks or points of interest along the way. So for example, say you take a hike in the woods and find something really cool like an old abandoned car, you can tag that spot with a marker and give it a description and it will be easier for others to find.

This functionality has made it a useful app for geocaching and some folks are even using it to track locations of shipwrecks.

Another use for this application is for fitness – runners, walkers, bikers etc.

While not explicitly designed for runners like Nike+, using Google’s My Tracks app does not require any special sensors or special shoes since it relies on a GPS signal to plot it’s data. And it is hard to beat the price as My Tracks is free.

The screenshot to the left shows a stats view from a track I recorded walking around Plainsboro Preserve. It shows distance traveled, time, pace etc all interesting. It also shows elevation statistics such as high, low, gain etc. Unfortunately though from researching that aspect it seems that GPS accuracy is less than ideal.

I have been using the app quite a bit just walking/jogging to see how my pace is compared to a previous time. I can keep multiple track recordings on my Android phone to compare information and determine if I am making any improvement in my pace and with some basic math figure out an estimate of calories burned if I wanted to.

A cool feature I mentioned briefly above is the ability to share the track you recorded. Say you went for an off-the-trail hike in the woods, found some nice sights and wanted your friends to be able to re-trace your path? Well you can have the app send the track via email to your friends, or share it to Google’s own Google Maps service and from there set the map to public or private. Sadly no option to save it to any third-party sites such as Facebook or Twitter, though I suppose there might be a reason for that.

Here is an uploaded track I recorded on Google Maps.

On the map you will notice I set some markers such as “Maggie’s Trail” – every time you set a marker on the mobile My Tracks app it also stores metadata on the cell phone signal quality, carrier, tower etc. Most likely not too interesting to you unless you are a pretty hardcore geek (which some of us are lol.)

There are probably other uses I will figure out over time, but as it is now this is quite a useful and fun app.

Definitely worth a download from the Android Market .

–Jon

Foursquare's home page

I consider myself adventurous when it comes to new interactive services and usually always try out the next “new” thing if anything just to satisfy my curiosity. It is always an interesting journey to see what ideas take off and which ones flounder into obscurity.

My most recent experiment is the location-based social networking service Foursquare. While not bleeding-edge brand new (it launched sometime in Spring 2009) it has really gained some momentum lately and some friends of mine started using it so I figured what the hell and signed up to give it a spin.

An added bonus was when I discovered they had an Android app. As a recent convert to the world of Android this past May when I bought my HTC Droid Incredible I figured this would be a nice experiment to see how well they implemented this service on both web and handheld.

In a nutshell, Foursquare allows you to post, or “check-in” at a location to say you visited, see who else has visited, and who has visited that venue the most (the “mayor”) as well as leave tips or shouts about a venue, ie “Try the Triumph burger it is for the win!”

Visiting a location frequently or visiting a certain number of different venues unlocks profile badges. One badge for example is called Local and is awarded for checking into the same venue three times in one week.

Foursquare profile page

Right now it is sink or swim for them. When they were little no one heard of them. Now that they are pushing 2 million users they are on the radar of all the big guys – Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

Now getting back to the basics of Foursquare – as it stands right now other than it being yet another social network to have to keep tabs on, I have not found a real benefit or value to using it at this time.

It is a simple question that I have not found an answer for yet – for what reason should I use Foursquare?

I have been browsing profiles on Foursquare to see who is doing what and I have come to the conclusion that many people fit into two camps. People like myself giving it a try out of curiosity and people who are egotistical nerd super-achievers who are mayors of like a dozen locations and have many hundreds of check-ins and badges.

Right now though it seems the balance of value is on Foursquare’s side. They get all this absolutely delicious location-specific data from their users that marketers would be delighted to buy access to. They have people willingly going to venues and saying I was here at this time.

I am not really into badge collecting. I am not one for wanting people to be right on my tracks so I don’t turn on stuff on my phone that lets most people know where I am at any given time. And I don’t see the point of checking in to places I visit right now.

None of this is to say the service is awful or bad or that it has no potential – quite the contrary. I think a location-based service such as Foursquare has huge potential but right now it seems they are missing the mark.

The bread & butter of their service will be the mobile apps. For the most part their web site is not even really needed other than as a desktop portal.

With that in mind let’s check out the Android app. (Note that they also make apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Palm as well.)

When you launch the app, the first screen you get shown is the “friend screen” – I understand why they did this but as you can see in my screenshot this screen is nearly useless. Out of the few friends I have added, only Jeff has his app/phone set to show his current location.

I would have either made the screen more user-specific – ie you see only recent friend check-ins nearby or even better (at least in my opinion) I would have made the default screen a “places near my location” type of deal. As they add more features to the service they could even make the main entry view more of a portal such as showing a restaurant near you that is having a special a special on wings for every run the Yankees score tonight or the museum nearby is offering half-off today. Or even the local library promoting a reading event.

There is a lot of room to enhance the places view as well.

For example, in this screenshot from my phone on the left imagine how much more useful it would be if it had star ratings right on this screen. Not just one either – like one from users, maybe one from Zagats, AAA or some other relevant service.

So a scenario would be I am in city visiting for work or whatever, I’d pull out my phone, fire up the app, give the GPS a moment to lock in my location and pull on the list and say “oh look a 5-star burger joint is only 100 meters up the road.” Or say I am out at 3 am with some friends and I want to find a place that is actually open, give me a preference to filter places to show places to eat that are within 1000 meters and open at this very moment.
 
Hell they could even cross-market or partner with someone like Urbanspoon or Yelp to get some venue-specific data if needed.

The venue screen to the left is a prime example of an under-utilized screen. Not only could they have the ratings I mentioned earlier there, they could/should feature relevant data such as phone number, hours, etc. There is another tab called Tips that has user-submitted blurbs but most venues have very few if any.

One of the downsides to allowing people to add venues is that there is a lot of shady data. One pizza place near me exists in the database three times – because three people added it with differently spelled names.

Superusers (the most active users) can supposedly edit the venues now but as I am not a superuser I am unable to see how this works or if I can merge multiple listings into one.

Another issue is people adding their own house. In the suburbs it is not as bad but in a city like NYC with some tall vertical residences you end up with stacks of peoples’ homes mixed in with the legit listings. I don’t know Omar or David nor do I care to know they live at XYZ and I doubt I will be checking in there.

I understand why they allowed people to add venues, but it seems to me they lost some of their control in doing so.

I found the maps for venues to not always be accurate either which I am guessing has a lot to do with random users adding said venues. If you go to add a venue and your GPS is off by a 50 meters or so the map rendering itself won’t be correct.

Fortunately most venues I have checked into are in their proper place, but I have found a few that are not and as far as I can see there is no way through the app to report a venue as being inappropriate, closed, or erroneous in some way.

Even a simple button to click and report it so that they could at least follow up somehow or just remove a venue if it turns out it does not belong and help them maintain better data integrity. Nothing can be more terrible for a service like this than invalid or irrelevant data. People are impatient and if they encounter it often enough they might say hell with it and not use Foursquare.

This final screenshot here shows the actual venue check-in screen.

This is where you see how they tie in with other social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Some folks may choose to broadcast this info out to their accounts and friends. Others won’t. All comes down to one’s own personal privacy preferences.

Location-aware services are still in their infancy and we are rapidly learning about how they can open up a whole other can of worms for privacy and safety.

For example, earlier this year a site named Please Rob Me threw together a page to show when people were not at home based on their updates to Foursquare and other social networking services.

Anytime you share info about yourself or friends on the web you are compromising your privacy some. It is up to each and every one of us where we the line is for too much sharing.

A service such as Foursquare is not exactly without privacy issues itself either.

So what’s the verdict? It is a decent concept and implementation but it is rough around the edges.

For me it is that the service does not offer me enough of a benefit to use it at this time. As the disclaimer goes though, your mileage may vary and judging by some of the profiles I have seen there are no doubt some very active, content users.

I think we will see a lot coming out of the Foursquare folks in the coming months. Their service shows a lot of promise. For now I am keeping my account on there but probably won’t be actively checking in to anything.

Hopefully they will give me something cool to write about in the near future.

Cheers,
–Jon

I decided to go through some old CD’s and Zip disks I had stashed away and came across some old-school stuff, including this gem:

Welcome to Netscape

That there is the “Welcome” screen from version 1 (actually 1.1) of Netscape Navigator. Sir Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the World Wide Web, but Netscape Navigator is pretty much the browser that changed the world. I know that sounds like a really bold statement, but it is the truth. This browser almost launched the “new economy” by itself.

The highly successful IPO of Netscape Communications led to a huge influx of capital and creation of tens of millions of jobs in a virtual gold rush with companies trying to out-innovate each other for the next big thing. 16 years later and trillions of dollars of economic activity later it is almost just a footnote in the history books now but Netscape Communications deserves full credit for launching the New Media revolution.

Without getting into a whole history lesson, Mosaic Communications (which went on to become Netscape Communications, then gobbled up by AOL in 1998) had the first successful commercial web browser, Netscape Navigator, which was based off of NCSA Mosaic, a project developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain, among them Marc Andreesen who co-founded Netscape with SGI co-founder Jim Clark.

Finding the program for this browser was a real treat for me. As someone who got my start in technology at the dawn of the dotcom era, it really brought me back to the exciting beginnings of the web. It brought me back to the days of hacking HTML trying to make shit work, the days of worrying about the size of gif files and making sure they do not take more than a few minutes to download on our 14.4 baud modems. The days of having to actually submit your site to Yahoo in hopes they would include it in their directory.

Looking back I feel privileged to have been a part of this – working in the industry when it was just taking it’s first baby steps. Sometimes looking back I still can’t believe how far things have come and how fast. Now we do full-blown video, animation, games etc over the web on cell phones and other portable devices at speeds that are mind boggling.

So back to the browser – I went to run it (this version did not have an installer – it was a self-contained single executable) but it did not want to run on Windows 7 64-bit. Tried setting compatibility modes etc and still could not get it to run.

Copied it to a Vista 32-bit machine and that did the trick.

HTTP header errors when visitiong Yahoo

So I run the program and first thing you see is that the interface has a lot of the same basic features as they do now. You have the toolbar with forward and back buttons, home, stop etc. At the bottom you have the progress bar which would also show you the URL of a link you mouse over. About the only thing this version did not have in the interface that is standard now is the URL bar where you can type in a URL to visit. To visit a URL you had to go to the file menu and select open location.

First site I tried since it was one of the oldest was Yahoo.com but it did not work. I got the error above which looks like it is simply a case of an old browser not supporting the needed HTTP header.

I found that trying most sites it simply did not work. If I did not get that error I got other errors about supported character sets (this browser did not support UTF-8 or other unicode formats) or the browser simply did not have a handler for a given file type.

So failing that, I went on to play with the navigation buttons Net Search and Net Directory.

These options also brought up some neat old-school web stuff.

Netscape's selection of search engines.

First button I tried was Net Search which brought up a page with links and descriptions of the few web sites one could use to search the web at the time.

This is really amazing because not only is this pre-Google, but it is pre-Yahoo as well. At this point in history Yahoo was a hierarchical directory of sites and Google was still a couple years away.

At this point in time there were really just a handful of options for searching the web – among them AltaVista, Lycos, and WebCrawler.

All three of these domain names still seem to work but none of them are their original owners anymore and for the most part have changed drastically where one could say they are simply just the the same names and that is about it.

In this screenshot one thing that I noticed was this list pre-dated Lycos even being a commercial entity. The URL on the bottom when I moused over the link shows it’s original URL from when it was a still a research project at Carnegie Mellon University.

Web directories in Netscape Navigator.

Next on my little journey down memory lane was the Net Directory button. Interesting how we used to delineate between the two methods of finding sites – “search” and “directory.” I think these days due to the sheer volume of content on the web and the pace of change, hierarchical directories of sites are all but gone other than perhaps DMOZ.

Like the Net Search button, Net Directory brought up a page with some links to directories of sites, most notable among them being Yahoo.

This page REALLY shows how young (and small) the web was compared to now. When I moused over the link for Yahoo it shows their original URL before co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang incorporated Yahoo as a business – akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo – where you could browse through the directory of 13,000 pages.

Contrast those 13,000 pages to now – even a simple Google search with the keyword “USA” returns 741,000,000 pages. The exponential increase in availability of information online is almost hard to grasp.

–Jon