The magic of Twitter is in its ability to draw more and more people in with a vague promise of building their digital brand and having an audience. People are indeed drawn in en masse, and the snowball keeps rolling. This enables grand ideas like using the vast stream of Tweets for searching content on the web and zillions of other uses.

What’s the trick behind the Twitter’s success? it doesn’t really matter anymore, because it’s too late to compete with them anyway. Simplicity, celebrity founders, and luck definitely played a key role. What does matter, though, is understanding the psyche that leads people to participate. Here’s a feeble attempt at explaining that, following the Einstein Principle stating that a scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

One of the most elegant ways to explain complex systems is through cellular automata, and Twitter is turning us into a huge one indeed. As with any cellular automaton, each cell (=twitter user) acts according to a very simple set of rules. Here are the rules for the Twitter Cellular Automaton:

1) If you think you have something interesting to say, tweet.

2) If x minutes/hours passed since your last tweet (even if you don’t have anything to say), tweet.

3) If a followee tweets something that looks even remotely interesting, retweet.

4) If enough people follow somebody, follow them too.

5) If somebody follows you, follow them (or not, depending on how highly you think of yourself).

What does this say about us, the individual cells? does this degrade us to the basic animal-instinct level? I don’t think so, as you do have to be somewhat educated and eloquent to be able to use the service. Instead, it peels layers of shyness and fear and exposes our animalistic, reflexive communication skills on a grand scale - and that’s a good thing, or at least seems like one at this point.

Rivers of words have been poured on the subject of the midlife crisis. This “crisis” occurs at the intersection of two periods - the dawn of “living the future” and the rise of “living the past”. Until you reach the ripe age of the middle, you live the dream believing that anything is possible; the sky is the limit. But then it dawns on you that you haven’t even reached the treetops, never mind the sky. So you start thinking – hey, if I haven’t done it so far, I never will! I’m too old for that! It’s only downhill from here! And since the future doesn’t matter anymore, you start living - or rather re-living - the past.

This is really misfortunate. People waste their best years mourning the demise of their youth rather than planning the second half of their lives. This has a lot to do with the middle class syndrome, in which people are trained to serve some invisible tyrant by working their ass off all their lives. If they take a rest, dire straits will surely come upon them. Middle classers who are out of work for more than a few weeks are ridiculed and frowned upon for being lazy, stupid, or just plain weird. The constant pressure from their fellow class members is immense. It is this peer pressure, however, that keeps the middle class producing the goods and services the entire society relies on, so we can’t really do without it.

The midlife crisis is a direct result of the middle class syndrome. Unable to relieve the peer pressure completely, middle classers sooner or later rebel in the only way they know (and can afford to) – spending a sizeable chunk of money on some item they don’t need, which reminds them of their long gone youth. That’s actually not such a bad outlet, and can sometime lead to positive outcomes. In some cases, though, newly inducted members of the middle age fall into a pit of despair and can take a while before pulling themselves out of it. In the next post I’ll explore ways to prevent this from happening.

This is one of the most amazing bookshelves I’ve ever seen. I have a thing for bookshelves, a piece of furniture that lends itself to meaningful design. The thoughtfullness and minimalism of this particular design is simply amazing. The designer’s site is here.

After who-knows-how-many years of collecting bolts, nuts, washers, nails, and other metal nicknacks, I finally decided to sort them all out and put them in nice little drawers. The task was formidable – I estimated the number of items at more than 10,000. Picking them all up one by one and placing each one in the right drawer would take forever, so I had to come up with a quicker strategy. As it turns out, the strategy came about after I already started, and this in fact is lesson one:

1. Start doing whatever it is you need to do, and sooner or later you’ll figure out how to do it better. Experience is your best guide.

2. Adopt a utilitarian approach. Ask yourself: how will you (or others) use the items? If you just need a few items once in a while, which items will it likely be?

3. It’s not going to be perfect.

4. Optimize the number of categories you’re going to use - the smaller the number of categories, the faster the sorting process will go. In the long run, however, it will be harder to find individual items if you only have a handful of drawers labeled “Nails”, “Screws”, “Nuts”, etc.

5. Sorting can take a while, and your categories will tend to drift and change. Be very clear and consistent on what goes into each drawer, or else you’ll end up with a greater mess and a lot of time wasted.

6. Dump the rusty nails and crooked screws. Don’t waste your energy on these, unless it takes less than 2 seconds to wipe off some dirt that just happens to look like rust. If a nail is rusty, it’s not going to get un-rusty. If it’s bent, you’ll spend a while banging on it and trying to straighten it up only to find out that it’s still not straight. If the threads on a screw are not even, you’ll regret using it when it actually comes in handy one day. The bottom line – with so many items at hand, you can always find a better one. Just dump the rejects.

7. Having said that, the smaller the number of items you have the more important each one is. If you believe the number of items is small enough to make each one count, choose one of these approaches:
a) If you already have it but it’s not up to snuff - fix, groom, and develop it, and eventually you’ll get your efforts’ worth.
b) Even though you already have it, if it’s crooked you’d be better off dumping it and getting another one instead. In other words – lesson #6 applies even for a small number of items.

8. You don’t have the resources to build the ultimate screw sorting machine, but wouldn’t it be great? Just imagine this big contraption - you simply show it a nut and it fetches the perfect screw in 2 seconds flat.

9. Some items won’t fit in any other drawer, and there’s no use in starting a drawer for each one-of item. Just put them all in a drawer marked “Misc.”

10. Sorting a big pile of items actually takes less time than you’d imagine. Just start, zero in on your strategy, and you’ll be over and done with before you know it.

I just came accross this great post by Naval Ravikant on aging and entrepreneurship. This Douglas Adams quote captures it nicely:

1. “everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
4. Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.”

Twitter reached its hockey-stick moment several months ago, and is now growing like wildfire. No one has a clue how to monetize it yet, but being an extreme case of “build it and they will come”, the company keeps raising money and attracts more and more users. Commercial interests are quickly taking over though, albeit bottom up. People like Guy Kawasaki use automated tools to feed Twitter with a rapid stream of tweets designed to promote their business and private brand. That’s perfectly fine, as Twitter’s lack of rules indirectly encourages such behavior. It is augmented by the 140 character limit, which promotes bite-size clutter.

The question I ask myself is what new tools the Twitter community - soon to be known as “the Internet” at this growth pace - needs. There are plenty of desktop and mobile clients, innovative front ends, automated tools. But what’s missing?

Relationships are unilateral on Twitter – Anyone can follow (“become friends with”) whoever they wish. Users are identified by name and avatar, but except for a bunch of celebrities and real friends, the majority of users one follows are complete strangers. This implies the unimportance of the identity of individuals generating tweet streams. The power of Twitter comes from the combined content generated by of millions of users. Problem is – this “Über-stream” it’s too messy. This leads me to thinking that Twitter could use some sort of categorization mechanism. Hashtags has built one, but it requires voluntary tagging which only a fraction of users bother with and suffers from chaotic folksonomy wherein thousands of tags are mostly meaningless.
So how do we go about categorizing the tweet stream? That’s what I’m working on these days…

Here’s a startup idea that will make make the world a better place: Replace guide dogs and white canes with mobile streaming video. Use a service like Qik, Ustream.tv, or Kyte to stream video from mobile devices carried by blind people. Video streams will be watched by volunteers across the Internet, Mechanical Turk style.

Watchers will commit not to take their eyes off the screen during their shifts. When the blind person wants to cross the street, for example, they’ll indicate it by pressing a button or shaking the phone (in accelaromater-enabled devices like the iPhone). The watcher will pay extra attention, and guide the blind person using voice instructions (”Stop, car on your right”). For extra safety, more than one watcher can monitor each video stream at a given time.

The challenges in turning this into reality involve reliability, dependability, and cost. I assume that getting people to volunteer shouldn’t be a problem.

What do you think about this? is it feasible? will people buy into that? leave a comment.

Some patents are useful, some are useless, and some are plain weird. I came across these patents and felt obliged to share the wisdom. The USPTO must be a fun place to work.

Nose Pick, US Patent #D430934. This is a very useful invention indeed. What’s amazing is that it took humankind so long to come up with this stroke of genius; it was only invented in 2000.

Mobile Morgue, US Patent #6299229. I wonder - does this come bundled with a mobile cemetery?

A collar for walking your snake, US Patent #6490999. This one is so useful. It was invented in 2001, and indeed I don’t remember seeing anyone walking their snake before that. All snake owners where holding their breath waiting for Mr. Donald Robert Martin Boys to invent this ingenious serpent leash.

Female Urinal, US Patent #6571399. I guess this could be useful in some situations, but somehow I find it hard to see it happening any time soon.

Bonus: Sanitary Appliance for Birds, US Patent #2882858. I thought this one was crazy enough, until I saw this. I guess you never know which “technology” is actually commercially viable.

“It’s not the technology that’s scary; it’s what it does to the relations between people that’s scary”
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’ve been living in Silicon Valley for too long now to have first hand experience with people’s fear of technology. It’s important to look beyond this environment, and even beyond the western world, because the next big jump in technology usage will come from people who are not using much of it (if any) right now, in places like rural China and India. These people are slowly joining the ranks of the middle class, and so can gradually afford to buy mobile phones, iPods, TVs, and cars. Surprisingly enough, they learn how to use these products quickly and easily mainly because user experience design has made such amazing progress in the last few decades. Their fear of technology is masked by their eagerness to belong to the middle class. This pushes them to quickly adapt and become an indistinguishable part of it.

Pirsig was right about technology being ultimately not scary. He was also right about the human relationship part, although he didn’t anticipate the rise of the social networking and its effect on human interaction. All these new members of the middle class connect with each other through their computers and phones. Their usage patterns, much like ours, gives a new meaning to the word “friend”. While the world is getting flat, so does friendship. People whom I barely know are now connected to me on LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe the best demonstration of flat friendships is Twitter, where people follow each other based on trends and activity levels rather than familiarity.

The notion of strangers having a peep hole into my life is odd. I obviously cannot rely on these “friends” for help in a time of need. Or maybe I can? Does the fact we’re “connected” have some merit beyond the few square nanometers of disk space that hold this information on Facebook’s database server? While this is an important question, a more interesting one is what will be the effect of flat friendships on tightly knit communities burgeoning into middle-classdom. These communities rely heavily on human interaction, which makes it fascinating to witness and understand how they embrace technology.

While the current slowdown is definitely painful for many startup companies, the big picture is actually not so bleak. Most experts agree that the current slowdown will last for about 2 years. This is roughly how long it takes a tech startup to release its first product (depending on many factors, of course; building Internet sites takes much less, developing new drugs takes much longer). Therefore, now is the time to start a company and be ready to meet the market when it needs your product.

On the supply side - from the LP perspective, venture capital is actually not such a bad idea compared to other investment opportunities. VC investments are risky and volatile; downturns should be planned for. Traditionally conservative investments like real estate did not fare so well recently to say the least, and so did other channels. LPs still have money to invest (though admittedly less), and some of it will find its way into venture funds. I therefore find it hard to see the VC well drying up any time soon. Yes, it’ll dwindle some, but won’t run out.