My friendfeed wish list - 5 features/product improvements that would make me happy :)

I have been addicted to Friendfeed lately and find it far more entertaining than TV :) These five features/product improvements would make me friendfeed a LOT more. FriendFeeders, I hope you are listening :)

• Ability to address specific people in my posts/comments. Ability to say @paul or @spidra would be great. Especially if I want to draw that user's attention to my post. The @ posts could all show up in a separate tab or something. So I could click through to see all the @bindureddy posts and respond to them
  
• Ability to read a blog post directly on FriendFeed.  Clicking to the blog and reading takes time and energy.  It would be much nicer if I could just click a zippy to read the blog post. This would be very much like Reader/iGoogle. 
  
• An easy way to scans 100s of posts/read state.  Right now, the constant next page clicking is giving me RSI.  I have also divided my FF into lists which actually doesn't work all that well for me. I hardly ever scan anything but my home feed. Read my ff post on this here
• Power-user feature: If you comment and like stuff a lot, you end up spamming all your friends on FriendFeed. It would be really nice if I could turn that stuff off. I want my friends to only see my posts not my likes and comments. 
• This one has more to do with feel of the site than with any particular product improvement. Right now FriendFeed seems pretty much more for geeks/power-users than for normal people.  Sometime ago, I got my cousin to try it and she wasn't sure what to do other than than to like a couple of people she knew.  She has no feeds that she can import so she imported nothing. She left to go back and hang out at Facebook where she is on pretty much all the time. Part of the issue is the "liking technology" which makes FF seem like one large loosely-coupled community vs. small groups of people hanging out with each other.

Friendfeeding....

Lately I have not been posting too much on my blog... However I do friendfeed - http://friendfeed.com/bindu

My brain on music

Writing this post more as a note to self... Music has always had a strong effect on my mood. As a child, I would get up and start dancing every time a favorite song of mine came on TV. This was pretty unusual as I was a very shy kid. I would be afraid to say hello to strangers but did not seem to have a problem with dancing.

Every time I am feeling low or depressed, I just need to listen to good music and there is an immediate effect on my brain. In some ways it is similar to a glucose/sugar high. The effect does not last for long however. I am happy for a short period of time, about 15 mins. after the music stops playing and I go back to being in the mood I was in before I started playing the music.

Clearly music has a profound and interesting effect on the human brain. Something I need to read up on...

My $0.02 to start-up founders - Recessions are a good time to start companies

I have been reading a lot lately about how many founders are stressed out about raising money, laying off people and weathering through recession. IMHO recessions tend to be better times to start and grow a company than when the economy is doing well.

- If you are laying people off, it most likely means that you hired one too many. Most web start-ups don't need too many people. Yet I see people growing their company to 15-20 people, sometimes without a product or user growth/revenue. If you are just starting, be very very careful about hiring. My own philosophy is to find people who are really passionate about what you are doing and offer them a larger equity share vs. trying to hire another 'employee'. You are much more likely to find talented passionate people interested in what you are doing during a recession than not.

- Web companies should focus on business model and revenue AS WELL as user growth. Trying to focus on user growth alone unless you are confident you will grow at a viral/phenomenal pace is a bad idea. There are numerous times, where I have seen start-ups come with good ideas which gain some traction and die off once the fad dies. Keen.com from the early 2000s was one such and I am sure every one can think of a cool web start-up that died because they couldn't make money. Sometimes it might take some time to figure out how to make money. Don't even think about raising a 2nd VC round if you don't know how you will be making money. Betting that your start-up with get acquired for millions for dollars because it has some traction is a pretty risky bet. Remember most large companies don't acquire start-ups during risky times. Use the recession to experiment with revenue models/ways to improve user growth vs. focussing on raising a 2nd round

- Don't raise funding unless you really HAVE TO. How many times does one hear that and how many times does it get ignored? This might sound a bit heartless - but it is better to lay people off and get down to a really small size and focus on user growth/business model than to spend your time worrying about pay-roll. Remember that services such as Amazon EC2 etc help you run very large jobs without buying expensive hardware. If the only reason you need the VC funding is to get more hardware because you are growing phenomenally and you have a great business model, getting VC money should be slam-dunk. Recessions help you focus on the bottom line vs. spending all your time competing with other start-ups to hire good people

- If you really HAVE TO raise VC funding for whatever reason. Put in the effort to make your case on why your company will provide real value. I will grow to be a multi-million pageview site because this is a fun/viral concept and I will make money by advertising is a bad pitch. Show strong early user growth and some revenue growth before going to the VCs.

- The number of companies started during recession usually tends to be pretty low which means you will have less competition

- You don't have to worry too much about the opportunity cost of doing a start-up. Recessions tend to be ugly times for large companies, so you are not missing much by leaving a large corporation to start your own.

That said this time around it might be a tad difficult to get talented people to leave large successful companies (e.g. Google) and join start-ups as everyone is predicting that the recession will be a really long one and people tend to prefer to have safe jobs.

LinkedIn badly needs a facelift - better UX and fewer features

I rarely use LinkedIn except to respond to invites. Today I decided to play around with it a little more and I was a bit horrified about how badly designed it is.

The biggest issue seems to be the that the designers are trying to fit a bunch of disparate features into the site. The multiple nav bars - one on top and one to your right increases the clutter considerably.

My guess is that in an attempt to increase engagement on the site, the PMs have added a bunch of random features. They have the ability to update status, a news gadget and even a amazon reading list widget!

I suspect LinkedIn is mainly used as a online resume hub and to find jobs/contacts. They probably would be much better of designing a very streamlined experience around this core focus and adding features that increase depth in that area. They would also be better of killing a few features that are not being used too much. Right now, they seem like a really un-cool, cluttered, 'professional' version of MySpace/Facebook.

Google's Friend Connect and Facebook Connect - Not really the same

I am not really sure that comparing Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect makes much sense. They are basically two different APIs/products with different purposes.

Facebook Connect allows you to basically take your Facebook login, profile and friends with you to any site and see the site and site's data through Facebook's 'social lens'. Examples include - See all the videos favorited by my Facebook friends on YouTube or all the products bought by my Friends on eBay. Facebook connect allows you to easily weave Facebook profile and friend data into the core functionality of your site.

This is a REALLY powerful API and has the potential to be very popular on the web. The only real drawback that I see is that, Facebook is being territorial by not giving out a user's address book/friends' email-addresses, even when users want to export that information to the 3rd party site. The single sign-on feature that Connect offers is interesting but I doubt it will be used widely. Sites will end up using their own registration processes along with Connect.

On the other hand, Google Friend Connect is more like a gadget that you include on your website. I don't see serious web sites such as Yelp or YouTube ever using Google Friend Connect. It simply won't fit into their look and feel/functionality etc. If you look at examples, the Friend Connect site showcases it is clear small sites are using this. FriendConnect is more like another version of MyBlogLog.

While this is pretty interesting, I don't think Friend Connect is going to be a big game changer.

Calculated Risk - Watching the TED spread and LIBOR

If you are interested in following the financial crisis and are constantly monitoring the TED spread and such. I recommend reading Calculated Risk - http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/