A friend of mine has started another venture with some cats from around the Dallas / Fort Worth area…
Magnt is their general theme, with magntize being their first product.
magntize is a hosted, pre-designed (and beautifully designed if I might add), customizable personal profile thingy-ma-bopper. It includes all kinds of juicy information about you: name, websites, profiles on social sites, updates from social sites, resume, keywords, etc. Basically everything that can give you a snapshot about a person…
So here’s mine: http://jacob.good.name/
I worked with Dave early on testing out features and gave him quite a large amount of feedback. They have great design chops and lots of the bugs are worked out.
It’s a neat product, for a fair price ($99 a year).
Disclosure: I was given a 1 year Pro account from Dave because he’s a personal friend. He did not require nor ask for this review. But due to FTC Disclosure requirements, I have to include this statement.
Get the pun? :: groan ::
So the infamous 37 Signals has been posting up some not so interesting or useful blogposts lately. I mean, I understand how tough it is to live up to the hype that you’ve created for yourself through your blog… 37 Signals used to be THE place for cargo culters to get their cargo culting material. I fell for it a while back. I quite my cozy .Net job, got a Rails job and am now living happy…
But their last few posts have been no short of whack…
There was one where… and I quote:
“My problem with that: Quitting your job is easy. That, on its own, doesn’t deserve applause.” - Matt
Really? Yeah… ok… I’ll call bullshit on this. It can be easy to quit a job, but generalizing it (even for the context of leaving to start your own company) is not accurate. Whack
And now… their satirical post on Twitter (and other startup) valuations… I’m not a huge fan of Tech Crunch either, but today they posted a retort that is worth reading. It’s the classic case of how 37 Signals has taken their approach to business and have been spreading it around as the holy word. “Their way or we reserve the right to invalidate your method”… It’s the classic example of cargo culting. They built this entire army of followers, I know, I still have the tatoo… and then brain wash them into thinking that the only way to do things is their way.
Granted, the bickering going on is classic example of “My way is better”… which I applaud everyone for putting their opinions onto the table and questioning each other… I just think that the 37 Signals blog has been going downhill (as well as TC) and it’s about damn time someone starts posting some honest journalism around the startup space.
:: shrugs ::
It’s no secret that people look to Facebook as they push out their new features, UI changes, and their ever growing API… I’m one of those people.
Sitting here thinking about it today, I realized that in opening up users’ status feeds to outside applications, Facebook is essentially growing their data mining and acquisition rate exponentially.
Think about it, not only do people post all of their personal likes, dislikes, and data mining information into Facebook (which is why it’s a gold service)… Now, people can import even more structured data for Facebook to collect.
It’s one thing for you to put your favorite books into your profile… but it’s a whole other thing when your blog posts, movie reviews, book reading habits, and etc get imported and stored on Facebook servers.
For every single application that gets built and plasters stuff on your news feed, the more data that Facebook gathers…
Genius
