Marcoullier.com

FriendFeed announced that they are opening the doors to everyone today. They lead the pack, with a more refined experience than Iminta, Plaxo Pulse, Spokeo, Profilactic, Second Brain, etc. But they still fundamentally suck.

The current standard for these feeds is reverse chronological order, with all the content lumped together, as if everything is equally important. Services need to investigate context-sensitive display mechanisms that enable users to zero in on content of interest .

Ultimately, this race will go to whoever most elegantly allows users to ignore 90% of the data at any given time.

(Length: 95 words)

Paul Graham posted the excellent Six Principles for Making New Things; it’s a must-read for any entrepreneur.

Anyone I advise will tell you that my two basic sentiments are “rip it out — it’s not vital” and “who cares — launch and let the users tell you the answer”. If I wasn’t so belligerent about things, I’m sure these teams would worry that I don’t care about their companies.

You’re going to guess wrong. A LOT. Launching simple apps means you can fix them quickly before adding the next boneheaded feature

See the principles on the permalink.

(Length: 99 words)

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Loads of discussions in the last year about VCs being obsolete. Computing and bandwidth are cheap enough that guys in garages take something from launch to sale without ever taking capital. MyBlogLog did it. I recently turned down money because I could prove the idea cheaply.

And then there’s Mark Pincus. He’s convinced that his idea will be huge, and he’s gone from zero to 27 employees in six months and just announced $10M in funding from some of my favorite people. All while I was screwing around trying to prove my ideas were viable. Kudos, Mark. Lesson learned.

(Length: 100 words)