PlumBlog

Drop things on purpose

DropBox is live! We are launching our second application on Facebook exactly two months after Shoebox, the first one.

DropBox lets you share anything you find on the net with your friends by dropping it on their Facebook profiles. Videos from YouTube, web articles, photos from any web site and much more. We think of DropBox as an open inbox where your friends can see your drops, add comments and even re-drop your drops. It's a lot of fun. Try it out now!

And if you haven't installed Shoebox yet, now's your chance. Shoebox is your one place to save all the things you stumbe across, care about and need on the net. And Shoebox and DropBox coexist nicely and will get even tighter soon.

The Facebook platform is cool. Try it out. And let us know how you feel about it. We'd love to hear your feedback. feedback-at-plum-dot-com.

Save your stuff in a Shoebox on Facebook

Plum is live... on Facebook! Plum has opened up with an application we call Shoebox on the new Facebook application platform.

Click here to sign up. Note that you will need to sign up for Facebook first if you are not already a member.

For those of you who have been waiting for Plum to open up, we appreciate your patience. We will be sending out emails to everyone with a heads-up that you can now sign up for Plum on Facebook.

Is the portal a 1.0 thing?

People have been predicting the death of the portal for a while now. Is the consumer portal really dying or would Mark Twain have concluded that "the rumor of MyYahoo!'s death is greatly exagerated"?

Will MyYahoo and the other big "portal" pages where I get my daily what's-happening-in-the-world-summary be replaced by more social, random sources of information. Is my attention going to be driven primarily by my online friends or the New York Times and other  "authoratative" sources of news and editorial?

Are my visits to digg for an update on what the mob is paying attention to right now more compelling than the RSS feeds on a portal page. Is a stop by the Huffington Post for some attitude and POV and a swing by YouTube in case Will Ferrell does another George Bush impersonation on Saturday Night Live more convenient than an editor packing it up on the front page of the Washington Post? Will I just hang with my friends on Facebook and get updates when they post something to their pages?

What's the emerging model? Is it primarily "social" or primarily "editorial"? Is there going to be one place that brings together the news, enterntainment and tools for me i.e. a "portal"? Does Google News stand a chance as it crawls and filters or will I just tune out the big aggregators and increasingly listen to my social networks? Said differently: who wins the fight for my attention, my friends or MyYahoo!

-hans peter

Happy birthday Mac

January 24th, 1984 Apple Computer introduced the first Macintosh Computer. It changed the way we view computers and I think it changed the world a bit.

The original Macintosh had 128kb RAM and a 400kb floppy disc. By today's standards it was a toy at best. Yet I became the proud owner of my first Mac in March of that year, spending most of my previous summer earnings, while in college, to buy it.

I got a Mac because it spoke to me. It told me that computers were not defined by ugly green blinking prompts against a black screen that required that you know what to type after "C>_". It told me that if you dare to be a little different you can capture people's imagination and great change can ensue. It told me that true innovation is about making great ideas available to people in ways that delight them and matter. It told me that you have to take risk if you want to make a difference. And it told me that sometimes taking risk means making mistakes, but surround yourself with great talent, listen and learn and really important stuff will come from it.

At Plum, 23 years later, I am finding myself reminded of what my first experience with Apple and the 128k Mac taught me. When people say "Why are you doing it that way, the convention is to do things like this..." or "You can't expect people to understand that, all these popular sites do it like this..." I take a look around and I see a lot of web applications that look like "C>_" prompts and shake my head. There has to be a better way.

We are trying to change how people share the things the stumble across, care about and need online. We are trying to change how people share knowledge and information. Funny thing is that the now infamous video that Apple used to introduced the Mac still seems apropos against that backdrop:

Happy Birthday Mac!

-hans peter

Lights on

We are expanding our beta program. Thank you for all the things you showed us and taught us during the private beta. We now have a growing base of users who have come to depend on Plum for saving everything they stumble across, care about or need on the web and its time to open the doors wider.

People are using Plum as a simple way to keep track of all the neat things they find. Others use us for planning and coordinating. Some use it as a form of publishing that we haven't quite figured out yet, but that looks really exciting.

Stay tuned. More news, tidbits and observations to come. This blog is back in action!

-hans peter

Has 80:20 become 90:10:1 online?

The 80:20 rule states that you can achieve 80% of your results in most areas with 20% effort. Conversely the last eighty percent of any effort only moves the needle by a small amount. This turns out to be a trueism that applies broadly in many walks of life. But does it apply to user generated content? Is eighty percent of the content created by twenty percent of the users?

Mike at Plum pointed me to the following short article published in the Guardian yesterday. It makes the claim that one percent of people create new content online, ten percent comment on other peoples' stuff and the remaining ninety perecent simply view it.

One important way to get more people to engage in creating online content is to make it real simple to learn and use the new tools and applications. But I wonder if "real simple" isn't being translated to "real simplistic" a little too often. If new applications solve real problems and help people simplify their busy and complex lives, communicate more efficiently, discover more relevant information and entertain themselves in the process, then wouldn't they make an effort to learn how to use the new tools?

So the big question on my mind is: do you make a new online applications simple to the point of being simplistic in order to try to get lots and lots of people to at least try it out... or do you ask people to make a small investment in learning how to do something new that might have a big positive impact on their life?

-hans peter

Plum helps you save anything... even the environment

Plum is a sponsor of the SuperNova conference this week. I spoke this morning on a panel called the Personal Infospace. Interesting conversation. Topics of privacy, copyright and ownership, how wisdom of crowds scales and what the format of the medium is going to become, among others.

Our theme at the conference is "Plum helps you save anything. Now even the environment." We are giving away carbon offsets (CO2) to attendees to offset the the greenhouse gasses associated with travel and attending the conference. Check out TerraPass if you want to learn more and perhaps make your own contribution. You can get guilt-free driving by buying one year worth of carbon offsets for your car for under $50,-

-hans peter

Bright future

Interested in a bit of techno-optimism to kick off the week? Read my latest and last ClickZ column. It ran today. I wrap up three and a half years of monthly columns by sharing some personal prognostications and predictions for the effects that the Internet will have by 2010.

-hans peter

Applications moving off the desktop

Nice piece in the New York Times today about how desktop software is expensive and free alternatives are emerging on the net.

Doesn't hurt that Plum is mentioned :-).

I love this industry. Anybody who doesn't believe in Darwinism should spend a year of their career in high-tech.

-hans peter

Clip, snip and collect

I wrote an article called Clip, Collect, and Share last week in response to a question I get a lot: "do people really collect?"

Summary - no surprise - is that I view collecting as a basic human behavior. Perhaps even an instinct? And while most of us are fortunate not to have to collect roots and berries for sustenance any more, we collect physical things and information like never before.

The more interesting question perhaps is what do we do with all the things we gather and collect?

-hans peter

Expanding our beta

We are beginning to open our proverbial doors wider this week by expanding our limited beta. Thank you to the many thousands of you who have signed up for you patience. We will be inviting people in on a first-in-first-in(vite) basis.

I have received a lot of great email with interest, encouragement and some really cool ideas for how to utilize Plum over the past couple of months. Please keep them coming, I will do my very best to respond to every email.

-hans peter

Commodity or not?

Last week Amazon made a big announcement that did not seem to get picked up too broadly. They introduced S3, their new storage web service. And its cheap. Want a few Gigabytes in the sky? Amazon will host it for you for pennies per month. Google is rumored to be working on something similar.

Has storage become a commodity? If not yet, it sure looks like it will be soon.

Whether Google anticipated this happening when they introduced GMail or not, I don't know, but I think the (unintended?) consequence was that it made everybody realize that storing the bits was soon becomming an old favorite: Free! So my guess is that Google's competitors all set out on a quest to neutralize any competitive advantage Google had gotten because they had figured out how to make big storage really cheap.

What does this mean? Well it's great news for us the users and another big boost for innovation. Companies like Plum no longer have to think too hard about building and hosting huge server farms to store big media files such as photos, podcasts and video. Just plug in to the grid and there it is... well, almost. It means we can offer almost unlimited storage to you, our users at very low cost. This is going to be very exciting.

-hans peter

4.9.06
I have written about S3 and the implications of storage as a service in greater depth in my recent column Bits Also Want To Be Free.

Intelligence on the web

I spent most of the week at ETech. It was my first O'Reilly conference and I really enjoyed it. Quality of sessions was generally good and I met some neat new people and re-connected with folks I had not seen for years. I especially enjoyed Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra and Dana Boyd's G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide. Linda Stone's talk got rave reviews (although I managed to miss it) and Bradley Horowitz was quite impressive laying out the Yahoo! story which is increasingly open and developer friendly. Microsoft's Ray Ozzie's demonstrated a new clipboard hack (using Firefox to show his demo!) and spoke about Windows live, creating some buzz too.

A dominant theme in Tim O'Reilly's, Bruce Sterling's and Amazon's Mechanical Turk keynotes can best be summarized as "we have discovered that there is intelligence on the web... and it's you". O'Reilly said that "it's not about artificial intelligence, but about intelligence augmentation" and that this was all about "making connections in some profound way". Sterling poised that intelligence would arise through decidedly low-tech means of human "sorting, tagging, ranking and researching". I think this signifies a pretty major shift in how people are thinking about the web. More and more smart people are looking beyond search and page rank and to the one billion people now connected through this network in order to discover and add value. The social net is emerging and it will be about a lot more than socializing with people, it will increasingly be about socializing knowledge with the help of people.

Noticeably absent were Google. They had a recruiting station, but no real presence from key people.

-hans peter

(Some) APIs posted

Some of our open programming interfaces are up on the developer section of plum.com. (Uhm, "developer page" for now). Here is a simple example that I did on my personal site in the last 24 hours while at ETech in San Diego. It uses data from a plug-in script that Hans Peter wrote for the Plummer (our desktop collection tool) extending it to support collecting from the Macintosh Address book. Items collected from the Address book are displayed on a Y! map by the mashup even though the internals of Plum still doesn't have any understanding of what an "address" is.

-margaret

Searching for better search

Fred Wilson has a good post today on the search for better search where he points to several problems with the keyword search and page rank model. Is social search, tagging and all that, going to make a big difference for the regular web user? Will user generated tag clouds and folksonomies  (see Wikipedia definitions for tag cloud and folksonomy) make it easier to find the stuff you are looking for by relying on smart mobs applying their collective knowledge and filters?

I don't know what the next killer application of search is going to be, but I tend to lean towards a belief that extracting information from the things we do and say and using that as a way to help inform our search for related information is  one important and as of yet pretty unexplored area ripe for innovation. If I am planning a trip to Hawaii or listening to a lot of Moby or reading and writing mostly about folksonomies and tagging, then shouldn't all that inform how I show up when people search for me. And should it not also inform my own search results?

Oh, and while I'm at it, Fred also commented on Adam Lashinsky's fun piece in Fortune Magazine about the dynamics of the start-up / VC dating game. I agree with Fred's comment that VCs need to re-think what is success and even their underlying models in the ever changing landscape of startupiland. The expectations of what is a successful VC outcome must evolve beyond mega returns with big $$ invested. Until it does, VCs and the entrepreneurs they back will far too often find themselves on opposite sides of the table. I commented on this in more detail on Allen's blog a few weeks ago as well.

-hans peter