Todd Sampson

I heard this great quote from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in a podcast a year ago.  The table discussion at last week’s Startup2Startup dinner made me think of it again.  Unless you are building flight controls or financial tools, this is how you should design social software:
Think of the last restaurant you went to. Did [...]

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Wow! I just realized it has already been two weeks since my last day at Yahoo!
In the last two weeks I have:

Connected with tons of old & new friends in the startup world.
Helped Rahmin, Strauss and the Cloudspace crew get Unclasses launched.
Hosted an (un)bar-b-q — i.e. indoor bar-b-q that got rained out.  (Credit on [...]

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For those who missed the classic Seinfeld episode (scene 1, scene 2) shrinkage is what happens when your man-bits get too cold. The funny thing is, the same thing can happen to your network. If the relationships with your contacts go cold — through falling out of touch or contacting them only when [...]

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Image via Wikipedia
So, I just realized how many messages I have been missing on Twitter since the crew there removed the Track feature.  I know that the lack of the track feature was really having an impact on the value of the service (see my previous post on The Ideal Twitter Setup and tracking your [...]

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Everyone loves me. Everyone loves my business and products. What’s more, everyone loves everything that I do. I. Am. Awesome.
So, aside from sounding like Barney (wwNPHd) from How I Met Your Mother, the above is an example of someone’s ego defense mechanisms completely insulating their id. While this state of delusion [...]

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I love Twitter. It is an absolutely fantastic service. However, once you get into using the service, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of information coming to you. This is compounded if you pump the messages of all those you are following to your mobile phone. And if [...]

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I am beginning to think there is no way to avoid it. Every time we launch a new product feature at MyBlogLog, someone (usually multiple someones) tells me the new feature will kill another company. In the past month I have heard, “This new feature is…”

a Digg killer.
a Technorati killer.
a FriendFeed killer.
a Socialthing [...]

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I just saw this post by Bijan and figured I would help him extend his vacation. A quick screenshot with Skitch, a search for Greasemonkey Google logo replacement scripts, and a few minutes of code modification later Bijan (and anyone else that wants to install it) are back in The Bahamas — on Google.com [...]

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Check these out… Vot3r and Fast3r, the first two beta sites from former-Yahoo Lowell Goss’s new startup Loud3r, have just gone live.
Essentially, Loud3r sites use community and some special algorithm magic to help you keep-up with topics that simply have too much information to follow by drinking from an RSS topic feed — in [...]

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MyBlogLog’s Reader Roll, the website & blog widget that shows recent visitors, has launched a major upgrade. In addition to a more stylish design (which is completely skinnable) the new Reader Roll gives a lot more information about who is visiting the site.
When you move your cursor over the face of someone in the [...]

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