Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• MTA's new Trip Planner

  MTA recently launched a new service called Trip Planner .  I've used it a few times since I'm still learning some of the buses and trains around our new offices, and it seems to work pretty well. What I like about it more than HopStop is that it gives you multiple routes and is actually tied into the schedule. After all, something may be 30 minutes of travel time, but if you're waiting on a bus that comes every 25 minutes or something, the real cost of the trip is longer. Of course, as Dan points out, it would be better if they actually tied into the service advisories, but like he said - maybe next version. Posted Feb 20 2008, 06:39 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Personal, Web 2.0, NYC

• Facebook opens up with a JavaScript API

  Facebook just announced a new JavaScript Client Library that allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site . In other words, you can start building Facebook applications are live outside of Facebook. I agree with Charlie that this move " makes membership in Facebook that much more valuable ", and is probably a direct response to the openness promised by OpenSocial . Duncan calls it a clever move , but if their goal is to truly build the social OS - or what Charlie calls a "social dial tone" - then it's a necessary move. Henry calls the strategy "brilliant" . This move seems another smart step toward a hybrid strategy: Allow app makers (and Facebook) to extend social-graph functionality to the web, gather more app users, and recruit more members--but retain full control over the social graph itself. This is precisely the approach we are taking with Notches. A "walled garden" is nice because you retain all control, but these days you need... Posted Jan 27 2008, 12:38 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Facebook, Notches

• What exactly is "User Generated Content"?

  There's an interesting discussion going on over at CenterNetworks , with Allen calling out Mike Arrington and co. for giving Digg the award for "best user-generated content". Allen says that Digg doesn't belong in that category (which he includes Wikipedia, your blog, and Flickr), but rather as a "UGC aggregator". Obviously, this is all semantics, but I think saying that there's no "content" being generated on Digg, del.icio.us and similar sites misses the point a little. Digg does more than aggregate content - it also filters and ranks the content. As Steve Gillmor would say, there's a lot of attention metadata generated by the users of the site. It is this "content" which separates Digg from being indistinguishable from a set of links, and I would argue that there's a lot of value in that information. Some of the discussion there also focused around the amount of effort put into the generation of content. For example, one commenter... Posted Jan 22 2008, 04:02 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Social Behavior

• The Case for Freeing the WSJ Online

  An interesting article in Business Week about opening up the Wall Street Journal Online in the wake of the sale to Murdoch. For The Wall Street Journal Online, going free will come at a high cost. The daily financial newspaper is one of the few major publications to successfully charge for access to most of its online content, earning roughly $79 a year from each of its nearly 1 million Web subscribers. Once incentives and other free offers are taken into account, some analysts estimate that the paper will bring in more than $65 million this year from WSJ Online subscriptions alone. But soon-to-be owner Rupert Murdoch seems willing to sacrifice that revenue in return for the possibility of earning many millions more from online advertising. In an Aug. 8 earnings call for News Corp. ( NWS ), which plans to acquire Journal publisher Dow Jones ( DJ ) for $5.6 billion, Murdoch said both companies are debating making WSJ.com free, though there are no concrete plans yet. "I think it would... Posted Aug 25 2007, 06:44 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Web 2.0, Blogging

• Distinguishing between a platform and a destination

  Charlie says that "the whole idea that you have a main site is dead". I couldn't agree more - I strongly believe that platforms are the future of the Internet. One clarification I'd like to make in this whole discussion is Facebook is both a destination and a platform. It's important to understand that these are discrete things - something can be a platform without being a destination and vice versa. Clearly, Facebook offers a nice API for integrating your code into theirs, but this to me is not what makes Facebook a platform. MySpace, iGoogle, and a plethora of Web 2.0 portals allow you to "embed" your code - Facebook just allows you to do it more seamlessly. If anything, these are all simply platforms - or rather, vehicles - for traffic. Of course, as Charlie and myself and countless others have said, traffic does not give you a business model. On the other hand, Facebook is getting flak for not being open enough with their data . As Fred says, being open... Posted Aug 21 2007, 06:15 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches

• Facebook: Lawsuits, IPOs, and Acquisitions

  ConnectU is suing Facebook for, among other things, copyright infringement, breach of contract, theft of trade secret. (It should be noted that Facebook is counter-suing for business torts and unfair business practices). ConnectU (which started at Harvard Connection) alleges that Mark Zuckerberg was brought on as a member of the ConnectU development team, given access to the existing code base and business plans, and eventually "stole" them. For more details, read the full set of complaints and other filings . Rob is wondering why no one is covering this lawsuit ... it's certainly a big deal given the recent valuations and talk of an IPO. As Mike Arrington notes , "this isn’t a case of plaintiffs looking for a quick buck as billion dollar valuations are discussed" - this is actually a long-standing dispute that commenced long before we were saying "Facebook" and "billions" in the same sentence. Facebook recently acquired Parakey , a as-yet-launched... Posted Jul 24 2007, 07:19 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Microsoft, Google, Startup, Venture Capital, Facebook

• What's the best state to incorporate in? (Hint: Delaware)

  AskTheVC recently addressed the question of what was the best state of incorporation . The short answer is one of 3 preferred states: "Delaware, whatever state the company is in and whatever state(s) the VCs are located in." Obviously, the last is hard to determine if you're going to incorporate before you close financing. California is notoriously employee-friendly so it should be avoided. Some of those laws may still apply if you are based in California, but if you are elsewhere you should definitely assume those burdens. New York is also undesirable. It's fairly balanced when it comes to dealing with owners vs. employees, but the one big red flag is Section 630 of the NYS BCL. This section states that the top 10 shareholders are liable for employee wages if the company goes out of business and employees aren't paid. This statute does not apply to foreign companies (i.e., those incorporated in other states) even if they're doing business in New York. Considering... Posted Jul 23 2007, 05:53 AM by Tim with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Law, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, NextNY

• Twitter is, or will be, a Messaging Platform

  Charlie discusses the future of Twitter and touches on what I think are two key points: corporate twitter and content subscription. The key as Charlie discusses is the opt-in and one-way nature of Twitter. That is, I only get updates from someone if I explicitly choose to receive them, and the party I subscribe to doesn't necessarily need to listen to me. That sure sounds a lot like an RSS aggregator, doesn't it? To me, Twitter is exactly that: a messaging aggregator. The future of Twitter is a messaging platform . Twitter has a number of ways to deliver updates - you can get them on your phone (via SMS), from IM, or on the web. And of course, you can get them as RSS and bring them anywhere you want. You can also send the updates from any of those mediums. Ever better, Twitter has an API for putting data in and getting messages out, which means I can update Twitter and have this "status update" sent out to Facebook , my blog , and so on. Delivery based on context and priority The key feature... Posted Jun 18 2007, 03:05 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Innovation, Business, Blogging

• There's no such thing as Web 2.0

  I've said before that I hate the term Web 2.0 but that it's more than a buzzword . Perhaps what I meant to say is what Marc Andreessen said: there's no such thing as Web 2.0 ( via Fred Wilson ) - thing being the key word there. The first Web 2.0 conference was held in the fall of 2004, and coincided with a large number of people in the tech industry (myself included) peeking our heads out from the fallout from the nuclear winter of 2001-2003 and realizing that the Web was not only not dead, it was thriving. From there, it was easy to conclude that "Web 2.0" was a thing , a noun, something to which you could refer to explain a new generation of Web services and Web companies. Many people have since pointed out that there is no clear definition of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly, whose organization created the conference (and the term), attempted to define Web 2.0 as follows: "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the... Posted Jun 11 2007, 03:09 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital

• The real reason for Google's free 411 service

  Tim O'Reilly speculated why Google is really doing a free 411 service . In short, I'm speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google's own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player. Charlie confirmed this at the recent Google Developer Day. Dr. Norvig said that the primary motivation behind Goog-411 is to provide something useful to Google's users, but the voice data the service collects will certainly help the company improve its voice recognition capabilities. This isn't surprising - Google has a proven track record of providing useful, free software that is ultimately a vehicle to feed the AdSense cash cow. Perhaps the more interesting question is how Google will put this speech database to work in the future. Such a database would be incredibly useful to deliver contextual AdSense for audio products. Of course, the injection process is a bit more complicated (and less dynamic) in a podcast as opposed to a web... Posted Jun 04 2007, 12:32 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Google, Advertising