It uses Cocoa’s natural language date parsing, so you can enter your time as “2 hours from now” or “next sunday at 11am”. The exact format of the input string needs to be:

[natural language date/time]:[calendar item name] @[calendar name]

If no calendar name is specified, it defaults to “Work”

Need fast iCal entry? Get KlepCal here.

Users must not be surprised by the outcome of an action they take.

Granted, everybody knows what they’re referring to. You click on a random tab in SuperPoke and suddenly you’ve accidentally notified your friends that you’re gay. Surprise!

I think it’s a dangerous trend to regulate the behavior of applications through anything other than technical means. Ultimately, the guidelines will be useless if they are full of arbitrary passages like this that are subject to interpretation. I now feel the need to sprinkle my apps with comments to avoid surprise — “Just so you know, when you click this button, the page is going to reload. Please don’t be surprised. Maybe grab a friend to calm you down in case you start getting nervous.”

pedantic |pəˈdantik|
adjective
of or like a pedant : many of the essays are long, dense, and too pedantic to hold great appeal.

Scott: Is that a web site?

Marni: No, it’s someone I work with.

When I first started thinking about SpotDJ, I had a job. Being a loyal employee not looking to get sued, I only worked on the project during nights and weekends. Which is to say, I didn’t really work on it at all. I can’t remember what was filling up all my free time back then, but I knew that I could build and launch a product if I just quit my job and devoted all that new found time to it; that was all that was holding me back.

After quitting the job, I realized that I couldn’t possibly go on without a cofounder. If I had somebody else, particularly someone who understood all that business stuff and could worry about money, everything would fall into place. Once I found a cofounder, I needed money. After all, I had quit my freakin job and hadn’t had a salary for weeks now! We were just one step away from success and that step was raising a small seed round.

Okay, round raised. Now if we can only find another engineer. Because it’s very risky to build something solo… Then we needed a designer, because I sure as hell can’t draw….

It went on from there, and still continues. There’s always just this one thing that’s keeping you from success. The only thing that changes is that eventually you figure out that once you get that one thing, there will always be another. Nothing really makes things that much easier — it just reveals the next challenge.

Up next: Your Friends Won’t Be the Rabid Beta Users You Think They’ll Be

When we write proposals for Facebook applications, we typically include definitions for the Facebook-specific terms we use, like wall, mini-feed, and notification. Facebook doesn’t provide much in the way of official definitions for these features, and new users are often confused by the similarity between the wall, messages, notifications, requests, and emails.

To clear up some of the confusion for people new to Facebook or new to Facebook applications, here is my unofficial guide to some select Facebook viral features. For each feature, I’ve provided a description, the “intended” usage, the common usage, and some comments. Note that for most features, there is no “official” usage so the “intended” usage is what I’ve distilled from talking to other developers, both inside and outside Facebook.

]]> http://www.scottkleper.com/wordpress/2007/12/a-facebook-glossary/feed/ 0 http://www.scottkleper.com/wordpress/2007/12/startup-tip-1-dont-listen-to-me-or-anybody-else/ http://www.scottkleper.com/wordpress/2007/12/startup-tip-1-dont-listen-to-me-or-anybody-else/#comments Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:00:21 +0000 klep http://www.scottkleper.com/wordpress/?p=76 I’m putting this first because I know you’re busy starting a company and I can save you a lot of time by telling you to skip all the other tips and listen to this one. Or don’t. That’s the whole point.

When I, and later we, were first starting out, we sought a lot of advice. We talked to friends, mentors, other startup veterans, current founders, VC contacts, teachers, etc. Most of them had really good advice, but the problem was that we talked to too many people. For every smart person who gave a given piece of advice, we could find an equally smart person who said the exact opposite. I remember one drive down the Peninsula where we mapped out exactly who was in which camp on each issue.

The fact is that when people give you advice, they’re basing it on either something that worked for them, or something that went horribly wrong for them. If they never got to a million users, they’ll tell you, “Don’t bother building in scalability up front — just get the product out there.” If they were bought by Google for their caching technology, they’ll tell you, “Focus on the platform, keep the product simple.” On financing especially, you get advice all over the map. “Take as little money as possible to get to your next proof point.” “Take as much as you can right now in case things don’t work out right away.” “Don’t take money from the A-list VCs because they’ll pressure you into taking a bigger risk.” “Don’t take money from some no-name VC because it’s all about the smart money.”

It’s not that the advice isn’t helpful, it’s just that following any one person’s advice is almost certain to be wrong. They started their company in a different time, a different space, with different constraints. You should listen to as many people as possible, but also realize that they’re not really giving you advice, they’re giving you their own biases. Many of the best advisers realize that and will be upfront — “…of course, that’s just what worked for me.” But if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t add that disclaimer, be sure to add it yourself as the advice enters your brain. Or don’t — that’s just what ended up working for me.

Up next: You Will Always Be One Step Away…

I’ll be focusing on one item in each post, but don’t worry — after you read tip #1, you won’t have to read any of the others. Here are the first five I’m going to write about:

1. Don’t Listen to Me or Anybody Else
2. You Will Always Be One Step Away…
3. Your Friends Won’t Be the Rabid Beta Users You Think They’ll Be
4. It’ll Never Be “Obvious” in Six Months
5. Technical Cop-Outs are Lame

We Like FBML
As a developer, I am far more interested in coding in FBML than in HTML for the following reasons:

• It’s a superset. FBML isn’t a “proprietary language,” it’s a set of tags added to HTML that make it easier to write social apps. With FBML, I can show or hide elements of the page based on whether two users are friends — it’s a simple tag that Facebook handles on their side. If I were using HTML, it would be up to me to figure out if the two users are friends through an API call.
• It’s high performance. With FBML, I can add features and logic to a page without my server doing any work. This is because certain features of Facebook (ranging from friend links to wall functionality) are just built in and are reduced to simple view elements.
• It’s a view layer. If you knew nothing about CSS, you could still create an attractive Facebook page with an appearance consistent to the rest of the site just using the built in tags.

As a developer, FBML is handing parts of the logic of my app, most of the appearance, and offloading work from my server. OpenSocial, as we currently know it, offers none of these features and touts that gaping hole as a key advantage!

Facebook Applications Can Be Written with HTML and JavaScript
Even if you were convinced that a social application platform that requires nothing more than HTML and JavaScript was somehow desirable, you’d be wrong in saying that it’s not something Facebook offers. With an iframe app, or even an FBML app that only uses the HTML portions of FBML, you can essentially do the same things. If you needed to make API calls, which are done in JavaScript in OpenSocial, you’d either dip a bit into FBML and realize that it’s much easier than writing code, or you’d do it on the server side, where controller logic actually belongs!

OpenSocial is Java
I’m far from the first person to compare OpenSocial to Java, but I agree that the comparison is apt. When I was in high school and read about Java, I was excited that there would finally be a platform that would run all the world’s software regardless of the hardware and OS it ran on. Java made a huge splash but it took a long time for the reality to come anywhere near the hype. The challenge for OpenSocial will be to get real apps running in real containers in a way that resembles something more than some interesting demos. That plus a real security model would do the trick.

A Press Piece Masquerading as a Technical Feature
If Facebook developers aren’t excited about a platform that uses open standards, who is all the talk about open standards aimed at? Developers who haven’t written social apps yet? The ones who have been chomping at the bit with some really great ideas, but have been waiting on the sidelines because Ning didn’t have a platform yet? Obviously, it’s something that sounds technical, but it’s PR. Open standards sound good, proprietary language doesn’t. Which makes it too bad that…

OpenSocial Needs Its Own Markup Language
OpenSocial needs its own markup language to be successful. There needs to be a clean way for containers to extend that markup language and API calls in a namespaced and gracefully degrading way. It would be a significant change in the architecture of OpenSocial to do it, but I believe it’s necessary. Otherwise, all we’ve got are iframes — widgets with some small degree of integration into the container.

OpenSocial is an Opportunity
I’m annoyed at this one aspect of how OpenSocial is being positioned, but at a higher level, I still think it’s a good idea with lots of potential. I don’t believe for a moment that developers will be able to write once and run anywhere if their app has any interesting functionality. But I also don’t think it’s necessary to have 100% parity on all containers. The best thing about Facebook apps is how well they integrate with Facebook. To write a really good OpenSocial app, it should be focused on particular containers and integrated with the unique features those containers offer. I’m also glad to see other networks start to open up and offer a little healthy competition against Facebook’s platform. As Facebook app developers, we’ve already received inquiries about OpenSocial development and intend to pursue it aggressively. Should be pretty easy — it uses open standards!

Most APIs are built to limit functionality, or more kindly, at least to encourage certain types of functionality over others. For about a year, I wrote software that worked with the iTunes API, which can be summarized as follows:


getTrackTitle();
getArtistName();
play();
pause();
stop();
nextTrack();
previousTrack();


The iTunes API was clearly designed by committee. A bunch of people reserved a conference room with the noble goal of designing a way for other programs to interface with iTunes. They ended up talking about all the things that they had to prevent other applications from doing. Most likely, the concerns they enumerated included usability, security, piracy, loss of control, loss of revenue, and ongoing support.

As a result, most applications that use the iTunes API are glorified remote controls. The deeper integration that you see in products like our SpotDJ Classic and iLike are, put simply, total hacks. We used the APIs in ways that it was neither designed or intended for. As a result, we spent a lot of time futzing with undocumented hacks and less time building great new features.

When I start looking at a new API, I generally begin with two things. First, what do the sample apps do? Second, what are the API calls? Most of the time, this gives me a pretty good sense of what the designer intended. When the Facebook platform was released, it only resulted in more questions. The reference app for developers was called “Footprints.” It was an app so simple and uninteresting that I don’t even remember what it did. It largely served to educate developers about Facebook’s novel approach to developing add-ons for a web site — specifically, a REST-based API to obtain information from the service with a custom query language and a homegrown markup language to leverage the existing user interface and functionality of the site. The documentation was sparse, and completely unwritten in some points. It failed to answer basic questions like “What is a ‘wall’? How do people invite other people to use my app? What’s the best way to do X? Is it okay to do Y?”

Whether by design, through evolution, or just happy coincidence, the Facebook API inspires rather than limits. Instead of sitting down and making a list of use cases that they wanted to prohibit, the Facebook developers most likely listed the different parts of their system and brainstormed how to expose them to developers. I’m sure that examples of possible applications were discussed, but the smartest move was recognizing that the truly valuable applications were the ones that Facebook itself hadn’t yet thought of.

When we work with clients on Facebook applications, one of the approaches we use, either internally or with the client, is to focus on a particular part of the API and brainstorm ways that it could be used for their application. Note that this wouldn’t work so well for an API like iTunes (”Let’s do something really unique with pause();!”) but it works quite well with the Facebook API (”What do feed items mean for a game?” “How can we use a profile action to encourage replay?” “How will users want to stay connected via the mobile API?”)

As the API has grown and thousands of apps have been released, best practices have emerged along with novel implementations that stretch the boundaries of the API and inspire developers to further explore what’s possible. At the same time, a developer community has built out documentation, frameworks, and guidelines that Facebook itself supports and encourages. As other networks release their own APIs or implementations of OpenSocial, it will be interesting to see which ones limit their developers and which ones take the less prescriptive approach and really foster creativity.

About three blocks from our house is an abandoned paint store. The parking lot is fenced off and overgrown with weeds. Its perimeter is littered with broken bottles and random trash. Last week, I saw a guy taking a piss there in broad daylight. It’s a blight in every sense of the word — even the building itself is a 50’s stucco monstrosity that replaced what was originally a tasteful early 1900’s combination of shops and apartments.

Land is valuable, so of course somebody owns this property. It was sold to 7 Hills, which planned to tear down the paint store and build something more in the original style of the neighborhood with a large storefront (Walgreens) at the street level and condos above. Through working with the neighbors, they spent a year or two refining the plan and agreeing to improve the surrounding sidewalks, plant trees, provide 24 hour security, and change their plans to improve traffic flow.

Of course, it’s San Francisco so no matter how liberal you are, there’s somebody who’s even further left. In this case, lots of people. The Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is a group whose agenda is to preserve/restore the affordability of the Mission District for the people who have historically lived there. A worthy goal, but sought in an entirely bizarre way. After the condo plan was approved by the Planning Commission, the MAC filed an appeal with the Board of Supervisors, claiming that the Environmental Impact Report had failed to take into account the social impacts that the new development would have.

There is some precedent for this. Apparently in an earlier decision, the Board overturned the Planning Commission’s approval of a project by saying that it would upset the social characteristics of the neighborhood. That decision, if it were allowed to be repeated, would set the precendent that every Planning Commission approval was subject to the Board’s opinion on social impacts, something clearly impossible to quantify.

Support was strong on both sides and not as racially divided as one might think. Arguments supporting the project:

• The site is a high crime area because it has been neglected
• The developer has worked with the community and made many concessions
• Nobody is being displaced — no housing units are being torn down
• The development exceeds the required number of below market rate (BMR) units
• There is no reasonable alternative being proposed

Arguments against the project:

• There are several Walgreens within spitting distance
• This is an opportunity to build a new Day Laborer center and 100% affordable housing
• Luxury condos do not belong in the Mission
• The plan is inconsistent with the city’s overall plan for the Eastern Neighborhoods

The last point in the arguments against was something I was not familiar with. Apparently the city is in the process of adopting an overall plan for neighborhoods such as ours, and apparently it involves lots and lots of low income housing. But it’s not formalized yet and I’d be surprised and terrified it meant that we could *only* build low income housing, so I fail to see its relevance.

Here’s something interesting though: Last year, the owners of the property said that they’d entertain any reasonable offer for someone else to buy the property and build an alternative project. The crux of the argument that the MAC was making was that they had the support to build a 100% affordable housing project, yet nobody was stepping up saying that they had the funds. And the owner of the property said they had received no reasonable offer. So I fail to see the relevance.

It was a tedious and tense Board of Supervisor’s meeting. I left work early to attend and got home around 11pm. Supporters on both sides were organizing community members as they arrived, giving out stickers in support of the project and arranging translators as necessary. There were a large overflow room where you could watch the debate and a play area set up for children.

Voting was postponed because public comment took so long. As I was sitting there watching this, I was both proud to live in San Francisco, where people are politically active and the process is so open, and embarassed. After all, anywhere else in the country, replacing a drug dealing corner with a 24-hour store, more lighting, and housing opportunities for middle income wage earners, would be a no brainer. In most places, the city government would probably kick in a few bucks to get a developer on the project. When I spoke, towards the end, I didn’t really add anything that hadn’t been said 100 times already — choose a Walgreens over an abandoned lot. For me, that’s all it came down to.

So two weeks later, the board meets again to vote. The rumor was that it was pretty close. In the blink of an eye though, it was over. Supervisor Ammiano (our district’s supervisor, who accepted the appeal) made an argument against the project, then another Supervisor (I forget who) called for a vote and it was over — by one vote, the project can proceed. I have to wonder what actually happened behind the scenes. I’m assuming that all the supervisors knew how all the other supervisors were going to vote ahead of time. The supervisors in that immediate area *had* to vote against the project or it would look like they didn’t care about the largest minority (majority?) population of their district. There was probably an element of “Let’s make sure this passes so it doesn’t set a precedent, but I’m going to vote against it.”

So that’s a little taste of San Francisco local politics. Hopefully it’s the last time I get involved.

We’ve been so busy building the new SpotDJ that we haven’t even blogged about it, but it’s a huge leap forward for us. We believe we’re the only Facebook app that lets you build a musical cupcake. You can quote me on that.

If you’re a Facebook user, Hear More about SpotDJ for Facebook here or if you’re not a Facebook user, check out our new site.

We were surprised how quickly people took to this feature. Even though you had to submit a form every single time just to get a new question, there were plenty of users who answered all the questions we had. A few people even took the questions and their answers and pasted them on their MySpace page or blog. At some point, I bought 10secondinterview.com (I think 30 Second was taken) and started to work on a standalone version — a simple widget you could create with these random questions to spice up your profile page. I didn’t have much time to work on the site, but when the Facebook API was announced, I knew exactly what I’d use to try it out.

The 10 Second Interview Facebook App was initially written in about half a day, though it borrows heavily on existing code from SpotDJ. At first, I just sent it to a few friends and posted it on my Facebook Profile, but within a day, I was seeing activity from people I had never heard of. Oddly, they seemed to be mostly Jewish, and mostly Canadian. Anyway, I had a lot of fun trying to follow the paths of who found the app from whose profile. In a few days, it had gone from zero to 80 or so users, and I had a script that would pull up every user’s Facebook profile so I could see who they were.

Then, suddenly, there were 400 users. It turned out that my submission to the Facebook app directory had been approved along with what was probably the first batch of non-Facebook-and-friends-of-Facebook apps to be listed. It’s now a few weeks later and 10 Second Interview is pushing 60,000 current users (with significantly more who have installed it at one time or another).

There are a lot of interesting stats I could gather about the app, though at the moment I’m a little scared to touch anything. I did, however, do some queries to determine what questions are receiving the most responses. Remember that questions are asked in random order, so not all users see all the questions. The most popular question was answered by 93% of the users who saw it.

Here are the top 5 questions by percentage of users who answered:

1. What’s your favorite kids’ cereal?
2. What should you really be doing right now?
3. Take whatever you want. Just don’t take my…
4. If you had a tattoo, what would it be?
5. What’s your favorite candy?

One thing that’s interesting to me is that people have said in the forums (and through messages directly to me) that they like the questions that are wacky, risque, or ask a this or that (Twizzlers or Red Vines? Mary Kate or Ashley?). Yet the ones that get the highest rate of response are pretty standard questions. It would be interesting to classify the different questions and see if the users are right — maybe people like the bizarre questions but they’re less likely to answer the same ones.

Here are the 5 least popular questions (all stats are as of last week). The least popular question had a 24% response rate:

1. What would your porn name be?
2. What’s your favorite 80’s band?
3. Who was your first crush?
4. One in the hand is worth two in the…
5. What flavor are you glad is not included in Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans?

Worth noting: The most recent response to the last question was “big foot’s dick flavour.”

There are a lot of features I’m hoping to implement if/when I have the time, and a lot of stats that I think would be really interesting to look at (for example, I have no idea who’s winning — Mary Kate or Ashley?). I hope to post more about 10Sec soon…

http://www.google.com/patents?id=F0R9AAAAEBAJ&dq=kleper&ie=ISO-8859-1

My favorite part of the patent application (which I didn’t write) was the sample chat between the WebTV co-founders, which includes this gem:

Bruce: This is the best movie of the [Star Wars] series.

Phil: Wait until the new ones come out. They’ll blow the first three away.

Steve: I think you’re oversimplifying the importance of the plot to the Star Wars Trilogy. What was gained by 20 years of special effects research? The rereleased versions are no better than the originals.

Other notable relics from a simpler time include the possibility that one day WebTV might operate over these newfangled ISDN lines that we’ll someday all have to our homes, and repeated explanations and definitions of the World Wide Web.

Ever listen to a song and realize that when you were a kid, you totally misinterpreted the lyrics? In 4th Grade, I was really into the Beastie Boys because my friend Arthur was really into the Beastie Boys. But rap was new to me, so I looked to Arthur to explain some of the finer points of the lyrics on Licensed to Ill. Almost every detail I remember of what he said was untrue in retrospect:

1. The Beastie Boys all live together in a house that they call “White Castle.” There were no White Castle restaurants in Upstate New York, so Arthur and I discussed the lyric and decided that it must be where they live. After all, they chill there because “it’s the best” (”It’s the New Style”). Unclear how we explained away the other lyric, “White Castle fries only come in one size” (”Slow and Low”). Perhaps we thought they were saying “White Castle flies! It comes in one size!” but that hardly makes sense either.

2. The Beastie Boys have a rivalry with The Monkees. Long before the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, references to pirate lore were lost on 4th graders. So, “Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones’ Locker” (”Rhymin’ and Stealin’”) could only mean one thing — The Beastie Boys were poking fun at a group of actors who played musicians on a 60’s TV show. We interpreted “locker” as a school locker, since we assumed the Beastie Boys were in high school. (random note of interest: I also attended a Monkees concert in 1986, so it’s possible that I convinced Arthur this was the case.)

3. Katherine is a girl at their school that they don’t like. This was simply a misheard lyric. We heard, “I got a lot of girlies and not one’s cattin’” (”Posse in Effect”) as “I got a lot of girlies and not one’s Katherine.” So the story we formed was that Katherine is kind of a dweeb and they’re bragging that they’ve had all these girls but have never had to stoop to Katherine’s level. I actually like our line better here. I still don’t know what “cattin’” means and sadly I’ve lost touch with Arthur so I can’t ask him to reinterpret.

4. “The New Style” is about game shows. I distinctly remember Arthur trying to convince me of this. We were on our bikes at the corner of Bay Colony Drive and Charter Oaks in Pittsford. I don’t remember how it came up, but Arthur referred to, “You know, that song about game shows.” “What song about game shows?” “The New Style. It’s all about game shows.” The root of this misconception was the line, “K-I-N-G-A-D whammy. All the fly ladies are on my jammy.” Of course, whammy was a reference to the show “Press Your Luck.” Somehow that was all we needed to be convinced that the entire song was about game shows. Incidentally, remember the line, “So I went into the locker room during classes. Went into your locker and I smashed your glasses”? We assumed that it was Davey Jones’ locker he went into and possibly Katherine’s glasses.

5. “Paul Revere” is the true story of how the Beastie Boys met. Why would you write a song about the members of your band meeting in the Old West and shooting up bars together unless it were true?

Despite the errors in our interpretation, we were right about a lot of things, too. “Brass Monkey” is about a drink that’ll fuck you up. If you don’t fight for it, you will actually lose your right to party. “Girls” is incredibly sexist, but intentionally so.

Coming next week: Arthur’s take on Peter Gabriel’s “So”.

Neither of these things make much sense to me. Computerworld said, “Jobs also confirmed that the iPhone is powered by Mac OS X, not a miniaturized version or a completely different operating system, as some had theorized earlier this year.” The fact that Jobs was specific enough to say that the iPhone did not run a “miniaturized” version of the OS is leading people to believe that just like the Apple TV, you’re a small hack and a recompile away from launching desktop apps. I don’t see how this can be true. There just can’t be enough horsepower in a handheld device to run full OS X, nor is there any reason to. Parts of the core OS with some stripped down APIs should be more economical and better meet the requirements.

I think it’s more likely that it runs a stripped down version of OS X but that Jobs either misspoke or was misquoted. Maybe he meant that it runs the full OS X kernel, or maybe he wanted to distance the iPhone OS from a Windows versus Windows CE/Windows Mobile comparison. If it is true, I think the iPhone has a poor chance at success. It’ll be slow, bloated, and will never come down in price.

Then there’s the thing with the API, the reason I claimed I wouldn’t buy one (though obviously I will — we all will. It’s the Jesus Phone). I think this was blown way out of proportion. Jobs said that there will be third party development, and all of a sudden everybody is saying that the main drawback of the iPhone has been removed. I still have my doubts. I didn’t see where he said that any third party could develop, nor did he say that full blown apps could be developed.

Apple’s original concern over third party apps was (supposedly) about security. So either Apple, responding to developer outrage, built, documented, and tested a full security layer for Cocoa (and Carbon?) in a few months, or they’re talking about something else. Most likely, for now “third party apps” is going to mean Dashboard widgets. They’re cool, but DHTML plus JavaScript (and whatever other hooks they provide) are unlikely to encourage developer creativity like full access to the OS would. Widgets won’t be able to integrate the dialer with your Yahoo! contacts, or provide synchronization with Linux. It’s a different class of API.

Anyway, we won’t have to wait long to either find out that either I’m an idiot (in which case, I’ll see you in line at a San Francisco AT&T store) or that Apple has to backpedal and redefine what “API” and “full Mac OS X” actually mean. WWDC starts on Monday. As a hedge, I’ve confirmed that I’m not under contract with Sprint.

Thanks anonymous sketchy friend who apparently uses torrents!

When I realized that it was in fact Marni who was injured, I ran up to her as fast as I could and said, “Marni?” She would later make fun of me for not saying something more sensible, like, “Are you okay?” Anyway, the paramedics asked me which hospital to take her to. I foolishly said, “Whatever’s closest” — big mistake.

The care she got at the San Mateo General Hospital was fine. In fact, the doctor was really nice and even though I had to wait forever to see her. Everything seemed to go okay after that. She had no major injuries and the other driver acknowledged he was at fault so his insurance covered everything.

In 2004, we bought a house. It turns out that buying a house gets you on the grid for all sorts of things. We were suddenly both summoned for jury duty, and Marni gets a bill from the San Mateo General Hospital marked 3 years past due! Of course, she immediately calls and says that she never got a bill (she didn’t — we’re certain of it) and that she needs her now-former insurance company to process it (in theory, the other party should pay, but I think we got a settlement check when it happened). The hospital billing department told her that she should pay half while she pursues the matter with her insurance — that way, it won’t go to collections. The next week, it went to collections.

For the next two years, Marni would battle the billing department of the San Mateo General Hospital to have the negative credit information removed from her credit report. It turned out that they never sent a bill in the first place — their records showed that it was billed to Marni’s insurance at the time but her insurance company sent letter after letter to San Mateo saying that they never received a bill. Marni tried disputing the negative items with the credit agencies, but they always came down on the side of the hospital. It was only by escalating, documenting every call, and getting the insurance company to talk to the hospital that she got anywhere. Somewhere in the mix, we also contacted the Better Business Bureau, and the State Attorney General’s office. And even once they acknowledged that “there was a substantial delay in billing the insurance” (3 years!), they only removed the negative item from 1 of her 3 credit reports. It would take another few months of calls to get it off the other two.

I’d like to think that this is a rare fluke occurrence, but it seems that hospitals are notoriously bad about billing and quick to send people to collections, even after telling them on the phone that it won’t happen. In fact, once everything was resolved, I was going to post the whole story to the FatWallet Finance Forum, but a quick search showed almost the exact same story posted several times about several different hospitals!

The lessons I’ve learned are:

• Check your credit report often. The hospital acted as though everything was fine and even said it was their mistake. They took our payment and still sent it to collections.
• Be extremely careful with hospital billing. When we saw the “documentation” they had regarding the incident, it was clear that their billing system was constructed in a bygone era of dot matrix printers and green monitors.
• Check all three reports. When the hospital finally agreed to correct their error, they initially only corrected one credit report.
• The credit agencies exist for the benefit of creditors, not you. They’d like you to think it’s easy to dispute an item — and it is! But they will rarely see the matter your way unless you escalate up the ladder.
• If a billing department agrees on a settlement of some kind (in our case, a temporary 50% payment while we contacted our insurance), get it in writing.
• Sadly, if I had it to do all over again, I would’ve just paid the bill and not bothered with the insurance. It was a few hundred dollars that they ended up paying, but it wasn’t worth the trouble by a long shot.

Unfortunately, Jessie’s favorite game, Am I Molting, or Am I Dead? ended fatally today when the tragic answer was: both. It seems Jessie molted and then decided that none of the four shells in his crabitat were a suitable new home for him. In desperation, he tried to go sans-shell, the kiss of death for a hermit crab. I found him this morning in an empty water dish — naked and possibly drunk. He was dead. Jessie was 2 years old.

Jessie and I had so much in common. He was like a younger me — quickly darting into his shell at the slightest sound and periodically shedding his exoskeleton. I know Jessie is in a better place now. Probably on a bed of coconut in heaven, with lots of caves to hide in. Jessie — I hope you find the perfect shell you were looking for.

I started watching Battlestar Galactica when I heard Kevin Smith list it as one of his DVD picks during his guest appearance on Ebert and Roeper last year. I immediately Netflix’d the first two seasons and found it to be pretty engrossing. Without a doubt, the appeal was in the mystery of the cylons — why are they so fucking evil? Why did they take human form? What’s this plan they keep talking about?

Season 3 pretty much sucks though. There’s really no more mystery. Sure, they’ve still got their plan, but everything went downhill when it was revealed that the cylons didn’t just look like humans, they acted like them — had disputes, made mistakes, etc. The mystery is gone and instead, we get entire episodes devoted to Apollo’s marital problems or the captain, who was recently shot in the heart, boxing against his son, who had recently dropped 30 pounds. I don’t care about any of that. Bring back the evil mysterious robot people!

Adam recently blogged about the apparent death of Starbuck, and gave several possible explanations for what might’ve happened. My reply was that she was clearly reaching for the manual eject lever as she steered her plane into the multicolored cloud vagina. I made sure that multicolored cloud vagina links to Adam’s blog so that even though my blog will be the top Google hit for multicolored cloud vagina, he has to live with the fact that he’s second.

Anyway, despite the rumor that Katee Sackhoff was booted off the show, I’m guessing that Starbuck isn’t dead. Not that I care, but I think we’ll continue to see lots more crappy episodes that continue the plotline of her drawing and having nightmares about a multicolored cloud vagina. Because anyone who’s seen the episode knows that’s what it is.

I’m not sure if I believe this though. During the keynote, Jobs said that the iPhone was running OS X. Nobody actually believed that it was the same OS X we run on desktop Macs, nor did we think that existing OS X apps would run on the iPhone, but it was clear that the OS had some tie to what we now know as OS X and this was somehow a feature. He also listed OS X technologies that continued to work on iPhone, including Cocoa. Cocoa is only a selling point in the context of third party applications. End users don’t care what framework Apple is using for the applications on a closed system!

Third party apps will make a huge difference on the iPhone and it’s a much bigger deal than the lack of third party apps on the iPod. On the iPod, everything has always been secondary to playing media. The iPod is a media playback device. The iPhone is being pitched as a do-everything communications device — the only thing you need to carry around. To be locked into the set of functionality that Apple provides would be extremely limiting. I couldn’t run a third party tool that syncs my iPhone calendar with my Google Calendar wirelessly. I couldn’t install a simple ssh client. The more I think about the different apps that I’m likely to want and Apple is unlikely to provide, the more convinced I am that there must be a developer SDK that just hasn’t been announced yet.

Hell, even the piece of crap phone I have now, which is 3 years old and gets laughed at when I bring it to the Sprint store can run Java apps. I can replace my web browser and install third party apps that are mostly lame, but contain actual functionality.

This must be more misdirection so that Apple can announce third party apps with great fanfare later on. They’ll probably bring out the ComicLife developers at some Apple event in a few months, who will tell us all how easy it was to port their Cocoa-based app to iPhone. Then we’ll get a flashy demo where ComicLife Mobile pulls photos directly from the iPhone’s camera and sends them to your contacts.

At a high level, Palore is a browser extension (currently supports IE and Firefox, but only on Windows) that provides contextual information about businesses. More specifically, the two main features that Palore currently offers are:

• Click on a business phone number to instantly see related Yelp reviews.
• Click on a business phone number to instantly place a free VOIP call.

As a Yelp user (which is why Palore originally contacted me), I find the first feature very compelling. When I’m making a reservation, I typically have OpenTable, Yelp, Google Maps, and sometimes SF MenuPages all open. With Palore, regardless of how I find the restaurant, I can get the Yelp info on the same page right away. Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to get content from all of those sites.

From a technical point of view, I’m intrigued by the concept of using a phone number as a unique identifier for a business. If Palore ever opens up and API (palortlets?), I can see people integrating all sorts of business-related content into the Palore window — Better Business Bureau alerts, coupons, photo of the storefront, etc. And taking that a step further, I wonder what other data on a typical web page could be treated as an ID. If Palore was able to recognize that klep was a username on Yelp, maybe it could tie that to my blog, my SpotDJ page, my MySpace page (no, I don’t have one), and other sites where I use the same username. So instead of seeing a bubble of info about a business, I’d see info about a person. Obviously, overlap in usernames would be a problem but if done right, it could help tie together all these disparate social networks.

Palore is also (like everybody else) trying to get distribution through blogs. They’re going to offer the ability to post a customized version of Palore on your blog or web page that will highlight your reviews. So if you install the Klep version of Palore, you’ll tend to see my reviews above other people’s. I’m personally not super interested in promoting my own reviews, but I can see the appeal here for people who spend a lot of time on Yelp. Speaking of which, a Klep version of Palore should be ready soon and I’ll be posting it here.

Disclaimer: Like I said, they offered me a Starbucks Gift Card to try out Palore and give them some feedback. But I have no problem accepting gifts (hear that, Microsoft and AMD? Send me a laptop!) so if I thought Palore sucked, I would still say so.

Despite being in total awe of everyone at Artemis, I took the job with Be, probably because I was so star-struck with both companies that I just wanted to start ASAP with whomever called me back first. Be was a great gig while it lasted — I learned basic network programming from filesystem guru Dominic Giampaolo (now at Apple) and helped design the first Be web site (which is why Be founder and former Apple exec Jean Louis-Gassee would always say, “Ah, ze web-master!” when he saw me). Maybe I’ll talk about Be some other time though — this is really about the job I *didn’t* take.

Even though I passed on the Artemis Research job (which, now that I think about it, was basically some rudimentary QA work), I continued to be interested in the company. A few years later, they were bought out by Microsoft and I took it as an opportunity to do the requisite Stanford Microsoft internship without really working for Microsoft.

Interning at WebTV was great. There must’ve been around 20 interns in what was still a fairly small division of Microsoft. I sat in the Intern Bunker, sharing space with a bunch of other college-age engineers. Like everyone else, we had TV’s on our desks with a link to the WebTV cable system. So whether we were watching HBO or the WebTV Usability Labs channel, the opportunities to goof off abounded. We also got to work on real features that were destined to ship some day. I was the lead (only) engineer on TV Chat, which let you have an IRC chat about a TV show with other people who were watching that show. It never actually shipped, but it was fun nonetheless.

Part of the way through the summer, one of the other interns told everyone that it was traditional for Bill Gates to have all of the Microsoft summer interns over to his house for a BBQ. In prior years, Microsoft probably didn’t have many interns (if any at all) in the Bay Area, so the “come to Bill’s house” program was likely designed to only accommodate Redmond-based interns. But we were a vocal group, and we all petulantly demanded that we be included in this essential part of our Microsoft experience. Someone pulled some strings, and pretty soon, the entire intern group of WebTV, plus our managers, were on a plane to Seattle.

The BBQ at Bill’s was a pretty ho-hum affair. Bill’s house was on a lake, and we managed to convince Charlie (a freshman intern) that the ducks were actually robots with video cameras to watch the guests. Supposedly, someone overheard Bill asking his assistant, “What are all these WebTV people doing here?”

Personally, I had contempt for Microsoft at the time, even though I loved WebTV. I was still an Apple guy, and when we had assembled in the hotel prior to leaving for Bill’s house, I came downstairs with my Apple t-shirt. My manager asked that I at least cover it up. So I threw on a flannel shirt, which I promptly removed upon arriving at the Gates Mansion.

I don’t think Bill Gates was there for the entire BBQ, but when he was there, he was surrounded by a swarm of interns. I had no interest in listening to what he had to say, but towards the end of the evening, my fellow WebTV intern Ashley suddenly ran up to me and said, “Someone asked him about Apple! Come listen!” So Ashley grabbed my arm and flung me into the intern swarm. I found myself in front of all the other interns, face to face with Gates, who, I swear, looked right at me, looked down at my Apple t-shirt, and took a half-step back.

His answer to the “What will happen to Apple?” question wasn’t very interesting. I think he said that they’d never have a substantial market share but would continue to innovate and be successful in niche markets like design. I didn’t really care about his answer — I was just happy to leave Seattle with a mildly embellished story about wearing an Apple shirt at Bill Gates’ house.

A month or two later, all the interns got invited to another party. This time, it was at WebTV founder Phil Goldman’s house. Phil was, at the time, WebTV’s VP of Engineering. He was largely responsible for all the senseless fun we had as interns, and also largely responsible for making WebTV so much fun in general. From the moment we arrived at his house for the party, it was clear that he had two goals — Make sure that everyone felt at home, and make sure that he out-did Bill Gates in every possible way.

I have much more vivid memories of the party at Phil’s place than I do of the party at Bill’s place. Phil had this incredible rock swimming pool in his backyard and the interns all frolicked in the pool while the managers mostly sat around making fun of us. There was good food, and plenty of WebTV branded schwag. I recall a WebTV towel and I think some WebTV chapstick (or possibly WebTV sunblock).

The best gift of all though was the t-shirts we got, which we were told to shut the hell up about if anybody ever asked. On the front, the question, “Party at Bill’s Place or Phil’s Place?” On the back, “Phil’s Place”. I think we all unanomously agreed that Phil could throw a better party and we wore the t-shirts with pride.

Sadly, Phil passed away a few years later. He was only 39 and, as I recall, kept himself pretty healthy. My t-shirt is kind of ratty now, but so is my Apple shirt and I still wear that. Whenever I wear the “Phil’s Place” shirt, I think about how Phil won us over so easily by being welcoming and fun. I really miss all the folks from WebTV — they were a talented and entertaining bunch, who continue to do good work at companies like Danger.

Generally, I’d start with one of the Macromedia examples and make a bunch of changes so that the app would do what I wanted. But it always seemed like at some point, it would just stop working. The app would successfully connect to the Flash Media Server and would appear to start recording, but no Microphone access alert would appear on the client side and no stream would start on the server side.

Eventually, I made my changes one at a time and tested the app after each change. I was stunned to find that resizing the Flash app to my desired dimensions was causing it to fail in accessing the microphone! It turns out that Microphone.get() requires a stage size of a least 215×138 pixels!. Of course, now that I know what the problem was, it’s easy to find where this is documented:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/action_scripts/actionscript_dictionary/actionscript_dictionary482.html

But still, it was pretty frustrating that there was no visible error (at least that I could see — I’m new to flash) and the restriction seems pretty arbitrary. I realize that Flash needs to show the security alert, but can’t flash just pop up new windows?

Anyway, I hope this saves some else some time…