The SoCal Tech Group was put together roughly two years ago by me and a few of my buddies from PhatNoise. Its mission is to help connect technical folks in the Southern California area with each other and the venture community. I am a big believer in entrepreneurship and in LA.

I remember from PhatNoise’s early days just how many times I was traipsing to the Bay Area with pitch in hand, only returning with serious doubts as to why exactly why the company remained in LA. It was NOT an asset to be in LA: all the good developers move to SF (so I was told), and being an LA startup gave most folks in Nor Cal the vibe of a slightly sleazy Hollywood party. On many, many occasions did I consider returning to the Bay Area — it’s where I grew up, after all.

In the end, for PhatNoise, being in LA did have its advantages; we had both automotive companies and the port of Long Beach nearby, which is a great asset in the hardware business.

But I also knew why I personally wanted to continue to be in LA. First, it’s a dynamic and massive city. It is a mashup of cultures and industries, all lying on top of each other. It’s also a very creative city – the arts scene here is incredible. This is a place where, on a daily basis, you’ll likely be healthily confronted by many opposing opinions, something unfortunately missing in most Bay Area circles.

Second, the academic pedigree of Southern California seems to be under appreciated. While certain communities in the US are synonymous with higher education, SoCal can’t shake its sunny reputation. But the fact is LA has been home to some of the most influential people in technology. You can start with the legendary physicist Richard Feynman at Caltech, or maybe the more recent computer science greats such as Leonard Kleinrock and Judea Pearl (both from UCLA). The founders of both Blizzard entertainment and Broadcom were UCLA students, and Andrew Viterbi – the father of modern cellular communications – went to USC. Goto.com, from Pasadena, was the first to develop a search advertising business model. The communications systems responsible for letting the Mars rovers talk to earth were designed by a good friend and classmate of mine.

But the physical scale of LA is a challenge. You don’t have the serendipitous run-ins that frequent many SF or Palo Alto startups. You can’t get an impromptu gathering of people at a coffee shop quite as easily as in other locales. So the community, in my opinion, remains fragmented and not interwoven with the city they live in.

So this posed a challenge to STG as well – how can the group break this habit of forming disconnected communities in LA? The answer would lie in social media.

When we started, socaltechgroup.com was largely brochure-ware. A set of static pages with little call to action, and since all of us founders has such busy lives, we were not able to devote much time to make the site more effective. Well, starting in the fall of 2008, I started from scratch with Wordpress as a foundation. I made pages for each of the consulting members. I made articles about the group and any events we were doing. I created Facebook and Linked In groups. I installed all the standard analytic and SEO tools for Wordpress. In short, I made ourselves known – and as a result, we have tripled our membership in just four months. We’ve been able to make great relationships, and we’ve started to help out the community by helping market events like Startonomics.

This is where I see a very practical future of the web: maybe just like in Blade Runner, Los Angeles is a look towards the city of tomorrow. A place where we live in such close quarters, yet we don’t interact. We crash, but we don’t connect. The web may be the connective tissue of people, serving groups as niche as startup entrepreneurs or as broad as entire societies. It is less about mimicking the offline world, and more about bringing people and ideas together. Regardless, this is just the beginning, and I am proud to be part of an effort that is working on this right now, and right in my backyard.

I have long admired how folks working in artistic or design fields have been able to neatly wrap up their work in largely a visual format — whether it be old school vellum and paper, or the latest 3D visualization tools.  After many years hanging with my sister in architecture studios and witnessing this firsthand, I have thought about doing the same with my own stuff.

Well, turns out it is not so easy…if you are an engineer / software developer / even product designer, it seems like your work output is not easily archived; screw the work flow, even the process of working is hard to archive.  For example, if you write software, one could argue that archiving it is simply a matter of source control.  You would have all the changes to the source, and build scripts to try out the final thing.  But what if the code doesn’t really work — like it crashes before it gives any sort of indication that it did something?  And what about the thought process that got you there, is that captured in your source?  Also, who is the intended audience?  What if there are really interesting ideas in your project, but your audience doesn’t understand the language it is written in?  I guess the question is really how much more work do I have to do for all this to be reasonably archived by me for others?

Well, I thought I would tackle an easier task — archiving technical papers I have written.  It’s a paper, what’s hard about that?  Well, like many technical papers, I wrote mine using the fantastic LaTex markup language.  Really one of the first widely used markup languages, LaTex is extremely powerful, produces beautiful photo-ready output, and dutifully follows the “separate the content from the design” ethos.  Any because it is a markup language, the LaTex community has made a number of LaTex output converters: HTML, PDF, etc.  However, it really hasn’t been maintained — this HTML converter has a last revision of 2001.  How about LaTex to Wordpress?  Not a chance. *

But more to the point, why do I think publishing my work via this blog is the right way to archive it?  Well, blogs get searched, and blogs get linked to, and blogs get syndicated to you, the reader.  This means your new document storage and retrieval system is a web search.  And if my blog page goes down for good?  Well the contents of this site are frequently archived duplicated by crawlers.  This may be an obvious point to some, but if I don’t do this, my published work will fall victim to the one-way black hole of “academic portals”.

Go ahead, search for one of my papers using google scholar.  Just try to find a full copy of it without opening your wallet.  That’s right, IEEE, ACM and most others charge to gain access past the abstract.  I have nothing against these associations helping offset costs, but putting a fortress around the information seems to work against the whole academic process, right?

So on this site I’ll post abstracts, links to full PDFs (that I host), as well as upload the contents to services like scribd.  I’ll try to give an introduction for each, to give the content a broader audience, so please give them a gander.  But regardless — copy away, Intertubes, copy away…

* I would like to give props to this great LaTex-Wordpress resource page, which allowed me to put at least a few equations (but not entire document conversions) quite easily inside posts.

Image from this fellow’s impressive record archive

He’s already made me a very proud dad…here’s to you kid!

It’s ICQ all over again

Making a communication service profitable is not for the faint of heart – direct response advertising in such a social medium performs poorly, and charging for the service generally only works when you can be cheaper than the alternatives. Most importantly, a communication service won’t have a chance surviving unless there are just gobs of users. So why a new service comes along and tries to build a closed system, preventing it from attracting users in every way possible, is beyond me.

Twitter is the ICQ of this decade, folks: a great communications idea that doesn’t make money and doesn’t work very often. And both Twitter and ICQ have chosen to be closed. When ICQ gained enough attention, it begat competitors like Yahoo! and MSN to make their own (closed) IM systems. “Hey I’m on AIM! Oh noes, I’m on MSN! Guess I have to make an AIM account and run both!” Retarded, yes? So how is this different from “follow me on twitter – no wait screw twitter, follow me on plurk!”

So I want to expand my previous plea of making parts of twitter open source: not only is it the best way to build a scalable service, but it allows twitter and its competitors to focus on how well it designs a service for its users. There is nothing sad or unfair to twitter about this; they are toast if they don’t do it.

The Conversation has started

First off, go read Eran Hammer-Lahav’s great set of posts on the topic. I agree with both Eran and Scott Hanselman that the computational challenges may be alleviated by focusing on smarter clients and a more sophisticated API. If I blog and produce a piece of XML, and your reader pulls that XML on demand, then the information is simply duplicated. Is there a role for a centralized server? Well, you could build an email gateway (you email your blog, and it can email you updates of what you follow), an SMS gateway (that you may have to charge for), gateways to other protocols, and of course you can build a web-store of all this data. Maybe these are the things Twitter Inc. should focus on (still not sure it’s a business though).

While we are separating the science from the service, let’s ensure the marketplace is interoperable. So why can’t I follow bob@twitter while posting to dan@pownce? Maybe a URL is all that is needed to identify the user from the service.

Sometimes you have to open up to your hard problems

Lots of people are talking about this — I suggest you follow how the conversations progress.  My curiosity lies in what this has to do with open source and business.

Two proven capabilities of making any project open source is (1) if it is a worthwhile endeavor, you get really smart peer reviewers to help solve hard problems, and (2) it takes care of the not-profitable-but-necessary things like interoperability so that business can focus on how they bring value to their users. Open source has let products ranging from TiVos to iPhones focus on what consumers care about (which isn’t file systems and schedulers). Competing on uptime is no way to attract a mass audience, so why not let the fundamentals be a known problem and allow businesses to focus on building unique value? Let’s separate the service from the science.  As popular as Twitter is, it still is far from mainstream.  Twitter needs to cross the chasm, get people to understand the service, use it in as many ways as possible, build/support all the periphery services to it, sign carrier promo deals if they need to.  All of this is really hard work, and it is assumes the underlying mechanisms are in place and ready for the scale.  Once you have Skype-like numbers, then you can do some interesting brand advertising deals (”follow the new chevy on twitter!”).

A call to action

So this post is not much more than a call to action. I don’t know how to build the science and I am not interested in starting such a service — that’s up to all of you. But good business is always about learning from past mistakes, so let’s not let 10 years in Internet time obscure those lessons.

P.S.: I gotta plug Twoorl: Open source, nicely scalable, and written in a single day by an Erlang stud.

(Cat nap courtesy of a napping twitter image)

]]> http://dan.benyamin.org/2008/06/12/open-source-twitter-and-you/feed/ 0 http://dan.benyamin.org/2008/05/21/why-isnt-there-an-open-source-twitter/ http://dan.benyamin.org/2008/05/21/why-isnt-there-an-open-source-twitter/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 19:24:47 +0000 Dan http://dan.benyamin.org/?p=18 I am not a twitter user, as my stimulation / activity ratio is already waaay too high the way things stand, but I sure do get a lot of secondhand twitter smoke. Just wading through techmeme and techcrunch to find stories not about twitter being down is getting tiresome…

So why hasn’t someone developed an open source Twitter? It seems like a natural direction — twitter is a communications system, and a fairly generic one at that. A great idea (not sure if it is a great business), and one of the best ways its users can ensure its reliability and uptime is to reverse engineer it and license it under open terms. This would not only allow for a distributed system that would naturally scale, but would allow the protocol to be picked upon and augmented/improved as need be. Really a similar history to Gnutella – if Gnutella was kept under wraps there would be no way that it would power the majority of all P2P traffic on the web.

This is a short post and I’d love to do more research, but thought I would throw the question out. I won’t pretend to know the technical details of twitter, but I honestly can’t see any other viable outcome…

(Image courtesy of luc legay)

Something about the article really ticked me off, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it.  The article — a well-written and enjoyable read — is, after all, by a UC Berkeley professor of journalism.  Once taking it all in, including the magazine where it appeared, I realized what it really was: worthless.

Michael’s position is that true environmental change has to come from life style changes, starting from growing the food you eat in your backyard.  That’s ok, simple and harmless.  But it gets much worse.  Michael twists this argument into a diatribe on how society’s biggest ill is that we are all a bunch of specialists.  That is, most of us are only good at a couple of things, and not at all capable of living on our own skill base alone.  He thinks we should all become farmers, for example.

The rise of the specialist is as a result of predominantly cheap social networking — and that’s a good thing.

By networking not only do I mean telecommunications, but also roadways and the cars that drive on them.  And the postal system.  And broadcast media.  Oh, and dead tree publishing too.  This is the stuff of modern civilizations, and yes this is way better than when everyone hunted down for their food.  Where would the Prius that Michael drives come from other than supreme specialization on the part of Toyota’s engineers?  Innovation is driven by specialization, and I’m sorry but innovation is the planet’s best bet to minimize environmental effects.  And society is so tightly woven around the specialist that harping about eating radishes won’t have nearly as much effect on the world as good sound science.

Old media reinforces the echo chamber.

Michael is caught in the echo chamber, and old media — namely book and newspaper publishing — only reinforces the behavior.  And this is what bugged me the most: as much as his arguments are wrong (see above), no one would know about it.  In fact the last person to find out about the bubbly thought process is the author.  Even worse, with a badge like New York Times, its got to be right, right?

Now, echo chambers exist in lots of new fangled things too — Silicon Valley is notorious for being overly hype-stimulated.  But at least the thinking is out in the open, and the crowd course corrects rather quickly.  5-10 years between bubbles isn’t bad when old media takes (literally) generations.

Old Advertising hangs out with the same crew

Ok, maybe my last example is a bit self-indulgent, but it is hard to read Michael’s article about eco-friendly living when the print edition places this ad right next door:

Why bother? My point exactly.

After lots of searching found a theme I dig, though I have hacked it a bit so there are a bunch of unmerged changes.  Feel free to contact me or comment on this site…