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Back in early 2007, I was itching for a way to automatically tweet links to my photos on Flickr.

A few months later, Dave Winer wrote a web service called Flickr-to-Twitter. Dave was nice enough to give me access back then and I wrote about it at the time. And for the past two years, that’s how I’ve been posting flickr links to Twitter for the most part.

Since then a number of 3rd party apps have emerged to post photo links on Twitter. Many of them are fantastic. Simple & fast.

Earlier this week, Flickr announced that they had officially integrated with Twitter. It provides much of the same functionality as Dave’s original application with some additional bells & whistles.

It’s terrific that Yahoo built this into Flickr. It will help many users tie together two great products in a simple way.

But right now I’d like to say thanks to Dave for building his app. I appreciated it then and I appreciate it now.

Our portfolio company OMGPOP develops real time, social games. Their most recent game Hover Kart is off to a great start with well over 1million game plays in just over a week. Hover Kart is also integrated with OMGPOP’s Store where users can purchase virtual goods.

Today, Mashable wrote about Ford sponsoring Hover Kart in a very clever way. Using the “Konami Code”, players unlock a virtual Ford Fiesta car in Hover Kart that comes along with a bunch of special features.

Check out the full story on Mashable which also includes a video of a Ford Fiesta team member at the OMGPOP’s office in New York City.

Well done.

In our industry, we often hear people look down on “me-too” companies. I think it’s often misused.

Typically, the “me too” label is used to describe a company going after a highly competitive space with what appears to be a very similar product.

It’s easy to dismiss any new music service or a new social net or perhaps a personal financial web service. Don’t we have enough of these things already?

Last week Don Dodge published a post “Why do Fast Followers often beat the First Mover Innovators”. In addition to all the examples that Don shared there are many more.

Consider Guitar Freaks that came out in 1998. Here’s a  Guitar Freaks video on YouTube. You can see that it had influence on the widely successful Guitar Hero. But I don’t consider Guitar Hero to be a me-too game. They innovated in some big & important ways.

I think there are many people that have never been an entrepreneur (or a VC) that are too quick to judge. They don’t appreciate how these things are different.

Don’t get me wrong. We look for ideas that are disruptive and completely original. And you can’t say enough about the importance of execution.

And yes, there are plenty of clones out there. Those aren’t interesting to me. And I’m also not interested backing entpreneurs that lack a unique vision and hangs to the mantra “hey, the market opportunity is huge and there will be multiple winners!”.

That ain’t enough.

But I’m not going to paint startups innovating in highly competitive markets with crazy/daring/brilliant/audacious ideas with a simple, broad brush and call them all me-too.

Last night I participated in What’s Next in Tech which was led by Scott Kirsner and held at Boston University. I was on the VC panel with Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst and Michael Greeley from Flybridge.

Few thoughts from last night:

-Scott started the evening session by asking the audience if they are generally optimistic or pessimistic about what’s next in technology & opportunity. I think every single person raised their hands and said they were optimistic.

-I thought we had a nice discussion about exciting opportunities in technology and the concerns we have. In some cases we have similar interests & concerns but it was also clear that our firms also see the world & opportunity differently from one another. That isnt’ a bad thing.

-There were a number of questions about seed capital availability. I mentioned our involvement in TechStars Boston and Start@Spark. I’m really excited about both programs.

-We had a monitor on stage and were able to see Tweets tagged #whatsnext09. I thought it was great that Scott took some questions from those tweets as well.

-Scott asked the VCs if we had any questions for our fellow panelists. Neil asked outloud how I could be a Yankees fan. That got the home crowd grumbling and hissing a bit. Thanks Neil :)

-Yesterday, the news buzzing on twitter was the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Scott jokingly asked me if celebrity obits was the future business model of Twitter.

-Offline, someone asked me if we would consider making investments in applications & services built on top of Twitter or would we avoid it because “we already made an investment in the category”. That’s a very good question. I am very interested in applications and services built on top of the Twitter platform. I think there are lots of opportunities and I’m seeing some interesting companies use the Twitter API for media sharing, enterprise, payments, gaming, affinities, sports, marketing, tech support, content aggregation….the list goes on. Having said that, I wouldn’t invest in a company that is a direct or likely Twitter competitor for obvious reasons.

I was a bit tired after a long day in New York City earlier in the day and I hope it didn’t show. Thanks to everyone that participated and thanks Scott for inviting me.

(photo courtesy of Steve Garfield).

There is an event happening right now in San Francisco. It’s the Boxee SF meetup and you can watch it live here. The NYC Boxee meetup attracted nearly 800 people. It will be interesting to see how many people show up in SF.

There are a number of things planned for tonight. Here are a few of them.

Boxee App Store

Avner and the Boxee team are going to share a bunch of things at the meetup including the results of the Boxee Dev Challenge. The apps from the developer community have been incredible.

Boxee does Windows

To date, Boxee has been available for Linux and MacOS users. Tonight the Windows release goes into public alpha as well. From now on the Mac, Linux and Windows version should remain in sync. Thats good news for many Window users that have been waiting to try out Boxee.

MLB

After the last board meeting, Avner showed me a version of MLB.TV Premium running on Boxee that they were working on. Tonight, thanks to a partnership with MLB, Boxee users can watch thousands of baseball games live and in HD along with DVR functionality and in game highlights. That is very cool - especially for someone like me (yankee fan living in boston!).

Tumblr.

I love this one. You can stream music and watch photos from the people you follow on Tumblr on Boxee. Tumblr on the big screen…oh yeah!

The Boxee team (around 10 employees) have been working like crazy to get this release out the door. I’m blown away with their talent, ambition & drive.

Nicely done!

(update: TechCrunch covers the update as well here)

Earlier this evening I read a bunch of online news from traditional newspapers.

Here’s what I read:

1. Start-ups stifled by noncompetes, Boston Globe

2. Investors Bet on Payments via Cellphone, NYT

3. Digg Brainstorming new communication tools for users, LA Times

4. iPhone Upgrades could hurt some applications, SFGate

One thing stuck out in every case and it really surprised me.

Not one of those stories linked out to an external site. Some of them had links to internal pages but nothing external.

I have noticed the NYT will include external links in their “blog” section (good example on this recent post about PayPal). Not sure i understand the difference.

Much has been written about the future of newspapers.

One thing is for sure: online news requires links.

I bought the very first first iPhone when it came out a few years ago. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to give it a run.

It didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get over the lack of 3g, lack of MS Exchange support, lack of apps (no app store in those days), no copy & paste, no email search, poor battery, and an odd headphone jack connector. I wanted it to work for me. It was so frustrating.

I went back to my trusty blackberry curve.

Then the iPhone 3g came out and promised a lot. It came with an App Store, 3g speeds and MS Exchange support. My friend Nabeel and I got up early and bought that phone on opening day.

I lived with that phone for a few months but slowly found myself carrying around two devices. iPhone and Blackberry. I still couldn’t get over the frequently slow/delay keyboard bug, lack of copy & paste, lack of search, slow processor, poor camera & poor battery life.

Then i dumped the iPhone altogether and just used the Blackberry. I couldn’t take the iPhone shortcomings and carrying two phones isn’t my thing.

When a friend helped me install an early beta of iPhone OS 3.0 OS I knew that things were getting better. At last we had search & copy/paste. Yes!

On Friday, I received the iPhone 3gs. I’m still in the honeymoon phase but this thing is fantastic. Better battery, plus it’s fast. I did a web browsing speed test with my colleague Rob Go who has the previous 3g model. The 3gs blew him away.

The OS is smooth. Copy & paste and search are lighting quick. I can type really fast. The camera is excellent and I’m already having a ball with video recording.

I have had a love/hate relationship with the iPhone over the years. But I’m back and this is the phone I’ve been waiting for.

I didn’t make it to the 140 conference. I caught pieces of the of the various sessions on Twitter and various blogs.

I wish I could have been there for the Ann Currie session. I heard it was quite interesting.

Fred discussed the power of passed links at the conference and how services like Facebook and Twitter are driving more traffic than ever to various websites. I’ve been hearing about this from our various portfolio companies as well as larger companies too.

And while I do check out my Tumblarity score (today is 480 btw), I don’t check Google analytics too often for this blog.

But I checked it out today. Here’s where the traffic is coming from:

For the last few months, Twitter has been driving more traffic to this blog than Google.

Another thing to point out is Tumblr. Tumblr has been growing significantly. According to Quantcast the Tumblr network is now a Top 200 site.

Reblogging on Tumblr is definately contributing to this high referral rate.

I am surprised that Google is so low. Maybe I need to come up with better titles to my posts!