Month: August 2008

On Thursday, Y Combinator hosted their Demo Day. It’s the day that all of their startups that were recently funded come show what they have built over the last 2 months or so.

Scott Kirsner has a recap of the day and a quick summary of each company and a video as well.

Rather than offer my opinions on each company I came away with a few thoughts.

0. It was interesting to me that none of the companies were building facebook apps. I dont’ think the word myspace even came up. Several companies in the group were building stuff ontop of twitter including a news site. Real time news is perfect for Twitter and someone is going to crack that nut.

1. One of the companies is gunning for Tumblr. It’s called Posterous. I just don’t know how or why they could pick on something so cute.

2. The energy level in the group was amazing. THose entreprenuers were pumped. I found out that Paul Graham encourages each company to stop work for a week and practice, practice and practice their demo’s. It paid off.

3. Each demo/presentation was limited to 6-8 minutes. I loved that format.

4. Paul & Jessica are doing something important with Y Combinator and I’m glad they are doing it in Cambridge in addition to Mtn View. And I’m glad we are investors in IILWY which is a YC company. Our first one but probably not our last.

reblogged via staff:

We’re rolling out search across Tumblr, starting with individual tumblelog search.

You can check it out on our tumblelogs here:

• David’s Log
• Marco.org

Search boxes aren’t in any stock themes yet, but they’ll be included soon.

There’s still more to do. We’re not segmenting, so text without spaces between words (such as German compound words or most Japanese text) isn’t properly indexed yet. Advanced search operators (and, or, not, phrase) also aren’t supported yet.

And, of course, there’s much more we’re planning to do with this. Stay tuned.

Congrats guys. That was a lot of work and it looks great. Going to add it to my theme shortly!

If you want to give it a try grab the code here.

Om has a post today about needs of next generation of blogging services. He wants these services to evolve from publishing platforms to social services.

Om has it right when he says:

We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services. Facebook, for instance allows you to share photos, aggregate your digital droppings, share comments with friends and exchange messages, but it doesn’t give you a unique identity on the web. In contrast, blogs with social features could allow you to do exactly that.

I want my own unique identity online. I don’t want to be defined by Facebook.

Blogs will become social and evolve from a personal newspaper of sorts to a new thing all together. It’s a new category and that’s why we invested in Tumblr last year. In my (wildly biased opinion) Tumblr is the easiest to use.

And it’s the only one with the built in social features that I want  like reblogging, dashboard, notes, friend following).

reblogged via Tumblr staff:

We just pushed a few small updates to beta:

• You can now reblog any post as a Text post, Link, or Quote.
• If you prefer browsing Photo thumbnails in your Dashboard (or just need to be discreet at work), you can uncheck “Show full size photos” on your Preferences screen.
• Based on this clever Dashboard hack, nested blockquotes now get darker, making them easier to differentiate.

These are all great updates. The best for me is the ability to reblog any post as a text post or link or quote.

But my favorite update is coming very soon. Stay tuned :)