Month: January 2009

I’m seeing a lot of tweets about the new version of twirl. It sounds very promising. Some people say its the best way to use twitter while tweetdeck loyalists don’t agree.

As I look at my friends tweets I see a wide range of applications. As the time of this post, amongst my friends last 20 tweets in my timeline, I see twitterberry, twitterfon, twitterfeed, tweetie, web, txt, twhirl, tweetdeck, twitteriffic, tweetree and power twitter.

My personal favorite turns out to be sms.

Its clear to me after using twitter for the past 20 months or so that there isn’t anything that can be defined as the best way to twitter.

And that makes me pretty happy actually.

I’m glad there are so many choices for twitter users – because clearly one size does not fit all.

You can find me twittering away @bijan

Last night I read on news.yc that Paul and Jessica from ycombinator are moving to Palo Alto full time. As many of you know Y Combinator is a seed program investing in early stage companies in Cambridge and the bay area. (We are investors in one YC company – iminlikewithyou.com. And I’m a big fan of other yc companies like disqus and dropbox.

Paul and Jessica are moving for family reasons. They are expecting the arrival of their new first baby. First and foremost, I want to with them congrats and best wishes. That’s wonderful news and I’m happy for them.

I know what its like to move cross country for family reasons. My wife and I moved the opposite direction. After nearly 10years in the bay area we moved to the boston area in 2001. For a variety of reasons we wanted to be closer to our family.

On a professional note, this yc move is a loss to the northeast startup ecosystem. Its especially significant in the current market as many angel investors locally aren’t as active as they were in 05-08 due to the recession.

I very much believe in this northeast region (I include nyc when I say northeast). We’ve made 13 investments in the northeast and will continue to do more here. But as a tech community, we need more early stage efforts. We need to do more for our ecosystem.

I’m going to miss yc cambridge. You definately left a mark.

(Disclaimer: I wrote this post on my blackberry so excuse typos and lack of links)

I had lunch with a good friend of mine last week. He’s working on a very interesting product and seems possessed by its possiblities.

But he’s stuck on something. He’s stuck on what to name the product. Something easy to spell. Something memorable. Something serious but not too serious. Many of you have gone through this exercise. It ain’t easy.

At the end of the day the question is whether any of this really matters. Maybe all thats needed is just a great product and the name is less important?

After thinking about it more I dont’ think that is the case. Just for a moment consider the product names at Apple. Do you think those names matter?

I think choosing your product name is crucial. And it’s not just the name, consider it the starting point of the soul of your product.

I remember when I first met Biz Stone, one of the Twitter cofounders, he told me that Twitter wasn’t their initial name for the product idea. The core idea that your phone would let out a short “chirp” drove their naming decision. They started riffing on names like jitter, twitch, twitter, etc. Ultimately they fell in love with the name Twitter but it wasnt available at the time. So they created the initial site at Twttr.com to move foward before buying the vowels later.

I think great companies are passionate about everything they do. And it all starts with their name. Don’t give up on it. Make sure you love it.