News of another photography app for the iPhone raising an insane $41M from the likes of Sequoia, Bain Capital and others quickly spread through the interwebs today and has lead to numerous people opine that we have officially entered another bubble.

From a cursory glance, this seems to be just another entry into the already crowded photo app market dominated by the likes of Instagram, Hipstamatic, etc. and its hard to believe that investors would seriously fund another startup in this space (especially the amounts that they have). I mean, no one would seriously throw in $41M for a social, mobile, local, photo-sharing app (as a mock slide of their pitch deck suggests) and say “Not since Google have we seen this.’ Could they??

Sounds absurd and was enough to get me to download the app. Having played around with it over a few minutes, I can see it has potential but certainly not enough to justify a $41M first round after just a few days of launch. The UI, while could use some work, loads seemlessly – images pop up on my iPhone almost instantly and before you realize it, you begin to feel a bit creepy spying on people’s photos. I spent a few minutes looking at the pictures people put up near me (however they define “near”) and even came across a fellow YCombinator mate (@chrysb), whom I havent spoken to in a few years which was kinda cool. The app has all the makings of what made Facebook successful – pure voyeuristic pleasure in browsing other people’s photos and seeing what they are doing at any given time. The difference is – you don’t necessarily know these people and the common bond is location. And it does that job pretty well. I can see this being useful at concerts, parades, revolutions, festivals, sports events, and the like as this grows. Does that warrant $41M? I don’t think so. Especially not without a clear revenue model (which might be present though not immediately apparent – local deals?).

However, given the founders are serial entrepreneurs with a great track record, it’s not a silly bet. In fact, just the mere fact that raising this much money has generated so much controversy, might help them get over the initial chicken-egg scenario required to make this succeed. Time will tell the fate of color.com.

Infographics are so hot lately!

Interesting to see how the demise started with their decision to use Google as the search engine.

Full Article On Techcrunch.

As we all scamper around for last minute costume ideas, here’s one that I think is pretty timely (and yes, dorky).

I have been experimenting with welcome emails on a web application I have been working on and the effect has been great. The idea is to have a very personal, friendly and welcoming email message that you send to all your users who sign up. I first experienced this when signing up for DivvyShot (now part of Facebook) and got an email from the founder, Sam Odeo. The email was short and very personal (and included his phone number at the bottom!):

Hi Nihaar Gupta,

First off: excuse me if I got your name wrong. I’m just guessing based on your email address.

I’m glad to see that you signed up for Divvyshot. I wanted to get your feedback about our site. Have suggestions? If you think you know what we should build next please add it to http://divvyshot.uservoice.com/. Did something break for you? We take problems with Divvyshot seriously. Please contact me directly with a description of what happened: sam@divvyshot.com.

You might also be interested in some cool stuff we’re working on:
- Drag-and-drop support: Did you know that Divvyshot is the first photo sharing company to support HTML5 drag-and-drop uploading? If you have Firefox 3.6 I’d recommend checking out this video: http://vimeo.com/9536311.
- iPhone App: Now you can take your Divvyshot photo library with you! You can even transfer thousands of photos by shaking two phones together. Learn more at http://vimeo.com/7193701.
- Windows Client: Want to sync your Divvyshot photo library with your computer? Sign up to test our Windows client here.

Thanks,

-s
_____________________________
Sam Odio, Founder
http://divvyshot.com/user/8/
Office: 866-999-8858
Cell: 703-725-6442

This little email had a long lasting impact on me, as it added a human element to my interaction with the product and built my confidence in it. I adopted a similar approach gently asking for feedback on the site. The result has been almost 20% of the users that do sign up end up replying back to the email with very insightful and encouraging comments. Some have led to longer lasting discussions as well. Certainly a great way to start meaningful conversations with your users.

• Readability - This gives a printer friendly look to any page you are on. Especially handy when I’m reading fantasy football articles at work and don’t want to to make it too obvious. Also great way to get rid of all those annoying flashy ads on the site.
• Bit.ly – Easily share any link to my social network (and be able to check out stats) with a click of a button (bit.ly account required).
• Press This – Being a wordpress blog, I am an avid user of their Press This bookmarklet that’s great for re-blogging. While its not the same ease of use as Posterous’s, it gets the job done (with a bit of manual tinkering).
• Kick Ass – Ever find yourself reading the Help section of a website and zoning out. This nifty bookmarklet turns any webpage into a game of Asteroids. You can blast images and ads on the page as you hover over them!
• MapThatPad – (Shameless plug!) We all know apartment hunting can be a chore. Keeping track of all those listings that you find online and where you are with each one in terms of following up can be a nightmare. The problem is even more pronounced when you are apartment hunting with someone else. MapThatPad helps you save listings on a map and allows you to collaborate effortlessly on your apartment hunt. This bookmarklet saves any craigslist listing easily – no sign up or set up required.

You’re not in Kansas any more – Google’s new name and logo.

xkcd – Not so much a joke as an awesome gimmick that caters well to its core readers

Google Translate For Animals – We can all be Dr. Dolittles now! (Great video in here)

MapThatPad Telepathic Helmets - MapThatPad introduces finding apartments without typing a key or moving a mouse!

YouTube - Watch any YouTube video in an ASCII rendition (TextP) and save Google $1/second in bandwidth costs.

Google’s latest foray into social media has caused quite a bit of buzz. Having played with it for the past couple days I thought I’d put my thoughts in writing.

Firstly, this is obviously Google’s attempt to get on the hyperlocal, micro-blogging bandwagon in the same vein as Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. Having said that, there a few things I like and dislike about the service.

I actually like the Gmail integration – its not very obtrusive and I find myself clicking on the Buzz tab several times a day while looking at my inbox. This is sure to get people participating (even those who never use Twitter or Foursquare but are on Gmail) I am also pretty impressed with the mobile integration within the google.com mobile site. The foursquare-esque ability to communicate my location (with a very accurate list of near by locations and businesses) is awesome – easy to use and nicely integrated with the iPhone experience since its there each time I open my browser. To make the experience tighter, they should also integrate it into the Maps application which I assume will be in the next iPhone OS version. Buzz also easily lets you pull data feeds from twitter, blogger, tumblr, etc which is nice and am hoping for a push service as well and integration with Facebook at some point.

Searching on buzz (in Gmail) is also pretty easy and well integrated. I can not only search my own buzz feed by the entire public feed without leaving my inbox!

I am also impressed by their roll out strategy and how they seeded the service. Seeding my followers with the most frequently used list of contacts and pulling other public data from GChat away messages and Google Reader comments is pretty cool. I am sure there are people for whom this backfired but I think overall this was a great way to “bootstrap” the service and get people participating before they participate.

I also glanced at the Buzz API that was released at the same time and love how open (read: anti-Facebook) it is. This will surely help in its adoption and scale as they are taking a paragraph right out of Twitter’s success story.

Now for things I don’t like about Buzz, and there aren’t too many. For starters the name could have been a bit more creative, but then again Google isn’t quite known for creative product names (Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Chat etc). It’s also a bit too tightly integrated with my online identity (being tied to my email account) which makes it difficult for businesses/startups to participate in it  – some of the heaviest users on Twitter. This would mean creating a common email account first for everyone in a business to access the service. Not a huge deal, but surely unnecessary.

All in all, I think its Google’s first great approach to social media. Let’s see if it fares better than OpenSocial.

Update: There’s been quite a lot of backlash lately on Buzz’s roll out and Google has made a public apology for all the privacy issues that occurred due to this roll out.

TimesSelect attracted about 210,000 subscribers who paid $49.95 a year but it was scrapped to take advantage of the boom in online advertising.

via New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.com.

Interestingly enough, I just visited Last.Fm as well and noticed the very same trend:

Music and personality: A fascinating study that looks at how you can judge a persons personality by his/her musical preference. According to this study, people were better judges of a person when listening to the type of music they liked than they were then they met the person briefly face-to-face. I wonder if this kind of information can be used by dating sites to better match personality types or look at someones changes in music preference over time and see how that maps to his/her personality changes. Last.fm provides an API to access this information so it is feasible to try it on yourself or people you have known for a while (who of course have been using Last.Fm for sometime). I imagine this data could get increasingly more interesting for research purposes as Last.Fm ages.

Website credibility: An old (dated 2001) but more relevant than ever study on what users perceive as being a credible website (the key components being trustworthiness & expertise). Recommend everyone working with websites of any kind to look at it if you haven’t already done so.

MapThatPad: Last but not least, a website that helps you with your apartment hunting process on Craigslist. This is pretty much what I wanted when I was searching for apartments a few months ago.