After the past several weeks of having a greatly decreased number of friends on Facebook I’ve found that I am even more social than before on the site.

Instead of having to sift through upwards of a thousand news post each day in the feed I find that ten minutes of time will allow me to see everything that everyone has posted since the previous day and I can stay better connected to the people I truly care about on Facebook.

I’ve also imposed upon myself a 150 friend limit. I’m currently sitting at 150 friends with a few requests still pending.

If I want to approve some of the new requests then some of the old friends have to go.

I remove friends every once in a while with whom I truly am not communicating with. The people who don’t communicate with me or those that have been away for some time. I find that by removing them and then replacing them with someone new I get some fresh new perspectives as well as new content to look at.

I’m suggesting to anyone with a large number of friends that you simply begin cutting down your list with me.

Tell me below of your commitment to par down your friends list and maintain that limit. You will find your social experience on Facebook to have greatly improved.

The Only Sticker That Has EARNED A Spot on my Netbook

OpenDNS makes the Internet faster and safer.

I’ve been an OpenDNS user for quite some time and whenever I am talking to other startups, friends or family and they mention issues with the Internet I’ll steer them in the direction of OpenDNS. I’ve been word of mouth marketing these guys and gals for a while because what they offer is such a great service but I’ve finally decided to take a few minutes to share on my blog what exactly they do and why.

The thing that finally prompted me to write this blog was a call last night from a friend a few nights ago who has been fighting with Verizon about various problems with his Internet. He has been unable to reach a few websites the past few days by typing the domain but determined he could use the IP address to get to the site. It was a huge pain in the ass and I asked him open the DNS settings he has been using. He was using the default DNS servers that the Verizon guys installed for him. Ten minutes later we had him on OpenDNS and he was able to surf the sites he was attempting earlier perfectly. That prompted this blog entry.

For someone like myself who is often buying domains and then putting up sites OpenDNS has been a god send. Instead of updating the DNS on my domain, then waiting a good twelve hours before I can start actually developing on the site and seeing how it will turn out I update the DNS on my domain and use the OpenDNS cache system to instantly update my DNS and see the domain as it will appear to others who aren’t using OpenDNS in a few hours.

It makes me feel like I have a slight jump on everyone who is still using other DNS systems.

OpenDNS is great because I also use it at home to protect my computers. The phishing filters keep the bad guys out and I’ve noticed a nice uptick in speed since I switched our router over to OpenDNS at home.

While I’ve never had a problem with phishing because I always check URLs, and look for the warning signs the speed increase alone has been great. Telling my less savy friends to use OpenDNS and even setting it up for them has been great as well because it protects them and keeps them from calling me when something has gone horribly wrong due to a bad site.

Sure, I could run my own DNS server at home. I’ve done it before. I’ll even admit it wasn’t that much of a hassle but I’ve found I can just change a quick IP address on my router and get the same service from a group of people who are coming up with new and innovative ideas, and I’ve had zero downtime since I’ve made the switch so why bother.

I’m sick of ISPs with mismanaged and poorly run DNS servers. That is why I use OpenDNS and why the people around me use it as well.

Here is a small sneak peek…

Click To Enlarge

]]> http://rayangel.com/blog/in-my-spare-time/feed/ 0 http://rayangel.com/blog/share-invest-before-productmarket-fit-double-down-after/ http://rayangel.com/blog/share-invest-before-productmarket-fit-double-down-after/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:46:04 +0000 Ray http://rayangel.com/?p=332 Dave McClure makes a lot of interesting points in his piece MoneyBall for Startups: Invest BEFORE Product/Market Fit, Double-Down AFTER.

PRODUCT now typically means a website or service, run on low-/no-cost open source software, hosted in the cloud on low-cost servers, developed in a few months (or a WEEKEND!) by a small team of 1-5 developers, who continuously test & iterate in real-time with online customers.

MARKETing now typically means using a variety of online distribution channels via paid & organic search (SEM/SEO) on Google, viral/social amplification on new media platforms & social networks like Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube, and the quickly-growing mobile platforms of Apple iPhone & Google Android. With the exception of search, most of these distribution channels didn’t exist 5 years ago, yet they now easily reach over 100M-500M+ users, with very low cost and measurable marketing campaigns such that even a small team can reach billions of people globally.

REVENUE can now be collected easily via a variety of online payment, transactional e-commerce, digital goods, subscription billing, lead generation, CPM/CPC/CPA advertising. Many people buy things online now, and many companies are even bought for usage & users ahead of revenue. In other words: Brothers Are Gettin’ Paid, Yo. Cash Money, G. It’s aaaaalll goooooood, mah nizzle.

- Dave McClure

Real Life Ni Hao Stopper Screenshot

Spam in World of Warcraft is often not just a harmless message but a whisper that tricks many users in to visit scam sites where accounts get stolen or hacked.

Ni Hao Stopper blocks annoying gold selling spams, known scam sites and has a unique heuristics database that can actively block spam so you don’t see it.

My second World of Warcraft addon this one has been going for a few days and I’ve been spending a few minutes each night after I login to the World of Warcraft to get it updated with the latest information to keep users protected and stop them from getting annoying spam messages.

If you haven’t checked it out just yet head over to Curse and download it today.

Justin Rouch and I have been building Guild Press which is based on WordPress (open source software) and been preparing to launch a service based around the software.

When developing our service Guild Press we’ve been looking at the GPL very closely.

In this post I’ve gathered up some of the best points I’ve heard on the issue in to one spot.

The WordPress community is currently having a big debate over whether themes are considered derivative works of WordPress as per the GPL, the license used by WP.  The SFLChas previously declared that they consider the PHP code in WP themes a derivative work.  Other open source CMS software makers, such as Drupal, also consider themes derivative.

So, where do I stand as one of the primary copyright holders of WordPress?  I’d like to see the PHP parts of themes retain the GPL.  Aside from preserving the spirit of WordPress, respecting the open source ecosystem in which it thrives, and avoiding questionable legal ground, retaining the GPL is practical.

- Ryan Boren

Chris Pearson founded Thesis a few years ago and bucked the GPL license.  I listened to most of the interview and while Matt was defending the community and the platform Chris was constantly debating his revenue stream.  All I heard for most of the argument was what “I did”, who “I am”, etc.  And, in a bold statement, he claims to be one of the top three WordPress personalities.  I wholeheartedly disagree.  He has around 27k users – WordPress has 20m – that’s a stark minority.

- Mitch Canter

The long and short is that SFLC’s opinion could be applied to any software that runs on Linux.  Meaning you could never have a closed-source software product running on the linux kernel (“Oh, your code calls fork()? GPL!”).  It is commonly accepted that simply integrating with an existing product does not produce a derivative work.  If your code is totally your own, the GPL has no say over how you license it.

Per the GPL itself a derivative work is: “a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications” so you must copy actual lines of code from their source to be a derivative work. Simply calling WordPress functions doesn’t cut it.

My conclusion is that Thesis does contain GPL licensed code from WordPress.

So what does this mean?  I’d say it’s clear that Thesis uses GPL’ed code from WordPress and is therefore subject to the GPL as well. This makes the whole issue of whether “calling functions” or “running in memory with” requires the code to be subject to the GPL completely irrelevent.

As developers, it’s critical that you are very careful when using and re-selling code to follow the license agreements that we all adhere to.  Thesis clearly has a ways to go in this regard.

- Drew Blas

So now I want to know how you feel about the issue. Should themes that directly copy lines from WordPress be GPL.

Check out No Ports if you are mage on World of Warcraft.

I got sick of being asked to port people around to various cities. While I could just ignore the whisper I didn’t want WoW Instant Messenger even bringing up a whisper window. It annoys me.

So I created No Ports and now I’m releasing it to the world. All whispers asking for a port will simply never be delivered to you.

Want it? Head over here to get it: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/no-ports.aspx

Click To Enlarge

We believe this new call to action with a simple explanation on what we do can really help increase our engagement.

Have any thoughts?

I’ve done a lot of things on Facebook. I’ve tested new features before they’ve come out, I’ve had great chats with the engineering team at Facebook, taken part in a Facebook Hackathon, watched many Developer Garages and even created a company that made social games and applications that was later flipped.

All of these things have been great. They created an interesting problem for me however.

I reached the friends limit last year. 5,000 friends.

My solution at the time was to create a fan page. It sucked though because I didn’t want to ask my friends to become my fans. I didn’t have much of a choice at the time though.

I wanted to communicate new stuff, build lasting relationships and talk with everyone that I had talked with in the past. I realized eventually that a fan page wouldn’t let me keep connecting with the smaller social circle and the larger social circle I had at the same time effectively.

I eventually deleted the fan page. Then I went through and deleted a lot of people from my Facebook account. I didn’t want to offend anyone and I hated to do it but things were out of control.

Flash forward a few months and the same thing began to happen all over again. Facebook started getting out of control. This time for different reasons though.

My news feed was filling up with applications that I didn’t care about (I was hiding everything as fast as  I could), the experience was going down hill for me and I felt my self spending less time on Facebook and in some cases starting to lose touch with some of my closer friends and business contacts.

My inbox was full with messages on Facebook, my wall full of comments, my news feed filled with spam. So I created a new account and deleted the old one.

A very drastic measure by any standard but one I felt necessary. This time I’m only adding the people who are close business contacts or close personal friends. If someone searches me down and re-adds me I will do so for a while but for the most part I am treating my Facebook experience more like I would treat my LinkedIn experience and keeping my social circle smaller.

It has drawbacks such as the social graph not being quite as powerful for me on other social sites but for the most part over the course of the last week I’ve kept my friend count below a hundred and overall been much happier with my Facebook experience.

I know I’ve missed some great people, I know I’ve missed some great business contacts this way and I know that is a problem but I’ve been trying to re-find them or re-add them as I can but overall again I’m very happy with what I’ve done.

I’ve declared email bankruptcy many times in the past but this has to be the first and only time I’ve ever declared Facebook bankruptcy.