Snipperoo

A European Thing?

The widgetsphere looks strangely european.
Pageflakes out of Germany.
Netvibes out of France.
Snipperoo out of Britain.
Widgetoko out of Holland.
Oh, and PostApp out of the USA. The exception that proves the rule.
Go Europe!

right stuff, right place

Jay and I made up these cards to hand out and leave around at events. They sort of explain what Snipperoo is about in a few words.

Director of Evangelism and Customer Experience

DSC04344.JPG
Originally uploaded by ivanpope.

Steve and I started Webmedia, one of if not the first ever web site design and build companies. We were a good team as teams go, and as good teams go, we went. Our separate ways. For almost ten years. Then I asked Steve if he'd come and work with Snipperoo and, being a smart sort of guy who recognises something amazing when he sees it, he said yes. It's almost like remarrying your first wife. Almost.
We went to London for our first brainstorm and honest, Steve wasn't like this all the way through. He's just thinking. About me taking his photo.
Anyway, welcome on board Steve, look forward to doing some amazing stuff again.

Web 2.0 v. Web 1.0

What is the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0? I should know, because I was there for the whole of 1.0 and I'm back at the trough for 2.0. Some say this is a bubble like 1999. I say, they obviously weren't there, because this is so unlike '99 as to be a different world. But it's not just different in that we haven't got to the bubble yet. It just is different. Things have moved on and we understand this medium a whole lot better. There are real people in the hundreds of millions out there and loads of real businesses. It's not to say this isn't a great time to be in business, it is. In fact, it's better than last time round for lots of reasons. Here are some of them.

1. Children
In Web 1.0 nobody had children. Children didn't exist. Now, everyone has children and we talk about them all the time.

2. Suits
In Web 1.0 everybody wore suits. Now, no-one wears a suit. I took up suit wearing sometime in 1995 and didn't take it off again until I had no business to wear it to. This time round, I will not don a suit and I haven't met anyone else who will either.

3. Magazines
First time round, there were loads of new and buzzy magazines set on changing the world. They were designed just for our reading habits and we read them eagerly.Looking at the newsstand this morning I realised how irrelevant survivors Wired and Business 2.0 had become.

4. Books
There aren't any about 2.0. I guess they are being written, but during 1.0 new books were published every week with great titles like What Will Be and Making The Killer Application. We bought them all and fully intended to read them. During the lull (2000 to 2005) I went back and tried to read them, but they were all unreadable.

5. IPOs
There aren't any. In 1.0 bish, bash, bosh - there was an almighty IPO every week, almost every day. Everyone was expected to IPO on Nasdaq, even if they were a tiny french company with no revenues. Have you IPO'd yet? was the question you were most likely to be asked, even by people who had no idea what it meant.

6. Trade Shows
My experience of 1.0 was defined by the Internet World show and conference. I had a stand at the first UK Internet World and attended religilously every west coast and east coast show until 2000. I watched them explode in size until they threatened to take over the world. This time round, we have some excellent little conferences that aren't even conferences. I went to Internet World in London - the internet part had about ten stands.

7. Blogs
I think we've already forgotten what the world was like before there were blogs. From my perspective, last time round I never understood what VCs did or how they did it, let alone how they thought about the world. Now I read a huge variety of blogs and I get key insights into what everyone is doing. Last time round we blundered around in the dark. Blogs have opened our eyes.

8. Parties
It may just be that I'm ten years older and have two children and have moved out of London, but where are all the great parties?

9. Laptops
We all had them last time round, but they weren't really connected to anything. The number of times I went on a long business trip and never once managed to get my laptop connected to the net. I spent hours plugging into phone networks and signing up for local dial up services. This time, I arrive at my hotel, open the MacBook, and hey presto I'm connected without even plugging anything in. I never could have written this blog last time round.

10. Business plans
This time round I have yet to be offered a business plan on spec by a supposedly professional advisor. Last time, you could hardly go to a meeting without a plan being pulled from an inner pocket, or at least hearing a confession from the person you were meeting that they were 'working on a startup, you know, can I send you the plan'.

A Market

the market
Originally uploaded by ivanpope.

Hopefully Gnomedex will be a marketplace of ideas - among other stuff. I'm going here for lunch, oysters and chips. I haven't been to the States since I sold my last business in 2001. It's so great to be back, what a country. What potential. What fun.

Nabbr love us

And of course, we love them too.

Word spreads

I wish I could read this.

Sleepless in Seattle

It's six am. Flew in yesterday (last night?) to Seattle for Gnomedex, the conference that gets stranger the closer I get to it. People ask me what sort of conference it is, and I have no response. At US customs they asked me what I was in town for and I said 'conference' and they said 'Boeing' and (resisting the urge to be facetious) I said, nope, it's a strange little internet conference and everyone will be there. We don't make planes, but we do fly people around.
I'm going to blog Seattle and the event, so watch this space.

Widgetoko

A widget-y blog has popped up, giving more evidence that the time of the widget is upon us. They focus purely on 'site widgets' (which I think should be 'side-widgets'). Watch them for daily widgety goodness.

About Widgetoko

Widgetoko tracks new and popular site widgets. Delivered with a blog-a-liciously fresh flavour, for you to gobble down on a daily basis.

Site widgets… ?
Site widgets are pieces of code (often javascript) that you can include in your website, blog or Myspace/Friendster/TagWorld/etc. profile. They can give your visitors something cool to look at, and even make you some cash. Check out the archives for some examples.

Stats pr0n and datacenter woes

Because I've started to log issues like HDD temperature and SMART status, along with various port-sentry traps and all sorts of other things, I thought it was time to get a good overview of exactly what's happening with the Snipperoo server.

Munin uses RRD Tool to log the data (the great thing about RRD Tool is that you know the logs are never grow beyond a certain size) and then draws graphs of the system state for the day, the week and the year. It's good for at-a-glance style checking on changes. Munin also comes with a whole range of plugins and its also easy to write your own.

I used these two guides to get Munin up and running.

So after feeling pretty satisfied, I was pretty shocked to a call from Ivan saying he couldn't see the site. WTF? We're both supposed to get alerted if the box goes down, because of the monitoring service we're using from dnsmadeeasy.com. Not only was our server down, but it looks like the whole serverbeach.com datacentre was down, because I couldn't get on to their web-based ticketing system. Doh! The alert emails had been sent, but I'd used an address that was of little use for this.

So I spent the rest of Sunday afternoon reconfiguring the alerts system and putting a backup snipperoo.com service in place hosted on my own Dreamhost box; I was also cursing, because although I've got daily backups working nicely I was only saving to another box within the datacentre, and I hadn't gotten around to making an offsite backup. If the box was dead, we'd potentially have lost everything.

Five hours later and the datacentre was back up - they'd suffered a pretty catastrophic failure.

It can only be good that this has happened now and not later, once we've launched. Thus tasks for this week (aside from getting a version of the service finished for Ivan to show at Gnomedex) are to also backup offsite (now working using rsync) and to get a second server with an entirely different provider and keep them mirrored, and then configure the failover service at dnsmadeeasy.com.

And to cap it all, I've got filthy man-flu :(