Todd Pinkerton

I hate talking about Twitter. Everyone has their opinion -- "Twitter will be such a hit it will absorb Google", or "Twitter is a flash in the pan only used by web 2.0-type techies". So to blog about Twitter really doesn't make me very happy. But. I think there is a bigger conversation to be had. A conversation which is only a little bit about Twitter. Bear with me. Twitter is often referred to as 'a micro-blogging platform'. Users are asked the simple question, "What are you doing right now?". The answers are as varied as the people that use it. From the mundane ("eating lunch") to the useful ("eating lunch at http://localcafe.com ; try the reuben!") Users 'follow' other users, whether they are friends or just good tweeters who post interesting content. Now, why is twitter so popular? And here is where it gets interesting: Twitter is popular precisely because it asks so little of its users. To maintain this blog (which I do a terrible job of, even when I'm trying) takes quite an effort. I need to host my blog somewhere, I need to choose a layout and title, categories etc. And then I need to think of something interesting ...

Now that I've been baptized in the 4HWW, I've been following the author Tim Ferriss's blog. One post I found very practical was "5 World-Class Vices for less than $5". In it, Tim describes a few items that are the best in the world of their types -- wines, chocolate, etc -- but are very low cost. I've been trying to find all of the items mentioned in the article and many more in the comments. But more abstractly, this got me thinking about value. I define value as 'high quality for a relatively low cost, relative to other options'. For example, the Bugatti Veyron is an amazing car. It has some of the best engineering ever devised by man, it is incredibly fast, and at $1.4M pretty expensive. However you measure it, it is of very high quality. But it is probably not a very good value. If you use your car to go to work and the grocery store, a $10k used Nissan is probably a much better value to you. The Nissan has less quality than the Bugatti, to be sure, but the utility, performance, and maintainability make it ...

It's no excuse, but I've been too busy to blog lately, as you can tell from the date on my last post. However, some exciting new developments have spured me to pick it up again. First, another Boston Globe article about one of my new adventures, BetaHouse appeared in the Saturday August 11 paper and online here. BetaHouse is a co-working arrangement I am involved in. The idea behind BetaHouse (and co-working in general) is that several startups and entrepreneurs share an office space, splitting the costs of rent and such while collaborating and enjoying the company of like-minded people. Co-working is a popular concept on the west coast, especially San Francisco, and we hope BetaHouse is the start of the east-coast trend. For me, it certainly beats the solitude of working out of my home. The Globe article also mentions Virosity, my new consulting company that has kept me busy these past few months. We're a 'boutique' web and mobile consultancy, specializing in social applications and the like. We're a small shop (3 people) at the moment, but we're hoping to expand as we have more opportunities than we can handle right now. ...

SMS stands for 'search message service'. It is a way to send short text messages from one mobile phone to another, kinda like email. Unlike email, your mobile phone operator charges you around 10 cents (USD) per message sent, or received. Teenagers and Europeans love it. And the phone company loves it because those 10-cent messages really add up, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. SMS is a great tool for web application developers -- just look at the success of twitter. So how does it work, and how can you incorporate SMS into your application? There are a few mechanisms for sending and receiving SMS. One is to use a phone or modem connected to a computer. The computer can communicate with the phone (or modem), and send or receive messages on behalf of your application. The computer can expose a web service or some other mechanism to allow your application to send or receive messages as needed. Software packages such as NowSMS exist to facilitate this. Another way is to use email. Mobile Carriers in the USA have email-addressable handsets. If you want to send an SMS to 212-555-6789, and you know ...

I attended RailsConf 2007 last weekend in Portland, Oregon. As I sat delayed at the airport, I have a chance to write up some of the highlights from the conference. Thursday was a pre-conference day dedicated to tutorials. These were optional, and at extra cost. I ddin't opt for this because it seemed like a lot of the topics were pretty basic. The one that did look interesting to me was already sold out, so I ended up skipping the entire tutorial day and arrived on Friday. Here is a link to the full schedule. Most of the session presentation slides are here. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, gave the keynote speech on Friday. He introduced some of the features arriving in Rails 2.0, including built-in REST, debugging and breakpoints, and some performance enhancements like query caching and css/js resource bundling. Nothing revolutionary, just a bunch of nice, useful enhancements. The conference was multi-tracked, meaning you get to pick-and-choose the sessions you attend; it also means you may miss out on something you want to see because it is scheduled at the same time as something else. So Friday I attended Building Community-focused Apps ...

My most recent project, Goloco.org, went live on Earth Day -- April 22. We have been working on it for the past several months, and I'm quite proud of the way it came out. Goloco helps you arrange trips and share rides with friends (or make some friends in the process). You can create an account for free, but you'll need to add some money to your account before you take a trip. Feel free to add me as a friend if you join. You can view my Goloco profile here. Goloco was my first big Ruby on Rails project, and I learned a ton. In the beginning, you had to twist my arm to get me to write tests -- now, I can't write code without them. I've also become a huge fan of RESTful routes, capistrano, CruiseControl, ExceptionNotification, selenium, rcov, and many other plugins and gems. I can't wait to put all this to use again on my next project. A special thanks to Roy, Mike and Michael -- who made the project truly enjoyable.

I've been having trouble with my rails installation for a while. Tests would fail but only every so often, and occasionally a Fixnum object would show up when something else was expected, crashing my app. It turns out, ruby compiled wth gcc 4.0 on powerPC macs -- which my laptop is one -- is known to exhibit these strange behaviors. David Heinemeier Hansson himself mentioned this in this blog post. Turns out, the solution is to set gcc to 3.3 mode, rebuild ruby and any dependent libraries. You can do this with 'gcc_select 3.3', then running configure, make, make install as usual. On the way to finding this fix, I tried updating to Ruby 1.8.5 patchlevel 2. To get this to work, I had to configure, make, and install, then go into the source tarball in ext/readline and run : cd ext/readline > ruby extconf.rb > make > sudo cp readline.bundle /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0 Those instructions came from this mailing list archive. So if you're running ruby patchlevel 2 -- which is the latest ruby that works with rails 1.2.2 -- make sure you compile with gcc 3.3, and copy over the readline bundle as described above. I'm pretty disappointed this much hackery is required to get ...

Living and working in the Boston area provides a vast amount of opportunity -- you think we pay these insane housing costs for nothing? -- one of which is access to a huge educational community. Higher ed is a way of life here, with dozens of schools of all shapes and sizes in or around Boston. If you want to learn something, there's someone teaching it. But when it comes to 'life skillz' , where to turn? Most people associate 'street smarts' with everything you can't get a PhD in, from balancing your checkbook to how to hotwire a car. But there's a lot they don't teach you in undergrad, or graduate school, or postdoc... things we're either expected to know, or 'pick up' , or something we want to give us that edge against the cutthroat job competition. One such example is negotiation skills -- how to ask for more money in an interview, or how to get your landlord to lower the rent, or how to settle a heated disagreement amicably. My good friend (and former roommate) Carl Tashian clued me in to the Harvard Program on Negotiation, which is getting rave review from ...

When people hear the word 'startup' , they often think of a new small company trying to make it in the big world of business. I like to think the word means "trying something no one else has done before." While many startups do follow in the footsteps of others -- creating a better version of an existing product, or providing great customer service -- the most intesting ones are those that step off the beaten path, and try something different. Many entrepreneurs phrase this as 'trying to change the world'. I don't think that's far off the mark. It may be a small change, or applicable to only a small group of people, but the goal is laudable -- to change the wya people think, or work, or play, or see the world. To have that impact on humanity is an awesome lure for some, and it certainly is for me. I've worked in a variety of environments during my career thus far, from very big to very small. It's been the small companies, the startups, the two-guys-in-a-garage-eating-only-ramen-noodles that have been the most rewarding (and most challenging) to me. I've started this blog to discuss some of the ...