Feed: Paul Buchheit - AggScore: 79.8

In my head, this post and yesterday's post on risk and opportunity are deeply connected, but logically they needed to be split apart.

The theory of the left-brain / right-brain split is that the left hemisphere of our brain handles linear, logical processing (cold logic) while the right hemisphere is more emotional, intuitive, and holistic (evaluating the whole picture instead of considering things one component at a time). Naturally, some people are more left-brain dominant while others are more right-brain dominant. This divide is discussed quite a bit elsewhere -- I recommend starting with the TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist whose left hemisphere was damaged by a stroke, causing her to become right-brain dominant.

I'm actually somewhat skeptical that the left-brain / right-brain split is as real as people assume, however it seems to be metaphorically correct, so for my non-surgical purposes, it's "good enough".

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this right/left divide is that many people seem to identify strongly with one side or the other, and actually despise the other half of their brain (see here for a few examples, and even Jill Taylor seems to be doing it to some extent). This seems kind of dumb. My theory is that both halves of our brain are useful, and that for maximum benefit and happiness, we should learn how to use each half to its maximum potential.

This is where I link in to yesterday's post on Risk and Opportunity. My suggestion was to simultaneously seek big, exciting opportunities ("dream big"), while carefully avoiding unacceptable risks ("don't be stupid"). In my mind, that is the right/left divide.

The left-brain ability to carefully double-check logic and evaluate the risks is very important because it helps to protect us from bad decisions. When we imagine the kind of person who believes things that are obviously false, falls for scams, ends up joining a cult, etc, we probably picture a stereotypically right-brain person.

However, what the left brain has in cold, efficient logic, it lacks in passion and grandiosity.

When I wrote about evaluating risks and opportunities, it was as though we use a logical process when make decisions, but of course that's not actually true, nor should it be. Our actual decision making is much more emotional (and emotions are just another mental process).

The right-brain utility is in integrating millions of facts (more than the left brain can logically combine) and producing a unified output. However, that output is in the form of an intuition, "gut feeling", or just plain excitement, which can sometimes be difficult to communicate or justify ("it seems like a good idea" isn't always convincing). Nevertheless, these intuitions are crucial for making big conceptual leaps, and ultimately providing direction and meaning in our lives.

So to reformulate yesterday's advice, I think we do best when using our right-brain skills to discover opportunity and excitement, while also engaging our left-brain abilities to avoid disasters, find tactical advantages, and rationalize our actions to the world. Left and Right are both stuck in the same skull, but not by accident -- they actually need each other. (the same could probably be said for politics, but that would be another post)

Coincidentally, I just saw another good TED talk that mentions these right-brain/left-brain issues in the context of managing and incentivizing creative people. It's worth watching.

Donating money to worthwhile causes seems like a good idea, but doing it right requires knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, time, and of course money. I have at most two of those things. The traditional solution is to rely on "experts", but that has its own problems.

One of the great things about the Internet (other than the obvious) is that it enables people to collaborate in new ways, and each contribute little bits of their time and knowledge. Wikipedia is probably the best example of this, but I think it's possible to do much more. I'm not quite sure how to make this work, but I expect that in 10 years we will have much smarter "collective" systems that leverage small bits of time, knowledge, etc from large groups.

This is my first experiment in solving this problem. Actually, in some ways it's my second experiment -- a few months ago I posed a question about the "best use of money", and although it was only meant as a thought experiment, people also provided a lot of specific suggestions. That was rather encouraging.

Now I'm trying it for real -- I have a lot of ideas, but not much time, so I'm starting with the simplest solution that I could find. It may not work, but it should be interesting.

Here's how it works: I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes.

Here are the rules:

• The money MUST go to an IRS recognized public charity. No exceptions.
• Don't contact me. I already don't read the email I have -- I don't need more.
  
• I've created a topic on Google Moderator where people can submit and vote on ideas. I've never used Google Moderator, but someone told me that it's good, so hopefully it works :)
• Ultimately, this is just a recommendation and I may completely ignore the results if they are stupid, so don't bother spamming.
• I also created a group on FriendFeed where people can submit links and discuss ideas.
• I'd like to see broad support (from real people, not spam accounts) along with some evidence that it's a good idea, and perhaps endorsements from knowledgeable people.

In terms of which causes I'd like to support, I'd consider anything, but am probably most sympathetic to health, freedom, and education. In terms of solutions, I'm very skeptical of centralization, one-size-fits-all solutions, and people who are certain of the answer. I also prefer to support things that have tangible, objective outcomes (where you could say, "this money was used to purchase X" or "this money was used to fund study Y, which will be published this fall").

Now is your opportunity!

FriendFeed was nominated for three "Crunchies". Please vote for us in all three categories:




I can't promise that your vote will end the war, fix the economy, or save the environment (that one is here), but I can promise that your vote might be counted.

For some reason, this weekend has seen a lot of talk about what FriendFeed is/isn't/should be doing (see Louis Gray and others). One person even predicted that we will fail.

I considered writing my own list of complaints about FriendFeed. I think and care about it a lot more than most people, so my list of FriendFeed issues would be a lot longer. I may still do that, but there's something else also worth discussing...

One of the benefits of experience is that it gives some degree of perspective. Of course there's a huge risk of overgeneralizing (someone took a picture!), but with that in mind...

We starting working on Gmail in August (or September?) 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 (two and a half years after starting work on it), many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.

Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as "niche", and "not used by real people outside of silicon valley".

Now, almost 7 and a half years after we started working on Gmail, I see things like this:

Yahoo and Microsoft have more than 250m users each worldwide for their webmail, according to the comScore research firm, compared to close to 100m for Gmail. But Google's younger service, launched in 2004, has been gaining ground in the US over the past year, with users growing by more than 40 per cent, compared to 2 per cent for Yahoo and a 7 per cent fall in users of Microsoft's webmail.

And that probably isn't counting all of the "Apps for your domain" users. I still have a huge list of complaints about Gmail, by the way.

It would be a huge mistake for me to assume that just because Gmail did eventually take off, then the same thing will happen to FriendFeed. They are very different products, and maybe we just got lucky with Gmail.

However, it does give some perspective. Creating an important new product generally takes time. FriendFeed needs to continue changing and improving, just as Gmail did six years ago (there are some screenshots around if you don't believe me). FriendFeed shows a lot of promise, but it's still a "work in progress".

My expectation is that big success takes years, and there aren't many counter-examples (other than YouTube, and they didn't actually get to the point of making piles of money just yet). Facebook grew very fast, but it's almost 5 years old at this point. Larry and Sergey started working on Google in 1996 -- when I started there in 1999, few people had heard of it yet.

This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you're starting something new, expect a long journey. That's no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will never arrive, because it's a long journey! This is also why it's important to be frugal -- you don't want to starve to death half the way up the mountain.

Getting back to FriendFeed, I'm always concerned when I hear complaints about the service. However, I'm also encouraged by the complaints, because it means that people care about the product. In fact, they care so much that they write long blog posts about what we should do differently. It's clear that our product isn't quite right and needs to evolve, but the fact that people are giving it so much thought tells me that we are at least headed in roughly the right direction. I would be much more concerned if there were silence and nobody cared about what we are doing -- it would mean that we are "off in the weeds", as they say. Getting this kind of valuable feedback is one of the major benefits of launching early.

If you'd like to contribute (and I hope you do), I'd love to read more of your visions of "the perfect FriendFeed". Describe what would make FriendFeed perfect for YOU, and post it on your blog (or email post@posterous.com if you don't have a blog -- they create them automatically). Feel free to drop or change features in any way you like. Yes, technically you're doing my work for me, but it's mutually beneficial because we'll do our best to create a product that you like, and even if we don't, maybe someone else will (since the concepts are out there for everyone).

On "Coding Horror", Jeff Atwood asked this question:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?

He then argues that our intuition leads us to the "wrong" answer (50%) instead of the "correct" answer (2/3 or 67%).

However, the question does not include enough information to determine which of these answers is actually correct, so the only truly correct answer is, "I don't know" or "it depends". I skimmed though the comments on the post (there are about a million), and didn't see anyone addressing this issue (though someone probably did). They mostly argued about BG vs GB for some reason.

The reason that this question is wrong is because it doesn't specify the "algorithm" for posing the question.

If we assume that boys and girls are born with equal probability (50/50, like flipping a coin), then families with two children will have two girls 25% of the time, two boys 25% of the time, and a boy and a girl 50% of the time.

If the algorithm for posing the question is:

1. Choose a random parent that has exactly two children
2. If the parent has two boys, eliminate him and choose another random parent
3. Ask about the odds that the parent has both a boy and a girl

Then we can see that step two eliminated the "two boy" possibility, which leaves the 25% probability of two girls and the 50% probability of both a boy and a girl. Of course probabilities should add up to 100%, so the final probabilities are  25/75 (1/3) for two girls and 50/75 (2/3) for both a boy and girl. This is the "correct" answer described by Jeff, and it occurs because of the elimination performed at step two.

However, if the algorithm for posing the question was instead:

1. Choose a random parent that has exactly two children
2. Arbitrarily announce the gender of one of the children
3. Ask about the odds that the parent has both a boy and a girl
   

Now we're back to having a 50% probability of there being both a boy and a girl. The difference is that there was no elimination at step two, and simply announcing the gender of one of the children does not affect the gender of the other child or change the probability distribution.

The problem with the question as originally posed was that it didn't specify which of these algorithms was being used. Were we arbitrarily told about the girl, or was a selective process applied?

By the way, if we're applying a selective process, then 100% is also a possibly correct answer, because at step two we could have eliminated all parents that don't have both a boy and a girl. Likewise, all other probabilities are also potentially correct depending on the algorithm applied.

Update: Surprisingly, some people are still thinking that my second algorithm yields 2/3 instead of 1/2 (see the confused discussion on news.yc). I think part of the reason is that I was somewhat imprecise with the concept of "elimination". The second algorithm does not eliminate any of the families, but if I announce that there is a boy, that does eliminate the possibility of two girls. This is where some people are getting lost and thinking that the boy+girl probability has become 2/3. The catch is that announcing the boy also reduced the boy+girl probability by an equal amount, so the result is still the same (it eliminated either BG or GB, I don't know which, but it doesn't matter).

The responses to my blog are always a little surprising to me. Yesterday's post didn't have a whole lot of substance, but it did include one good product idea, which is to somehow let other people edit my posts.

Someone on news.yc was not impressed by my idea though:

I was going to disagree with those negative comments below but then read the blog and damn; this guy has a freaking ego to think people would want to edit his ramblings for him in any other way than comical..

Next, I looked at the comments that were on my blog directly. One of the first ones was from Paul Graham, and it said simply:

deniable -> deniability :-)

Well, apparently Paul Graham wants to edit my ramblings, and in a way that would make me look smarter too... I'm pretty sure that he would have just made the correction himself had it been as easy and obvious as leaving a comment, but unfortunately no blog software seems to do that, most especially not Blogger.com.

Last year, someone translated one of my posts into Chinese (and I had Google translate it back).

This all reminds me of one of the blog posts that has been trapped in my head for a long time...

It starts off with something about ants, because my house must have been built on top of a giant anthill or something, because they are continually staging giant invasions and I'm always having to set them on fire or vacuum them up or something. So I'm always thinking about ants, and ants are kind of interesting because, more so than a lot of animals, the individuals are not really viable, and the hive (or colony or whatever) is kind of like a creature of its own (yeah, I know, I'm not the first person to notice this). It even has a short term memory in the form of pheromone trails left on my floor, and I erase those memories with a paper towel and some soapy water. So the ant colony is fairly sophisticated, but each ant's behavior is relatively simple -- they are just following some simple rules and don't really comprehend why or how the colony works. They don't see the "big picture".

And that reminds me of our brains, which are built out of relatively simple neurons. Each neuron simply sums up it's inputs, and then generates an output that gets passed along to some other neurons (or something like that, I'm sure it's a huge simplification, but you get the point). Certainly no individual neuron can possibly comprehend what it's doing -- it just cranks along summing up inputs and generating outputs. The magic is in the wires, the connections among the neurons.

Individual humans aren't terribly viable animals either. They almost went extinct not that long ago (100,000 years?). However, since then we've managed to pretty much take over the entire planet and build all kinds of amazing things like airplanes, computers, and burritos. Humans started out kind of similar to other animals (but weaker and less numerous) and then became something fundamentally different. That transition occurred because we are able to communicate and collaborate like nothing else. We can communicate though both time and space. We learn from people who died thousands of years ago on the other side of the planet. Even a survivalist hunter who goes off into wilderness alone is still relying on all the training and knowledge that was passed on before the journey began.

So in many ways, the human society (or human superorganism) is kind of like the human brain -- the magic is in the connections. Significant advances have occurred when we upgraded the wiring that connects everyone. The inventions of spoken language, written language, and the printing press were all revolutionary because they enabled more sophisticated communication and collaboration.

And now I can ramble on about ants and neurons and stuff, and people all of the world can read it, and digest it, and tell me I'm an idiot, and make their own ideas, and pass them on to other people, and it all happens in a matter of minutes. As much hype and excitement as there has been around the Internet, I think that people may still be misunderestimating its importance. We are literally upgrading the wiring that drives human society.

This is also why I'm excited about things like FriendFeed. The flow of information and influence is rather fundamental to way our world works. In the past much of that information flow was slow and hierarchical. It had to pass through one of a relatively small number of tightly controlled networks and publishers. But suddenly, the information can come from anywhere, and go anywhere, and it doesn't need anyone's approval. If it's completely random, it won't work any better than a bunch of randomly wired neurons (which I assume isn't very good), but with the right wiring, everyone starts to get the right information for them, and maybe we can stop being so stupid. I'm not yet sure what this new human architecture looks like, but that's what makes it an interesting (and extremely important) problem.

I sometimes think of FriendFeed as a kind of "distributed broadcast channel", but that's just part of picture. Better collaboration, like having other people edit my blog posts, is another part. It enables each of us to do what we do best, which improves the overall system efficiency and intelligence (and more importantly, I can avoid things that I don't like doing).

Keeping with the brain anology, it's very likely that we can't even comprehend what's going on. I certainly don't. I'm just a little neuron, summing up my inputs, and then passing the result along to you.

I haven't posted anything here in about eight months, mostly because I've just been very busy, but also because:

• Blogging is too hard
• I post a lot of things over on FriendFeed, which is easier, and I'm lazy (and you really should subscribe to my FriendFeed if you find anything I post here at all interesting)
• I got tired of my blog posts. When I read them, there's something I don't like.

Nevertheless, I sometimes want to share something more than a FriendFeed message or interesting link, so I'm going to give it a second try.

However, I've decided that in the future my posts will be more rambling, and more pointless. I think part of what I don't like about the older posts is that they are sometimes arguing a point or something, but my real point (or my intention, at least) is just to share some kind of idea or thought, not convince anyone of anything. Also, I think this will be a lot easier to write because I can just type a bunch of words and they don't have to fit together in any particular way, and it's also a good excuse to not bother with any editing, so I should be able to crank these things out really fast.

I also have this idea to outsource the writing of my blog posts to someone, ideally everyone. The idea is that I'd write a bunch of stuff and then someone else (maybe wiki-style) would turn it into something coherent and readable. That would save me a lot of time and also provide plausible deniable when I write something that turns out to be especially stupid or offensive. But that's in the future. For now, it will just be a bunch of words that keep going until I get bored or distracted, and then I'll hit "send" :) (I'm also writing these things in Gmail since the blogger interface upsets me)

Long, long ago, before Google, search engines evaluated and ranked web pages by considering each page in isolation, examining the size of the fonts, the contents of the meta tags, etc. In some cases, it was even possible to "hijack" another site's listings by simply cloning their HTML. Perhaps a few search engines attempted to improve on this with simple tactics such as counting the number of links to a page, but that was generally useless since it's so easy to create "fake" links in order to boost your count.

With Pagerank, Google took a very different approach. Instead of considering each page in isolation, they examined the link structure of the entire web and computed a global evaluation of that structure. In other words, they began looking at the entire forest instead of just the individual trees. Google did other things too -- Pagerank is just one of many factors, but this general approach of evaluating information in a global context is fundamental to many of the algorithms. These algorithms made it easier for Google to spot which web sites were actually important, and which were just pretenders. Of course Google isn't perfect, and people can still manipulate rankings to some extent, but it was substantially better than the old way, and good enough to form the foundation of what is now a $174 billion dollar company.

Last week I wrote about Facebook gathering similar information about people. By collecting information about people and the links between them, they can start to get a global view of the human "forest". Unfortunately, based on many of the responses, that post wasn't very well written. A lot of people focused on how annoying Facebook applications are (true), how search results limited to your friends would be useless (also true), or other things completely unrelated to my point. A few people mentioned that Facebook hasn't done anything useful with this data, which is actually a good point, but I think that has more to do with Facebook and the newness of the data than it does with the value of the data. After all, the web was around for many years before Google came along and started profitably mining the link structure.

Will Facebook ever do anything useful with the human link data? I have no idea, and it's not particularly important to me. However, I'm confident that SOMEONE will begin mining this data, and that it could ultimately be more valuable than the link data from the web. Facebook is a convenient example because they happen to have a head start on collecting the data, but others might be the first to actually profit from it. Google, in particular, is much better at data mining and also has quite a bit of human link data (from Gmail and Orkut). Microsoft+Yahoo will also have a nice data set, though I doubt that they will know what to do with it. Of course none of this data is perfectly clean and noise-free, but real data never is -- the web certainly isn't.

It's very fashionable to declare that Facebook is an over-hyped fad and will never make any real money, certainly not enough to justify its insane $15 billion valuation. At first glance, it's easy to understand why some people might think it's a toy -- most of the activity there seems to involve biting, poking, and joining groups with funny names.

However, I think that assessment misses out on something very interesting: Facebook is capturing everyone's identity and relationships. Of course there's some noise caused by random friending, but by examining the larger graph as well as other details such as location, affiliations, interactions, and of course explicitly entered relationship details ("how do you know Paul?"), they can get a pretty good idea of which people are actual friends and acquaintances.

The lack of reliable identity information has always been an issue on the web. It's the reason why we don't have a useful directory of email addresses -- everyone in the directory would get bombarded by spam or other unwanted messages, and even if it did exist, how would you know which of the thousands of Adam Smiths is the one that you are looking for? Facebook has already solved this problem for a large fraction of people. It's easy to search for a name and then pick out the right person based on their picture, location, or friends. I get a lot of messages on Facebook, but unlike email, I have yet to receive any spam. That's pretty remarkable.

Perhaps a people directory doesn't seem terribly valuable, but if you can't imagine how to make money from knowing everyone's identity and trust networks, then you aren't being very imaginative. Spam and fraud are two of the biggest problems on the internet, and they are very difficult to stop because it's so easy to create new identities, and we have no good way of differentiating between real identities and fake ones. Even in "real" life, people are able to skip town-to-town, defrauding people again and again because to the people in the new town, they have a new and unknown identity.

One of the best examples of this problem on the internet is eBay. If you try to buy or sell something on eBay (especially computers or electronics, apparently), there is a very good chance that someone will try to rip you off -- just search Google for ebay scammers and you will find pages such as "How scammers run rings round eBay" and "eBay Forums: Today's Scams In Progress". Ebay has had a relatively solid lock on the auction market due to network effects, but with billions of dollars in profits, a $42 billion market cap, and 10 years of not innovating, I'm willing to bet that won't last. With reliable identity information, most of these fraud schemes would become impractical, which would obviously be a real advantage for an eBay competitor.

What else is highly profitable on the internet? Search. I doubt that anyone will ever beat Google at Google-style search, certainly not Microsoft or Yahoo, even if they do tie their horses together. The only way anyone will create something significantly better than today's Google is if they add a new and important ingredient to the mix. Many people have suggested that demographic information, or perhaps knowing what your friends have searched for will help, but I doubt it. What could work is actual, direct, human involvement by the users. In fact, it's already helping in a very limited form -- Wikipedia pages are written and edited by random people on the internet and they frequently occupy the top spots on Google (and I always click on them). Of course the problem with letting random users edit or reorder the search results is that you will quickly be overwhelmed by spam and fraud. But what if you knew who the users were and which ones you could trust?

Those are just the first few things that come to mind -- the uses of identity information are endless. Of course there's no guarantee that Facebook will actually realize any of this potential -- there were many search engines before Google, and they all fumbled the opportunity they had, but it's important to at least understand the potential for big things.

Update: This post was supposed to be about data more so than Facebook (Facebook just happens to have the data). See this post for a (hopefully) better explanation.

How much is an idea worth? Many normal people assume that ideas are valuable, and that if only they could think of one, they might be able to sell it for millions of dollars, like the Pet Rock. On the other hand, many engineers, VCs, and successful entrepreneurs claim that ideas are worthless. Paul Graham provides a sort of "proof" that ideas are worthless:

Startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

People in the "ideas are worthless" camp usually claim that it's all about execution -- they have plenty of great ideas that just need great teams to execute on them.

I have ideas all of the time, many more than I have time for, and so I tend towards the "ideas are worthless" camp. However, there's a nagging inconsistency -- something isn't quite right.

Quoting yet again from Marc Andreessen's "Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters"

I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.
...
The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.
...
Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail.

In other words, you just need to build the right product. A mediocre team building the right product will succeed and a brilliant team building the wrong product will fail.

Isn't that a little bit like saying that having the right idea DOES matter? And if ideas are so plentiful, then why do we see great teams executing perfectly on bad ideas?

I've thought about this for a bit and realized that both camps ("ideas are valuable" and "ideas are worthless") are wrong, at least when stated so simply.

Imagine that products are mountains. To build a product, you will need to climb that mountain. Some mountains have a big pot of gold at the top, and some do not. In order to make money, you will need to pick the right mountain and then successfully climb to the top and gather up the gold. You can fail by choosing a mountain that has little or no gold at the top, or by dying on the way up.

Taking this metaphor a little further, there are also multiple paths up the mountain. According to Wikipedia, Mount Everest has fifteen recognized routes to the top. Some routes are easier than others.

Successfully executing a trip to the top of the mountain requires a certain level of technical ability -- how much will depend on the mountain and route. It also requires good judgment in order to choose the right route, or to change course when you realize that the current path isn't working out.

Judgment isn't talked about as much as execution, but it's obviously very important. A technically brilliant team, upon encountering a sheer cliff, may excitedly think to themselves, "this is the perfect opportunity to use Erlang!" (or some other fancy tech -- Erlang is just a funny example) A team with better judgment would notice that there's an easier route that goes around the other side.

Judgment also plays a critical role in choosing which mountain to climb. Our landscape of product-mountains has millions of different mountains, many of which have never been climbed. Other mountains have been attempted in the past, but the team froze on the way up, or there was no gold when they got to the top (apparently the gold flows intermittently in this analogy).

There are also people wandering around in the flat lands near the mountains. Many of these people have ideas about which mountains have gold at the top, and some of them have even drawn crude maps showing what they believe to be an easy route to the top. Inevitably, they try to sell their ideas and maps to the mountain climbers, but the climbers just brush them off and say that their ideas and plans are worthless.

Eventually, a team of climbers will discover a huge cache of gold on one of the mountains. Naturally, the people who were hanging around at the base trying to sell their ideas and plans will say, "I had that idea first! They stole my idea! I knew there was gold at the top of the mountain!"

And it's true that they had the idea, as did many other people. Ideas are plentiful. The problem is that most ideas are bad -- either there's no gold at the top of the mountain, or the ascent is too difficult with today's technology. What's valuable is the judgment to know which mountains have the gold, and the team that can get to it.

So are ideas worthless? Not quite. If a skilled climber who has successfully chosen the right mountains in the past thinks he knows the location of another gold-rich mountain, people will listen. The idea has value because it comes from someone who has a history of being right.

If the exact same idea were presented by a random person with no experience and no ability to execute, it would probably be ignored -- there's just not enough evidence that it's a good idea. If that person truly believes in their idea, they will have to prove it on their own. (The beauty of our system is that they often can, even if everyone else thinks it's a bad idea)

If someone with a history of being right also has a capable team of climbers who have demonstrated the technical skill and judgment to climb other mountains, then that is very valuable, and they will have no trouble getting their idea funded.

Summary:
Idea * Judgment * Ability * Determination * Luck = $$$

Sometimes, it's faster and easier to just use the command line. Thanks to the new FriendFeed API, I was able write a little script that connects my command line to my FriendFeed.

This probably would have been easier to write in Python, but bash is so awkward that it makes for a somewhat more interesting challenge. (most of this code is just dealing with image files -- the real work is done by curl)

Here you go:

#!/bin/bash
# Replace with your nickname:remote-key
# Go to http://friendfeed.com/account/api to get your remote key
USER="paulapitest:buggy696hoist"

function usage {
    echo "Usage: $0 [-t title] [-l link] [-u nickname:remotekey] [images ...]"
    exit 1
}

MAXSIZE=""
while getopts m:u:t:l: opt ; do
    case "$opt" in
        t)  TITLE="$OPTARG";;
        l)  LINK="$OPTARG";;
        u)  USER="$OPTARG";;
        m)  MAXSIZE="$OPTARG";;
        \?) usage;;
    esac
done
shift $[OPTIND - 1]

TITLE="${TITLE:-$LINK}"
TITLE="${TITLE:-$1}"

[ "$TITLE" = "" ] && usage

ARGS=("-F" "title=$TITLE" "-F" "link=$LINK" "-u" "$USER")
FILES=("$@")

for F in "${FILES[@]}" ; do
    if [ "$MAXSIZE" != "" -a -x /usr/bin/sips ] ; then
        T=`mktemp /tmp/ffshare.XXXXXX`
        sips --resampleHeightWidthMax "$MAXSIZE" --out "$T" "$F" 2>/dev/null
        F="$T;filename=$F"
    fi
    N="${#ARGS[@]}"
    ARGS[N]="-F"
    ARGS[N+1]="img$RANDOM=@$F"
done

CODE=`curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "${ARGS[@]}" http://friendfeed.com/api/share`
if [ "$CODE" == "200" ] ; then
    echo "Shared on http://friendfeed.com/`echo "$USER" | sed -e 's/:.*//'`"
else
    echo "Failed: HTTP response $CODE"
fi