Go, Do, Be.

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'been playing drums a night a week with some folks from meez. We have a few covers on the setlist at this point. Lots of originalz in the same vein... we'll play a show sometime in '08!

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Seeqpod is kinda cool, btw, check it out if you get a chance.

I've worked in SOMA for the past few years. It's a great place to be if you like soaking in the rich stew of several hundred startups. Most folks are working on neat projects. There's a great buzz!

A few places have turned out to be buzz-centers. Caffe Centro on South Park was obviously a place where you could overhear business plans, deployment strategies... Heck, I've seen Visio UML diagrams in their recycling bins.

Since our office moved toward Market St. we've been hitting the north SOMA locus: Caffe Trieste. Step in and overhear discussions on scaling plans for the next few quarters, schema changes, testing strategies... the talk is as rich as the pastries.

Of course it is, there are a zillion companies in the Trieste neighborhood:

• slide
• meez
• gofish
• adroll
• mochi media
• metaweb
• tippit

These are only the folks I'd recognize. There are definitely a zillion others. Who else have you seen there?

View Larger Map

As for the coffee... it's great. Yes, Trieste is a local chain. The folks behind the bar at this location keep close contact with home-base (the original location) up on Vallejo St. Stick with the espresso drinks. They know what they're doing.

Look for me: I'll be on the couch with a small latte and a raspberry danish.

What's happened since last October? A lot. Here's a quick catch-up:

• I left meez to work with super-engineer, Greg Schroeder at GoFish.com in January.
• Ginger, my second daughter was born in feb.
• netscrap.com was on digg in July. We mostly survived.
• I secretly put some photos together on http://photo.greacen.com. I got some interest in showing some of my Lucca photos.
• I finally put a little bit of time into bashWebTest and tossed it out onto goog's sourceforge doodad. more on this later.
• What else? It'll come to me. Keep an eye on this one.

What's the deal with small companies? I had a classic start-up moment today when we met to talk about our community. The CEO of the company shared some ideas, which became requirements. even to the point of 'put that button on the left'. This kinda made my skin crawl for a few reasons... where is he getting this info? How does he think his suggestion is the remedy for the problem? Is this our feedback mechanism?

It brought me to this conclusion (hardly conclusive): how the hell do you get a product out of beta? Beta isn't a time-period, it's a quality threshold. Kinda seems like the path outta beta includes having some specific/measurable goals, maybe a spec to start. Then, someone had better have an idea about how the service isn't meeting those goals... This leads us to where we are now: new features or band-aid fixes to perceived problems are easier to deal with than performance/compatibility/clarity/usability issues.

There have been several prominent blogs that mention the appalling quality of software. I am a somewhat-silent co-conspirator with my current project. Here are some irrefutable facts about our situation:

• The site is slow.
• The features are hidden or confusing
• The site is not usable by some set of users (browser compatibility issues)
• Low payoff, missing proposition.

It seems like the best use of the group's time would be to address these classes of issues rather than forging ahead with this motto:

'Let's put some makeup on this pig'