Charles Hudson’s Weblog

I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus phone (I liked the one on TC, so I’m linking to that one) that I wanted to post my quick thoughts. In the interest of fair disclosure, I used to work at Google back in the day and know and respect a lot of the folks working on Android.

One of the big risks in being in the platform business is that nobody will build the things on top of it that you as the platform owner want to see built to showcase the opportunity. Facebook built apps on its own platform (photos, groups, events) before their platform really took off. The iPhone launched with some Apple-created apps – Maps (via Google), mail, calendar, etc. There’s a really good reason for this – as the platform owner, you want to make sure that some of the “right” stuff gets built and made available. And what’s the “right” stuff? It’s generally whatever you, as the platform owner, think needs to exist to showcase the power and potential of your platform.

For me, there is only one interpretation of what the Google Nexus phone means. It means that Google did not believe that its handset partners, left to their own devices, were on track to deliver an integrated consumer device (software + hardware) that would properly showcase Android and develop consumer interest sufficient to win iPhone converts or those who want a smartphone but are on the sidelines. The Droid hasn’t done that. Neither has the G1. I don’t think Google necessarily wants to play the role that Apple does in the iPhone ecosystem. But without a strong exemplar of what a great Android device can do, it will be very difficult to compete with the iPhone ecosystem.

A number of people have asked me how things are going with my virtual assistant, specifically what tasks I have her doing and how it all works. I thought I’d do a short follow-up blog post on how I work with my virtual assistant (who is really great, by the way), to schedule meetings. For those who don’t know, my VA is based in the Philippines. For more background, you can read my previous post on the topic. If you’re looking for a virtual assistant, I’d suggest you check out YourRemoteAssistant.com. I’ve been happy with them and it’s made my life much more sane. In the spirit of openness, I also get a small credit if you sign up and list me as a referrer.

1. Share your calendar on Google Calendar
The first thing I did was create a Google Calendar that had all of my work and personal appointments in one place. Then I gave my VA read / write access to that calendar so she could create, edit, and delete meetings as they arise.

2. Create a Google Spreadsheet of places you like to meet
The next thing I did was create a Google Spreadsheet with a list of places I like to meet and the times I like to go to those places. This makes it way easier for my VA to schedule meetings without having to come back to me to get input on meeting locations every time. Also, because it’s shared online, I can add or remove places from the list as I burn out on them or find new places I like more. Below is a screenshot of what that spreadsheet looks like – it’s not very complex:

3. Create a simple human algorithm for how meetings should be scheduled
The last step to making meeting scheduling work is to figure out how things should happen. This is really a matter of personal choice. I like to have my assistant offer up a few meeting times, block all of those times on my calendar (making it clear which are tentative and which are confirmed), and eventually confirm the meeting once the other person gets back and confirms. Once the meeting and location are confirmed, I make sure I have a mobile phone number for the person and some other context in the body of the meeting request. Just for added comfort, I also get a daily summary of all of the meeting requests that were processed during the day.

4. Get up on Salesforce or some other CRM system
The one last thing worth doing is to get up on a CRM system of some sort so that you can keep track of contact info for all of the people you meet. It’s pretty easy to adjust the scheduling process described above to include a step where your assistant checks to make sure the person has a record with correct information.

5. Relax!
I’m terrible at scheduling meetings. I drop the ball all the time. This has been one of the best decisions I’ve made all year – I no longer have meeting anxiety and I know that meetings are getting handled and arranged in a much better way than I could do left to my own devices.

There are some other things that I do that I haven’t included in this post. Do you have a virtual assistant? How’s it going for you? Any tips to share?

So, I’ve been really excited about the freemium business model of late. I’ve spent the last year or so trying to meet more entrepreneurs, funded and bootstrapped, who are interested in pioneering this model. In the process of these conversations, I’ve learned a ton and I’m now sufficiently inspired to actually pull together a small event focused on what it takes to succeed with a freemium business model. Before I pull the trigger and announce all of the details, I wanted to ping the blogosphere and see if this seems like a sane idea. The basic idea for the event would be to pull together a one day conference / gathering focused on having some leaders in the space share data on what it takes to succeed using freemium business models and hopefully some cool lessons learned. The event will likely take place in March 2010 here in San Francisco, but I still have time to back out if this seems like a horrible idea. Two questions for you all:

1. Is this an interesting topic to you? Why or why not?
2. If it is interesting, which companies would you like to hear from on stage?

Comment away!

I’ve been using Highrise CRM from 37signals for about a year now and I think it’s a pretty good product – certainly better than most other CRM tools I’ve used. However, there are some substantial features the products lacks that keep it from being even more integrated into my workflow. There are three core ways in which I’d like to use Highrise CRM:

1. Universal store of contact and context information for people I know or have met
2. Address book of record that will sync with other clients and devices (namely the iPhone) – this is a close cousin of point #1 above.
3. Easy way to keep track of conversations I’ve had with people and things on my to-do list

I know the 37signals team has a long laundry list of features they’re trying to prioritize and I’m just one of many users. That being said, there are a four modest gripes I have about the product:

No iPhone application – One of my most persistent frustrations with Highrise is that it doesn’t have an iPhone application. What would I use the iPhone app to do? Well, it would be nice to be able to access all of the data I have about people, particularly contact info for folks who are not on my iPhone, when on the go. I would also like to be able to input new items, particularly notes from conversations and calls and new to-do items. I’m aware that I can use the email feature in Highrise to just tap out a note and then email it into the system. I’d rather just be able to hop right into the interface than email the info in. Maybe I’m alone in feeling that way.

Doesn’t sync with any other system I regularly use – My biggest gripe is that I can’t use Highrise as my contact database of record as it doesn’t easily talk to any other system. I realize that Highrise can’t make Gmail or Mac Address Book integrate with or support two way sync between Highrise and those applications. But without mobile access or the ability to sync with the other apps I use regularly (namely Gmail), investing in Highrise as my database of record for contacts isn’t as useful as it could be.

No offline access – This is a small nit. I sometimes find myself with down time where I’d like to update my contact info. Unfortunately, there isn’t any way for me to use Highrise in offline mode. It sure would help in those periods where I have time but no Internet access.

Poor Task Functionality – Overall, I wish the Task functionality were more robust. One of the most important things I need from a task application is the ability to annotate tasks – I like to make notes about my tasks. Having the ability to do that in Highrise would be great. If you can do it already, I haven’t figured out how to make it happen.

If you’re a Highrise user and have thoughts, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I recently started using Tumblr about a week and a half ago on the recommendation of my friend, Hiten Shah. I have to admit, that I was really skeptical about whether I would need / enjoy / find use for another microblogging or content sharing service. I was also perplexed how Union Square Ventures could invest in both Tumblr and Twitter without any conflict of interest. Having used both products now, I can say that they are in fact pretty different. In a lot of ways, I think about Twitter as social networking status updates + a filtered RSS reader whereas Tumblr is really more like lightweight blogging / microblogging focused on sharing media items.

This is not a comprehensive analysis, just my early thoughts.

Twitter is for sharing links, Tumblr is for sharing media – With all of the caveats that apply about anecdotal information, my experience has been that my universe of people on Twitter use the service to do a few discrete things – they share links to interesting content (basically a filtered feed reader on steroids), they share interesting quotes / comments that they encounter in their everyday lives, and they use it as a way to share social kudos with others via re-tweeting and public @messages. My usage of Tumblr is totally different. Whereas the call-to-action when you log into Twitter is to tell the world what you’re doing or what’s going on, the CTA on Tumblr is really different – check out the UI you encounter when you log in:

The prompt for Tumblr is to share something, but they present you with a myriad of different kinds of content types that you can choose – pictures, text, quotes, audio, video, etc. The well-done iPhone application also gives you the same experience. The only conclusion I can draw from this, as a user, is that Tumblr is about sharing media, not just links. And that’s what I’m using it to do.

Twitter is about trying to spark a reaction or conversation, Tumblr feels more about self expression – A lot of what I see on Twitter is people sharing things (links, comments, quotes, pictures, etc) that they want to see distributed more broadly. Whether it’s a blog post, a news article, self-promotional / brand building plugs, startup advice, historical quotes, or whatever, the goal is the same – to launch it into the Twittersphere and have others spread the word via RTs and @ messages.

The UI of Tumblr really seems to de-emphasize this idea of re-sharing content. Sure, they have a “reblog” function that allows you to post something that you find to your own tumblog. But it’s not a front-and-center feature nor does it appear to be a big part of what I see people doing on Tumblr. The UI of Tumblr also is heavily oriented toward customizing your theme, which is not something Twitter pushes nearly as heavily.

Do you use both services? What do you think?

I was reading TechCrunch’s article on Zynga’s launch of Farmville.com earlier today. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about why Zynga might do this and what it means for the industry. I don’t think it signals a major shift away from Facebook or social networks, but it is an interesting hedge (at best) or a signal of a desire for more leverage (at least).

Screenshot of Farmville.com

Before delving into this too deeply, it’s important to remember why games on social networks, Facebook in particular, are growing so quickly. Many of these games and game concepts are not new. What’s new is the combination of low-cost and low-friction distribution on social networks, a working virtual goods model, and rapid user acquisition by the underlying platforms themselves. This is a really potent combination that’s clearly working.

There’s one other thing that’s really important (in my opinion) and not frequently discussed. On the open Internet, game developers have two ways of acquiring customers. You can do a deal with a big games portal or other centralized distribution point. Or you can buy media on the Internet and drive users to your destination site. Either way, the dominant model is to find people on the web and drive them to your site or the place where you’re distributing your game – it’s basically a herding model. Part of why games on social networks are growing so fast is that they break this model; instead of finding people who want to play games and driving them to your game, social games turn this on its head. Instead of chasing people down and trying to get them to play games elsewhere, why not just put the games where the users already are? Turning this paradigm on its head means you can do one really important thing – you can reach people who aren’t looking for games. This is a big deal. And this is, in part, why social games are succeeding in expanding the audience of people who play games. Skeptical? Talk to a Farmville player. Ask him (or more likely her) what else he or she plays and you’re not likely to hear console or even traditional casual games – for a lot of players, this is their onramp to games.

If you’re Zynga, the one big problem you have is not the offer controversy. Your biggest problem is that Facebook feels like the only game in town for social game developers, other than the open Internet. That probably won’t change anytime soon. There are other platforms with reach, growth, or good monetization, but not any one platform that has the scale, growth, viral channels, and monetizable audience that Facebook offers. Changing that dynamic will take a long time. And with Facebook’s proposed roadmap changes coming later this year or early next year, what’s Zynga to do?

Building up a web presence is a good hedge – if you’re serious about building it out, you have the opportunity to succeed where few others have by building a web-scale social game off a social network. That would require you to build a game that works (done), drive traffic to a destination site (doable, but expensive), and replicate the economics that you see on Facebook (unknown, but possible).

What would it take for a “crossover” game that started on a social network (no offense to Harvest Moon) to succeed by moving to the web? Three, things, in my opinion:

A game with wide appeal – A game with wide appeal has the opportunity to attract a large audience. This has two benefits. One, you get more people into the funnel, playing the game, and potentially transacting. Second, a game with wide appeal does not need to focus on advertising on the sites or networks where every other web-based game does – you can look to reach people in places where other games can’t. Think about it. If you’re building a hardcore MMO, where are you going to advertise? Where hardcore MMO players hang out, right? If you’re building a game that credibly could appeal to everyone, where CAN’T you advertise and expect some decent yield?

Known monetization – Farmville makes money. They sell virtual goods and Zynga has some sense as to how profitable users are in terms of unit economics. So they can afford to spend on customer acquisition as they are doing on Facebook today. Because the game works on Facebook, you could spend money on acquiring customers from day one. If the web audience ends up being less lucrative, you could still afford to spend to build up the web user base by subsidizing the web property with revenue from Facebook. If the economics are the same, there’s no issue. God forbid the economics of web players are superior – I can scarcely imagine what that would mean for the industry.

Knowledge of customer acquisition tactics that work at scale – One nice thing about the Internet is that you’re not restricted by social networking platform policies around how often and through which channels you can contact users. For all of that benefit, though, you lose all of the known things that work on Facebook but do not exist on the open Internet (the wall, the newsfeed, notifications, etc) and need to learn what works on the web. This could be a positive or a negative – not sure how steep the learning curve would be when it comes to succeeding on the web.

I don’t want to undersell the disadvantages of being off of a social networking platform. One of the best things about building games on social networks is that you can be ambient – having a presence there means that you get many more opportunities to engage users when they’re not thinking about your game. They could be messaging a friend, reading an article, using IM, or otherwise making use of the Facebook platform when you hit them with a call-to-action that drives them back to your game. Best part is that they don’t have to leave Facebook. I’m not sure that it’s a huge win to give all of that up unless you can replace it with something really powerful.

If you’re not super serious about building out your web presence, though, this is a very cheap and clear way of signaling your concern / displeasure with the balance of power on the Facebook platform. Also, if you’re thinking about possibly going public or achieving even larger scale, it gives you a simple first answer to the “what will you do if Facebook makes life miserable for you” question.

One last thing. I’ve heard a few people suggest that Zynga would use this as a way to use Facebook Connect for registration without being subject to the rules of the platform. I find it highly unlikely that Facebook will be anything other than very strict with the way that people use Facebook connect. The last thing they want is to have people start to use Facebook Connect to extend the FB brand and brand promise to the web and have developers end up using it as a way to circumvent the rules of the platform.

There you have it. Feel free to comment away. Thanks for reading!

And if you’re really into this stuff, I hope you’ve checked out Inside Virtual Goods, the research report that Justin Smith from Inside Network and I co-authored.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook, for work and for fun. I also spend a lot of time playing with applications and other services that either live on Facebook or have a strong connection back to the service via Facebook Connect. Of late, I have noticed that there are a few services that I really do believe would work better if they were fully integrated (as in owned and controlled) by Facebook as opposed to the current level of integration offered.

In thinking about how to determine which services might fit the screen, I tried to come up with 4 criteria that make sense to me:

1. The product or service must already have scale and relevance (this is arbitrary – use the sniff test as to whether or not the product or service has enough usage or traction to be reasonably well known or generate meaningful revenue)

2. The output of the product or service is designed to be consumed in a social context (it’s designed to spark feedback, conversation, debate, or some other social interaction)

3. The nature of the service has real returns to social distribution (it’s in a business where word-of-mouth, friend referrals, or other low-cost / low friction distribution can generate real economic benefit to the service)

4. The same advantages associated with deeper integration / acquisition could not or have not been achieved by arms length business development deals

Facebook has already shown an ability to take homegrown products that fall into point #2 above, namely photo and video, and build a very strong position in each category. It would be interesting to see if the same could be achieved with the services below:

Yelp

I use Yelp a lot and think the service is great. While Yelp does support publishing reviews to Facebook and Twitter, I do think that having Yelp as an actual service offering from Facebook would be way more interesting. If I were Yelp, I’d be wary of doing too much deep integration with Facebook – Yelp has its own social network of people who love to review things and a corpus of reviews built up over the past few years. If that’s not the company’s most valuable asset, it certainly is one of their top competitive advantages in the space. While Yelp could have a larger user base by having a larger presence on Facebook (via an app or something), I think of Yelp as a vertical social network + a review site. It’s instructive to me that two of the largest vertical social networks, LinkedIn and Yelp, both have minimal footprints on the Facebook platform. I think the executives at both companies have managed to gain traction on the web and rightly worried about what a stronger Facebook presence (and all of the associated issues around customer ownership, platform rules, growing the core web property, etc) would mean for their overall business.

With all of that said, I’ve noticed some trends in the way my friends use Facebook that leads me to believe that there is some pent-up demand for an easy-to-use review product. As always, this is just anecdotal info:

1. My friends already use their status updates to complain or praise service experiences they have in real life; These are micro reviews delivered via status updates
2. People already use Facebook and their status updates as a social Q&A service without tools to support it; I see lots of my friends asking for recommendations for restaurants, bars, dentists, movers, etc via Facebook status updates. And I also see people reply.
3. Reviews are a social product – good reviews inspire violent agreement or debate

I can see two real advantages to a tie-up between the two companies:

1. Provided their experience about how to roll out additional metros would support it, access to the full universe of Facebook’s users would allow them to add more geographies, cities, and countries more quickly. I’m not 100% sure that Yelp’s model is one where simply putting it in front of a larger traffic firehose would mean the service would grow more quickly. I bet there is some secret sauce in how you build momentum in a new place to get the density of reviews required to have good coverage. That being said, I bet access to Facebook’s global community and the ability to be more “baked in” to the Facebook experience would help the service grow.

2. Adding user reviews would give Facebook an additional touch point with local advertisers, many of whom are the target for their self-service ad product. If user reviews begin to show up in large numbers on Facebook, I believe local advertisers whose services are being reviewed (positively or negatively) will want to advertise to be part of the conversation and to influence people who are looking to make decisions or choose vendors. Reviews would potentially give more advertisers a reason to care about what people are saying on Facebook as well as some proof points / evidence about how users view their brand / service offering.

The biggest challenge, though, would be continuing to navigate the tightrope that comes from being in both the editorial reviews and local advertising business at the same time. This is always hard to navigate – on the one hand you have advertisers paying you for promotion and visibility while on the other hand you have reasonably unfiltered feedback from users. That’s a delicate dance and having Yelp as part of Facebook would not resolve this concern.

Eventbrite

I have to admit that I’m a bit of an Eventbrite fanboy. I use their ticketing and registration system for all of my events. That being said, it’s kind of frustrating to me that while Facebook drives a ton of traffic and visibility for events (and even some ticket sales), the event integration is not that smooth. While you can publish an Eventbrite event to Facebook, you still have to drive people back to Eventbrite and out of Facebook to complete the transaction. It’s not a good experience for me as an organizer or for attendees.

There are 3 reasons why I think a tighter tie-up between the two services might work better:

1. The current Facebook Events product does not work well for events that want to charge money for attendance. There’s no way to have someone complete the purchase experience from within a Facebook event. There’s also no easy way to link an existing event to a Facebook Fan Page. The events product feels like something that was built to help people organize free, largely social events. I see more and more people trying to use Facebook for professional or cause-oriented events where there is a financial transaction as part of the deal. Events, conferences, and professional meetings are a large global business – Facebook could make a bigger splash here than they have thus far.

2. Events are, by their very nature, social – tapping into social distribution helps get the word out to more people. Most events are about getting people together to socialize, learn, be entertained, or otherwise get some value out of being in the same place at the same time. Events are one of the most social things on the web – making it easier for event organizers to find attendees and for those attendees to share interesting events with their friends and colleagues would be a natural fit.

3. Event organizers are looking for tools that will allow them to keep in touch with attendees. No event organizer wants to continue to re-acquire past attendees every time they organize and want to promote a new event. Facebook Fan pages are a pretty good focal point for keeping track of Facebook users who attend your events. If I, as an event organizer, could close the loop with attendees on Facebook, that would lead me to invest even more in developing a stronger presence on Facebook.

Overall, many of the things above could be accomplished by a BD deal where Facebook lets Eventbrite hook into Facebook’s Events API and somehow enable payment. It can’t be technically difficult. While it strikes me as doable, it hasn’t been done yet. Perhaps Facebook would be more motivated to do something like this if they were participating in the underlying economics of tickets sold.

With the 4 criteria I mentioned above, there are a handful of services that are on the bubble:

Wordpress / Posterous / Tumblr – I believe that people write to be read. The output from these blogging and micro-blogging services is very social; it’s published to share thoughts and to hopefully elicit a response. However, I think all of these services could achieve most of the benefits of deeper Facebook integration by simply making “Post to Facebook” a default option for all users. Being part of Facebook would probably help all of these services grow, but it’s not clear what Facebook would get out of the deal. I don’t find the Notes feature terribly compelling – I wonder if Facebook users do want the ability to post long-to-medium form thoughts that don’t make sense delivered in status messages. I’ve seen an increasing amount of my limited blog traffic being driven by Twitter and Facebook, suggesting that social distribution does increase readership and engagement.

Meebo – I think Meebo is a great service. They, like Yelp and LinkedIn, have their own proprietary social graph about who talks to whom, how often, and for how long. I happen to think that Meebo is far more valuable to someone who does not have access to their own social graph (like a major media company) than one that does. Facebook has their own IM product anyway. I’m not sure how widely used it is, but its mere existence creates an obstacle to a deeper tie-up between the companies.

Digg – With more content being published into Facebook by bloggers and post-happy nerds like me, Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) are getting more and more insight into what pieces of content are being shared, redistributed, generating comments, and stirring debate. At some point I imagine that Facebook would believe they have a reasonable approximation for articles, posts, and news that’s moving quickly through the Facebook community and the various sub-communities on Facebook.

Music – I don’t believe Facebook needs to dabble in music. Music is social, but I have less in common with my friends’ musical taste than just about any other form of media we consume jointly. I could be persuaded otherwise, though.

Thanks for reading my long post! You can always follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/chudson to keep up with my musings.

Over the past few months, I’ve been really interested in developing a better understanding for how effective Facebook’s advertising tools are. I’ve done this strictly for my own events business, not for Serious Business. For a total expenditure of slightly over $1,000, I feel like I’ve come up with a few opinions / thoughts on the whole experience:

Facebook fans might have a nebulous value, but Facebook fans respond to targeted communications with benefits (discounts, free stuff). I still don’t know what a Facebook fan is “worth” to me – specifically, I have no idea what the maximum CPA I’d be willing to pay to get an additional Facebook fan. What I do know, though, is that putting out an offer (discount code, free ticket, etc) to your Facebook fan gets real activity. Our most popular posts / messages were ones that offered discounts, deals, or really relevant updates on new speakers. Surprise, surprise – people respond to offers for free stuff or relevant information.

Facebook has a gaggle of products that could be simplified and unified – As a newbie advertiser, Facebook still has too many disjoint products. They have Fan Pages, Events, and Groups. My feeling is that they’re pushing most professional organizations to use Fan Pages. I have a group as well, but the tools for managing it are very basic. And you can’t (as far as I can tell) easily integrate a group into a Fan Page. And Facebook has Events. Events are great, but you can’t link an existing event with your Fan Page – you have to create events from scratch from the Fan Page to make them easy to find for your Fans. That’s something they should fix.

You know what would help? Facebook should pick a locus of activity and I think they have – it’s the Fan Page. Now they just need to make sure that as many of their tools / offerings as possible seamlessly integrate into the Fan Page experience.

Facebook advertising needs the same kind of 3rd party tools ecosystem that Google AdWords has – Overall, I feel like Facebook has really rudimentary tools when it comes to measuring the efficacy of your advertising campaigns and automating the whole bid optimization process. If you’ve spent money on Google Adwords or internet advertising more broadly, you know that there are tons of tools out there to help you maximize the efficacy of your spend, compare performance within and across networks, and to tune your creative. Facebook doesn’t have that tools ecosystem, but they’re still a young company. To make this a truly powerful platform for SME advertisers, Facebook will either need to beef up their tools or create a good 3rd party ecosystem where other people can do that for SMEs and earn a profit doing so. My money is on the company doing the latter – it’s more consistent with many of the things they’ve done to date.

Facebook advertising can deliver real results if you track it properly – For our latest conference, the Virtual Goods Summit, we managed to sell 16 tickets that were directly attributable to Facebook. To be 100% clear, that means that we sold 16 tickets where the transaction was completed by someone who clicked on a link where the referring source was Facebook. If you’re an Eventbrite user, this means that 16 of our tickets came from tracking URLs that were sent to the Facebook audience. Facebook was our second most fruitful channel for customer acquisition – the only channel that outperformed them (based on tracked, directly attributed ticket purchases) was our own mailing list. Not bad for a 5 year old company with a relatively new advertising platform.

Longer term, though, the value of having a strong presence on Facebook is that it is a relatively friction-free way to communicate with people who are interested in your brand. Email is clogged – it has been taken over by spammers. Reaching people through that channel is difficult. It’s hard to get people to give you phone numbers – that’s too private and not disposable. So I do think that having a low-friction channel with high responsiveness is a good thing for people who want to advertise. Facebook, though, will have to bear the responsibility for setting the rules of the road and keeping this channel from getting clogged.

If you want to take part in my FB marketing experiments, become a fan of the Virtual Goods Summit or the Social Gaming Summit. If you have thoughts on your experiences using Facebook’s marketing tools, let me know in the comments.

This will be a very short blog post. I’ve had Google Wave for about two weeks now and I still can’t identify the core use case the product is seeking to address. I don’t have generic collaboration needs – I have plenty of specific situations where collaboration is helpful, but they’re all fairly custom. For example, I would have been really happy if Google had integrated Google Chat as a persistent sidebar in Google Docs and Spreadsheets – that would be something that would fit the way I already use those products and make them incrementally more useful. Ditto on the ability to leave notes or keep a log of persistent communication over the life of the document. But Google Wave doesn’t seem to be tailored to any of the use cases above. What problem is this trying to solve?

What am I missing? Can someone help me out?

I’ve been playing with Gist since the beta. After a several week hiatus, I’ve started using the product again. Overall, I think it’s a very good effort at helping people keep up to date with what their friends are doing across the web and helping you stay up to date. The best use case? Checking Gist before you meet up with someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Gist will show you their latest activity on Twitter, LinkedIn, and the web more broadly.

As much as I like Gist and as useful as I think it can ultimately become, I can’t help but feel that this product would do way more for me if it were more like infrastructure and less like an application. What do I mean? Well, instead of having to go to Gist to get these updates, I wish Gist were more like oxygen – it would show up in my calendar when I opened a meeting, show up in my address book when I looked someone up, and generally integrate with all of the other systems I already use to keep track of people and manage my day. It’s hard to start out as infrastructure without a good representative use case deployment and the web product does that. I just hope that Gist eventually becomes something that’s more infrastructure and less destination – you can’t get there overnight but I hope the company’s aims point in that direction.