Picture This

Foursquare added the ability to share pictures when checking in to their iPhone App this morning.  I love this feature and it is good to see foursquare catch up to what we built on AOL Lifestream this summer with the ability to update your status, location and share a picture all at the same time.

Images and location are very meaningful and go hand in hand.  Way before Flickr added geo tagging to albums, we used to organize our own physical photo albums around events and places.  I used to sit and flip through an album reminiscing about where I was when the photo was taken and when.  That is what makes what we did on AOL Lifestream and what Flickr and Foursquare have done is important to me.

It also makes me wonder why Facebook has not done a better job innovating on photos.  The feature is the most popular on Facebook, and in many ways was the most significant reason why they now have 500M users, but the feature actually feels weak to me.  I still use Flickr because of this.  When I view my Facebook photos or my friends photos, dates and location are not easily viewable if at all.  I can see the comments on the photo which is great and I can see who else is in the photo with me, but I really can’t expect Facebook’s Photos feature to be a reference point for me.  If I want to easily search for a photo based on when or where, forget it.

Here is my map of all my photos:

Is social slowing your content experience?

I started reading TechCrunch 4 years ago and they provided an essential lifeline to what was happening in Silicon Valley while I was on the east coast.  It seemed the site and specifically Mike Arrington always could find a great story and break news that others could not.

TechCrunch, which in September was acquired by AOL, has always embraced new technology to better the reading experience.  In April when Facebook announced their social plugins at their F8 developer conference, TechCrunch added a bunch of different social plugins to the main page.

The two most prominent social plugins are the Like button which appears on each article on the homepage and the Like Box which is on the right rail of the homepage.  The issue is that for me on my Mac on all browsers TechCrunch loads quickly but the page becomes locked as it tries to load the Like Box.  I am unable to scroll or click on any of the page elements.

This got me thinking, are we slowing down the web with all of the social integrations we are placing on these sites?

Washington Redskins = Telenovela

Should I give up?  Should I care?  Can the Redskins make the fans hate the team anymore?  Since 1999, this team has been an embarrassment, and sure it is easy to point to Dan Snyder, the Redskins owner, but it goes beyond him.

This week, only a few weeks after signing Donovan McNabb to a 5 year contract extension, basically handed Donovan his walking papers, benching him for the rest of the season.  I am partial as a Syracuse grad who lived a few doors down from Don in college.  He is a great player and a great person, who was raised right, worked hard, and always competed.  The Redskins’ complete lack of respect for Donovan McNabb this season just makes me question why have I rooted for the Skins for my whole life?

How can the Redskins make a commitment to a player, and then simply tell him after 3 weeks “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”  So much of the issue is with Shanahan Family (Head Coach Mike and Offensive Coordinator Kyle), and the relationship they have had with McNabb.

Are the Shanahan’s racist?  Some might say so, as they have called McNabb weak, gutless, and stupid, something you never heard them say with Elway, Cutler or Rex Grossman, all quarterbacks they used to coach.

Are the Shanahan’s winners?  Mike Shanahan was one of the most sought after coaches last year, and his resume looked good, but was it really?  Shanahan made it to the playoffs 7 of his 17 years coaching, which is a great percentage.  His back to back Super Bowl victories were also impressive, though he had one of the best QBs of all time and had a great staff.  I believe John Elway was much more responsible for those Super Bowl wins than Shanahan.  So if you take away the 7 playoff victories from 1997 and 1998, your left with a coach who won 1 playoff game in 5 other trips.  Also, it seems like Shanahan subscribes to the theory of “let the bridges burn to light the way” as he leaves town.  His departure from the Raiders and Broncos were both less than graceful.  It looks like his departure from the Redskins may be the least graceful of them all.

I think this video captures perfectly the feelings of his departure from Denver.

So where does this leave the Redskins soap opera?  They have alienated a player who is beloved throughout the league, and have mishandled the Albert Haynesworth situation.  They have questionable coaches, and the fans are beyond fed up.  They play in the most competitive division in football.  Add all this up, and the Redskins have a long way to go to fix the mess.

Got To Hand it To Mark Cuban

I am a huge college football fan, heck I am a huge sports nut in general.  Today kicks off the 2010 Division 1-A bowl season with the amazing New Mexico Bowl pitting BYU against University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).  Woohoo?!?!

There are some great college post season tradition like the Rose Bowl, and even in more recent history the Holiday Bowl has had great moments, but lets be honest, no top Bowl moment ever can compare to the NCAA Basketball tournament.

So this week, along comes Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, saying he is willing to payoff each college or conference to end the charade that is the Bowl Championship Series.  Mark is an outside the box thinker, and in this case he is spot on.  The BCS exists for one simple reason, money.  See while the NCAA Basketball tournament is awesome for the fans and student athletes,  colleges lose money playing in the tournament due to travel and ticket costs.  The BCS and Bowls in general literally make or break athletic department budgets.  Even when you see half empty stadiums, teams are guaranteed a payout thanks to ESPN and those awesome sponsors like ‘uDrove‘ who is sponsoring the Humanitarian Bowl.

When I worked in the athletic department at Syracuse, I can remember see plaques in specific conference rooms thanking the Fiesta Bowl for providing the audio and video technology in the room.  When Syracuse made it to the Sweet 16 in the spring of 1998, the university was not sure they could send the cheerleaders or band due to costs.  Did I mention the university was giving away their bowl tickets every year, but students slept outside for NCAA Basketball tickets each year.  Things are upside down.  Fans want a tournament, but sponsorship money keeps the bowls alive and colleges coffers lined.

The format of the playoff does not matter, but breaking the cartel that is the Bowl Championship Series needs to happen.  The world needs to be spared of the Beef O’Brady Bowl featuring Southern Miss and Louisville.

How Undelicious!

With Yahoo sunsetting Delicious among a few other web properties, I think we are seeing how a company fails to capture the potential of an acquisition.  Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005, and was an early example of how Social was going to be such an important component to Web 2.0.

The social bookmarking website was an important tool in my life when I launched Open AIM in 2006.  The team used Delicious’ tagging to view common blog posts or reviews of AIM to determine what we should do with the product and platform.  Unfortunately Yahoo could not figure out how to take the utility that was Delicious and make it a product that powered other Yahoo properties.  The truth is Google Reader was able to replicate Delicious’ social features and productize them faster.

I definitely need to make sure to grab my data from Delicious before they shut it down.  It is weird to see more and more nacent Web 2.0 products get shut down.