Diego Basch

Jason Kottke started this meme on Twitter. People write absurd things such as “when Obama wins, Michael Bay will stop making movies”. This resulted in a spike for the phrase “when obama wins” on Twitter:

Not too long ago I spent some time thinking of a name for an open-source project. I brainstormed with other people and we discarded several ideas because of the following reasons:

• too long
• not very original
• ambiguous or unclear pronunciation
• domain name unavailable
• not too relevant to the project

We finally decided on a name, after long deliberations. A few days later I decided to take a look at the most successful projects in terms of number of downloads on Sourceforge. Here are the top 15 as of this posting:

1 eMule
2 Azureus
3 Ares Galaxy
4 BitTorrent
5 DC++
6 Shareaza
7 GTK+ and The GIMP installers for Windows
8 7-Zip
9 VirtualDub
10 Audacity
11 CDex
12 FileZilla
13 eMule Plus
14 guliverkli
15 Pidgin

Shareaza? guliverkly? Evidently there are more important factors that influence the success of these projects. I wonder what other types of entities are similar in this respect. Clearly this is also true for companies. Near the end of the last century, when I used to work for a company called Inktomi (whose name few people could pronounce correctly, and which had a very obscure meaning with little relation to search engines), we used to learn of a new startup with an “interesting” name pretty much every day. I remember that I learned about two companies around the same time. The first one, whose name I liked, had a short name that perfectly fit what the company did: eMusic. The second one, I didn’t like very much, as it was meaningless and misspelled: Google.

At Flaptor we just released a WordPress plugin for our automatic tagger. It’s called TagMahal (click on the link for download instructions). It’s fun to play with, I just used to pick the tags for this post.

I read a post on Techcrunch about a startup called YouNoodle. Their idea is to try to predict the success of a startup using artificial intelligence. I doubt they can come up with something better than what an experienced technologist could do with a simple checklist, but I guess time will tell. There is a link to an interview with the founders on the NYTimes. What I found interesting was the response to the obvious question, have you applied the algorithm to your company?

“So far, we haven’t run ourselves through it,” Mr. Goodson said, adding that the results could prove baffling. “If it says we’ll fail, and it’s right, that’s something of a paradox.”

It is not a paradox at all. There are many non-paradoxical explanations for such a result, for example:

• The algorithm doesn’t work at all, and it guessed luckily. For example, here’s my algorithm: For a given startup, I predict that it will fail with a 90% chance. It will be right most of the time but it’s still worthless. If I started a company based on this algorithm, it would most certainly fail.
• The algorithm works, but the startup itself will fail. Wouldn’t that be ironic? You come up with an algorithm that can predict whether a startup will succeed, but you don’t have what it takes to make it into a successful business and the algorithm knows it.
• The algorithm works well enough but it’s not perfect. YouNoodle suceeds in spite of the fact that the algorithm guessed wrongly for them.
• The algorithm doesn’t work at all and the company still succeeds! I can remember several examples of this scenario.

As I posted on the Flaptor blog recently, we released a tool to automatically suggest tags for blog posts based on a learning algorithm. You can check it out here:

Flaptor autotagger

Most of what we do at Flaptor is related to search and information retrieval, but once in a while people want to learn other technologies. This is how Bonoki was born. Some of the guys wanted to play around with Ajax and the browser side of things. We picked up Joel Spolsky’s book on User Interface Design and spent a few months working on (yet another) photo sharing site. Please check it out and let us know what you think, we welcome all feedback however harsh!

I read Paul Graham’s essay titled The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. It’s a good read and it’s hard not to agree with the majority of what he says. In a nutshell: success is the opposite of failure. If you avoid doing absolutely everything that would cause you to fail, you succeed. Here is a partial list of things to avoid. Among them, he has somewhat uninformative points like “don’t raise too little money” and “don’t raise too much money” which is like telling someone to not undercook or overcook a steak. No recipe here, the proof is on the plate.

In a way, it reminds me of someone one I knew who was reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in the hope of becoming a more effective person. After browsing the book for a while, I thought that she might as well be reading “The 12 Habits of Famous Race Horses”. This article is in a gray area between descriptive and prescriptive. Even though it’s nice to read, I don’t know if it’s actually very helpful. The people who have what it takes to create a successful startup (a tiny minority) will do it anyway. Those who don’t can have this article read to them every morning by their personal trainer as they work off the undercooked steak from the night before and it will do them no good.

At this point, I feel like inserting a link to something more Carl-Saganesque like the Drake Equation. The point is that a number of factors are completely outside of anyone’s control.

One of my favorite dishes.

First post after several weeks of traveling around.

I ordered a kit for this project. Their objective is to track the migrations of human genes from our common African ancestor until the current state of the world population. I’ll try to post the results when I get them, probably a couple of months from now.

Thanks to John, I learned of The Arcade Fire. Their album Funeral is the best thing I’ve heard in a long time and I have been listening to it over and over. It’s one of those rare occasions that makes me feel like sending money to an artist.