"Catering to the need for intellectual stimulation is a little nebulous, but obvious at the same time. Designing the APIs in a particularly elegant way will naturally help bring in the best and the brightest engineers; throwing together something that barely does the job will inevitably turn off the elite. One subtler example: creating "simple" and "power developer" APIs will help the newcomer developers get up to speed very quickly, but not rob the advanced ones of the full power of the platform.

It's worth pointing out that ultimately, until non-advertising business models are devised for social applications (and probably even after they are) valuable distribution (reach + frequency) is going to be the main underlying goal for all developers, commercial and otherwise. The examples above simply illustrate what the platform can do to refine the definition of "valuable distribution" for the developers."

--Max Levchin, Slide, writing about motivating developers in social media applications, aka "games."

User 21 has a nifty post with an analysis of the top 250 most followed people on FriendFeed, ans according to the chart, I'm number 34, which makes me the 4th most followed woman and  in the upper 15% over all.

This is flattering, but I have a few observations about it:

• Most of the people in the top 50 are all subscribed to most of the people in the top 100, so there is an info-junkies skew going on here.
• If the bottom of the 250 are people with 264 people and the top is 19,000, there's not as much of a long tail as one would think--which also suggests this application hasn't penetrated far beyond the web 2.0 digerati world, yet.
• Is FF building a new market or taking people from micro-blogging ( think the latter, mostly).
• Will the rate of growth slow as we work past the digerati, or is a second and third way of adoption coming? (What would tip it?)
  

Russell Beattie: Why  open-source identi.ca can't scale
rabble: leaving yahoo (great post with sharp observations, like: "Maybe at some point i'll sit down and write about the relationship the reform movement part of yahoo had with the mothership. While i tried to make things better, i'm not sure that improving the quality of a fortune 500 company is really my cup of tea.")
Sarah Dopp: OpenQueerMic--new host, new blo--July 11th event in SO
Dating in groups: Polyspeeddating.com and igniter--can you explain the difference?

Fred sez: "Social media is no different from all media. The number of people who at one point were interested in your content or service is not that meaningful. What matters is the number of people who engage with your content or service on a daily basis and how engaged they are. And RSS subscribers, Facebook app installs, and follower numbers don't measure that."

Susn sez: Fred is totally bottom line level of right. This is the active versus installed base of any application (as opposed to that other metric, page views for media).and the user to install or registration ratio is always easily 3 to 1, even less over time as people churn out.

"If at any point in time you utter the words "Just Don't Get It" or "Just Doesn't Get It" in any conversation with me, I will not do business with you.

If you try to justify your business, idea, proposal or whatever and in the course of conversation you utter these words, you have just proven to me that you are lazy. That rather than discussing the merits of another position, you think I'm stupid enough to dismiss that position because you want me to."
--Mark Cuban, uttering simple brilliance.

(Via scobelizer)

"So now we have a company with a woman CEO and a woman CTO and a woman COO. And the work we do? The work we do together? It's only incidental that it's software. Because what it is -- what it really is -- is applause. It is praise, for all these glorious women. Because it is fitting, and it is right, to give them thanks and praise."

--People's Software co-founder Lisa Williams, writing about PSco and how BlogHer --and the conferences it has held--played a game-changing role both in her life--and in bringing our new company together.

"Bad management is cancer. Bad managers tend to promote other bad managers for similar skills: brown-nosing and covering their asses. The best, most competent managers generally get held down at the bottom level (managers who have line employees as direct reports); the director level is usually the glass ceiling for good managers in a company infected by bad management."

--Valleywag commentator BartKela, commenting on a post about Yahoo! staffers departing.

Reading this this am just made me get that big smile--Christine is so smart, and so shrewed--and First Round is a great team--this is wonderful news--and smart hiring on Josh's part, IMHO:

" Big personal announcement today! I'm officially joining First Round Capital. (Thanks very much to Josh for his warm welcome.) I'll be working closely with Rob Hayes in the San Francisco office."

Way to go, folks. Want to show you all what we're working on at Peoples Software.

So I am at the United RedCarpet Club in Chicago, waiting for a flight to Denver after lots of delays from TVC.. Got smart and used miles for a daypass, so am nibbling cheese and using free wifi for a couple hours.

My United miles, for the most part, are left over from the years I spent travelling cross country for AOL and as a consultant; during the time I spent at Yahoo, I travelled little (that was the idea).

However, I know I am going to be travelling regularly this year--both for Peoples Software and for the work I am doing for the Knight News Challenge. So--

• Does anyone have an airport club they prefer?
•  Day pass vs. membership for a moderate traveller?
• Other thoughts on success at the road warrior thing circa 2008, layover version?

Thanks, lazyweb!

From around the twittersphere, blogosphere, etc  this weekend:

Loren Feldman: "People like the puppet more than you because he is more real than you are. More honest than you are, smarter than you are. More human than you are. People want the Shel puppet to win. The same can't be said for you my friend."

Dave Winer: "They let Shel Israel off the hook. He gets his name back, the puppet is retired. The mock trial they were planning for the TechCrunch summer party, that I learned of this morning, is cancelled."

Dave Winer: "All I could think about is how mean this community had become."

Susan sez: Mean, indeed.