Adam McFarland

When I woke up today and combed through my morning email I was shocked to see that yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing a browser today.  Usually these things leak out sooner, but I hadn’t heard anything other than the same type of vague rumors that you hear about a gPhone or gOS.

Google Chrome, as it’s called, was released today at noon and can be downloaded for XP/Vista (Linux and Mac soon to follow).  After reading the comic and watching the video, I was excited to download it and take it for a spin. While all of the features sounded nice, I didn’t know what to expect.  Just because they say that they “started a browser from scratch” and that it’s designed for “today’s web applications and not the web pages of 1998″ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera, etc.

After playing with it for 10 minutes I feel confident in saying:  it is better than all of them.  Noticably better.  It is now my default browser.

Here are my thoughts:

• It is sooooooo much faster than other browsers that it isn’t funny.  Google spent a lot of time highlighting the new javascript rendering and crash control, and for good reason. Pages load a lot faster than in FF3 or IE7, and the “crash control” isolates each tab so if one crashes your entire browser session doesn’t.  They even have a task manager where you can see which tabs are using the most resources, very similar to the Windows task manager.  I tried apps like Gmail and Google Reader and they absolutely flew relative to the other browsers I had open.
• New tabs aren’t blank.  Instead they show thumbnails of your most visited sites, a list of your most recent bookmarks, a search box to search bookmarks, and a list of your most recent searches.
• Gone is the search box in the upper right.  Everything is in one bar - your history, your searching, and your web addresses.  The first drop down for anything you type is “search on Google”.  Subtle yet awesome.
• Less clutter - I’d say I have an extra 5% viewing space than I do in FF3.  Despite that, it’s still super simple to find everything.  Nothing I can think of that other browsers have is inherintly missing.  It just works.
• It appears to render exactly like Firefox, which is what I figured it would do (since portions are modeled on Mozilla’s engine).  This is good news for developers.
• Speaking of which, the developer tools are solid.  I still prefer Firebug in Firefox, but that might be just because it’s what I know and am familiar with.  The javascript debugging appears to be better than other tools I’ve used, although I don’t do a ton of JS debugging right now.
• Did I mention it’s REALLY FAST?

Download it and see for yourself.  It installs in seconds and imports everything from Firefox or IE so you can pick up right where you left off.

I have yet to really consider how much of a mainstream impact this could have and how it could change the future of the web.  For the time being I’m just enjoying a new browsing experience (I’m typing this post in it right now).  In the past I’ve been critical of all of the half-assed crap that Google releases and slaps “beta” on, but this is different.  It is very refined.  Microsoft should definitely be worried.  Google is creeping more and more into our everyday lives where Microsoft used to be.  Can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

P.S. The spacing on this post was messed up when I first hit submit. Guess it isn’t perfect yet.

P.S.S. I had some trouble in phpMyAdmin (which is how we access our MySQL databases).  Chrome wasn’t executing queries.  It’s no longer my default browser.  That lasted all of 30 minutes.  Oh well, I still stand by everything I said above.  For most browsing it is still fantastic.  I’m sure they’ll work out the minor kinks soon.

To the Cuil Management Team:

Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine.  With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around.  So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries.  And I must say - the results are horrible. 

How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago?  SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web.  Wouldn’t want to actually return the SportsLizard.com home page or anything…

Then a search for “sports card price guide” showed up in your auto-suggest box but yielded no results!  There are only like 10 legit online sports card price guides, many of which have been around since the dawn of the internet.  Don’t have those in your 120 billion pages huh?  While we’re on the topic:  why does a search for my name not yield this domain?  Umm, this is Adam-McFarland.net?  At least return the tool over on Adam-McFarland.com!

I’ll admit, you impressed me by showing PureAdapt.com when I searched “Pure Adapt”.  I mean, five minutes ago that wouldn’t have done anything for me, but your results were so bad that I was actually shocked to see some accuracy.  Then again, you do display a totally irrelevant skull next to our name.  Wtf is up with that?

In short - your search engine sucks.  Google is still FAR more relevant for 99.9% of queries.  Stop hating on my company.

Sincerely,

Adam McFarland
Co-Owner, Pure Adapt Inc
www.PureAdapt.com

This is driving me nuts.  So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective.  I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this:

Has a banner ad that looks like this:

With the javascript actually typed out:

Am I the only one that this happens to?  Wtf Digg.  If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re losing impressions/money, as are your advertisers.   I feel like there’s no possible way that this happens to other people.  That it must be some Firefox plugin interfering or something…although maybe I’m wrong and no one else has caught something so obvious and ridiculously costly…

(By the way, check out my Digg profile and add me as a friend if you have an account.)

Sometimes it takes me a while to do things I know I should do. Case in point: in October I read this fascinating feature in Inc. Magazine about Pandora entitled Pandora’s Long Strange Trip: Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business.

Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls it the music genome–that lets users create online radio stations generated by the software’s recommendations. Tell Pandora your favorite song is “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead, and within seconds it will create a station–Casey Jones Radio–that streams nonstop songs from artists such as the Youngbloods, the Byrds, and the Beatles, along with stuff you might not expect, like R.E.M., the Jam, and Tom Petty. It’s undeniably cool and completely addictive, but Pandora has never quite found its footing as a business. Indeed, the company has been through an almost unbelievable number of setbacks, a series of blows that would make the most determined entrepreneur throw in the towel. Westergren has run out of money, which forced to him to lay off his entire staff (except for those willing to work for free). He’s been rejected some 350 times by venture capitalists. He has faced bankruptcy, haggled with anxious creditors, and been sued by employees. Deal after deal has fallen through at the last minute.

Sounded pretty cool to me. So what did I do? Completely forgot about it after I read the article…until this morning when I forgot my iPod at home. I’m the only one in the warehouse right now, so I randomly thought of Pandora and decided to give it a shot.

After entering about 10 of my favorite bands I started listening. The first few songs were from the groups I entered. Then it happened: for the last two hours they have not missed once - every single song has been either a group I like (but didn’t enter into the system), a song I like but had forgotten about and don’t own, or a song I never heard before from a group I’ve never heard of but liked. Amazing.

When I clicked the ‘why did you play this song’ tab for one song it said: “based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, melodic song writing, and dirty electric guitar rifts.”

Sure, if you say so. Next time someone asks me what kind of music I like I know what to say

When hulu - Fox and NBC’s joint online video venture -was announced I didn’t give it much thought. ABC already allows people to view episodes of popular shows online, so I figured this would be much the same. Mike signed up for the private beta but I didn’t bother. After getting his invite Mike told me it was awesome so without much thought I decided to put my name in for the beta and see if I could take it for a spin.

Now I’m addicted to it. Seriously, it’s amazing.

Miss an episode of The Simpsons? It’s on hulu the next morning. Want to watch an episode of 24 from Season 1? It’s on hulu too. Do you love old shows like Arrested Development or Futurama? Yup, they’re on hulu.

The best part is that I can login from any web browser and within seconds have an episode running in decent full-screen quality. No software, no downloads, no fees. There are only limited commercials - about 45 seconds per 20 minute episode, all from the same sponsor.

Even cooler, I’ve started discovering new shows that I’ve never watched before. A lot of friends have told me that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is hilarious. I honestly didn’t even know what network it was on yet alone what day and time, but I threw on a few episodes from hulu the other day and loved it so much that I went over to Amazon and purchased the first two seasons on DVD! This is exactly what they hope people do considering it’s a free service, and I’m more than happy to fork out $29.99 for some DVDs if I really like a show…so everyone wins

I’m really excited to see what they’ll do once they come out of private beta. I’m actually HOPING that they start charging. I’d gladly pay $10 - $20 a month if they:

• Made every single episode available all the time (right now it’s spotty at best for most shows).
• Made more movies available….not just a few “classics” like The Breakfast Club.
• Got a few more networks to sign up. I don’t like anything on CBS, so I’d settle for ABC and their family of networks (including ESPN of course)
• Sold me (or rented me) a hulu box that I could plug into my TV to watch. This sort of blends in with the On-Demand service that most cable providers offer, but I think hulu is already better than On-Demand so I’d just assume have my own hulu box. Who needs a DVR when everything is available anytime you want it? Hell, who needs DVDs if everything is available anytime you want it (assuming the quality is on par)? This would kick the crap out of Apple TV

Oh, and you can also embed full episodes on your site:

I recently went back and visited with one of my old engineering professors.  He seemed happy that I had started my own business, but the whole time we were talking I could sense a bit of skepticism.  Then I said “I went into industry for a while after college but didn’t like it”.  He looked at me with sort of a puzzled look and bluntly said “why?”

Here’s the thing - product development and web development are very similar.  At their core, each is just a challenge in problem solving and that’s why I love both.  Hell, gun to my head I’d probably say that product development is more interesting than web development:  there is more freedom and the problems you can solve are more diverse.

But - and this is a big but - the barrier to entry is far more difficult in product development.  The project I was working on developing in late 2005 as an engineer still hasn’t hit the market yet…and it’s not a complex product (it’s the equivalent complexity of a web mashup that you’d build in a week).  A simple product, but we needed to do several rounds of prototypes, scout out manufacturing facilities, do consumer safety tests and other QC testing that takes months, negotiate deals with our customers like Walmart and Target to stock the product, etc.

In the entrepreneurial world, it can take five or ten years to get a product to market compared to five to ten weeks to get a website to market.  The barrier to entry costs less and takes less time, and that is why I prefer web development.  I’ve been able to get every single “great” idea I’ve ever had to market in the web world - I was able to get Music Alerts online in a weekend.   Some of the stuff has been a success, some of it hasn’t been - but I’ve been able to find out in a matter of a few years what would’ve taken fifteen years in the product development world.

Imagine spending years patenting a device, finding a capable vendor, getting a contract to sell it in Target…and then finding out consumers like your competitors brand better.  It happens all the time, and it would suck to waste $500k and 5 years to find that out.  Now, spending $2k and 2 months isn’t so bad.  I crave the ability to throw a lot of shit against the wall and see what sticks, and the web world makes that possible.

Let me re-phrase that.  I think it is difficult to make money online, but most people make it far too difficult on themselves.  When starting an online venture, you should ask yourself “can I make money right away?”.  Not when you’ve got 10,000 or 1,000,000 members.  Not when you’ve got 5,000 people subscribed to your premium service.  Right now, by the time you have 1/5/10/20 customers.

How do I know this:  because I’ve made the mistake as much as anyone.  SportsLizard makes solid money, but it’s taken 3+ years and it’s still not enough for one person to live off of.  Contrast that with people I know in the collectibles industry that solely sell on eBay who make a decent living for themselves.  You need to get a lot of advertising/affiliate sales/people paying $5 a month for a Price Guide to come close to the money you make actually selling sports collectibles.  I guarantee that if I started in 2004 with the sole purpose of being a card/collectible dealer I would have SportsLizard pulling in the kind of money Detailed Image does.

And you can repeat the same story for iPrioritize.  Both sites have had pretty measurable success and have trouble making any kind of real money.  I’m not saying this to deter people from making “cool web 2.0″ sites, just that it’s really really hard to get people to pay you money to use one of those sites because the expectation level has been set that web 2.0 sites are free.  There are a very small percent that can make substantial money selling ads or with premium subscriptions.

Hell, Music-Alerts is by far the most viral site I’ve ever started and still gets more traffic than any of our other sites.  Wanna know how much we’ve made off of MA so far?  About $12 in affiliate sales.  All the PR and traffic in the world doesn’t necessarily = money.

In my experience, there are 2 sure-fire ways to make money in the web world: e-commerce and design/development services.  If you sell a product people want, it’s hard NOT to make sales online because almost everyone these days starts their purchasing process with a Google search….and you have built-in ways to reach customers from day one with zero marketing effort in eBay and Amazon.  And there will never, ever be a lack of available design/development work out there because every business - new, old, and future - needs a web presence of some sort.   Put your own special spin on one of those two industries to give your company a competitive advantage of some sort, and I find it hard to believe you can’t build a million dollar company in 5 years or less.

I guess my point is this:  don’t create new ways for people to spend money, instead find better ways to profit off of how they already spend it.

In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured I’d always be an iTunes Store guy.

That is, until I started seriously playing around with Grooveshark. One of the best parts about Music-Alerts drawing some attention is that I’ve received praise from - and consequently struck up conversations with - some young startups in the music industry. One such new acquaintance is Andrew Wise of the upstart company Grooveshark, which was started by three University of Florida students. It’s so unique and has so many features, that I’ll just cut to the chase and list off what it does:

• There are two components - your online profile and the file-sharing software (like old Napster or Limewire) that accesses your MP3 files.
• You can listen to streaming music for free on the site as much as you want.
• You can create playlists, add friends, receive suggestions, etc (all the social networking stuff).
• When you want to download a track, you add funds to your account and buy it DRM free for $0.99. Royalties are paid to the labels, to Grooveshark, and to the person who you’re downloading the song from. Hence the slogan “everybody gets paid”.

After being invited to be a BETA tester, I just went in minutes ago and set up my profile and added $5 to my account. I then proceeded to search for a song, download it, and import it into iTunes (gotta be able to transfer it to the iPod). It worked awesome. Bottom line - as long as Grooveshark is able to strike up deals with all the labels and be legal, it’s now where I’m starting my music search. It’s a cross between a social network, p2p file sharing system, and streaming music service. For the same price as a song on iTunes, I get it DRM free and I get the advantages of a social network that knows my music habits (incidentally, if I have a feature request it would be to import my iTunes library XML file so it already knows what music I like).

The only real question is about the legalities. What are the origins of the music I’m downloading, and if 90+% of the music on the site is bootleg, how will record companies feel about it? On one hand, they might like the fact that they’re actually making money from it when they otherwise wouldn’t be. On the other hand, they might not like the fact that other people are getting a cut for uploading it. Only time will tell. I’m certainly rooting for it to work.

P.S. - the Music-Alerts Facebook App is REAL buggy. I know about it, I just hate debugging under the constraints of Facebook. I’ll fix it…eventually. My bad

OK, so I know I’ve been posting a lot about Music-Alerts. I was intending on writing a post today about how this has been a really up and down week. A lot of great stuff has happened, and a lot of frustrating stuff that makes me want to run full speed into a wall has happened too. It really has been one of those weeks where you drain yourself by running through the entire gamut of human emotions.

Instead, I’m posting about Music-Alerts. After my little marketing challenge was done I expected traffic to taper off and traffic to level off. Then I could get back to “real work”. Instead - in true roller-coaster-week fashion - something inexplicable has happened: the site has worked it’s way UP the blogsphere and landed itself on giant tech sites like Lifehacker and MakeUseOf. Previously with iPrioritize I worked my ass off for months to get a mention on a big blog, and then watched the press mentions and traffic trickle down to smaller sites and eventually taper off. Instead, it seems like every day a bigger blog or site picks it up, and traffic just keeps growing. The site also now ranks top 5 for popular terms like”album release dates” in Google, which kind of solidifies the stream of traffic and means there won’t be a total crash once this PR wave stops.

The only explanation I can give is that it’s a really, really simple service that fills a need that was somehow unmet…and people love it. Honestly, it’s kind of cool and also kind of depressing at the same time. I mean, today Music Alerts will more than double the traffic for all of the rest of our sites combined! That’s SportsLizard + Detailed Image + Detail University + this blog + iPrioritize + the rest…all of which do pretty well for themselves. If traffic continues at todays levels, it will be well over 1 million unique visitors this month…wtf!!! Has everything else we done been so shitty compared to this? We’ve spent years on other sites and I spent a few hours on this one, and yet this one is really that much better???? Really makes you think.

My inbox has been flooded with “thank you” notes about the service, one person even going as far as saying “it’s guys like you that make the internet a better place”, when in reality all I was trying to do was make a feed for myself so I didn’t miss another album release. I even had a large Web2.0 music company contact us about integrating it with their application (we had a quick phone chat). It’s just been an insane day. This is probably the first project I’ve done where I really didn’t even think about as a business - aside from this blog - and it’s the most successful day (in terms of traffic) that one of my sites has ever had.

I don’t even want to think about what would happen if it lands on TechCrunch and continues to grow. At what point do you try to monetize something that is very tough to monetize…and is there a way to do it that doesn’t turn people off from the simplicity that attracts people to the site in the first place? Obviously, more affiliate links to buy/download + feed ads wouldn’t be overwhelming, but also probably wouldn’t make much money. Maybe the user base - which has grown by almost 1k today - will be worth something in and of itself…kind of like how Kiko made a business of growing a large user base and selling off.

Oh - and I now have an addiction to checking my stats every 10 minutes. I’m like a crack addict who can’t get off the high, but who knows he’s going to crash and crash bad. There’s no way it can keep growing…can it?

I wasn’t really sure how my one hour of marketing Music Alerts would pan out.  Turns out it went well…really well.  The StumbleUpon traffic has been nice, but it was those 10 or so emails that I sent that got the viral bug started.  Blogs like Emily Chang’s eHub, KillerStartups, and even a popular Italian tech blog gave it good reviews, and the site went from about 30 visitors a and 1 feed created per day, to over 500 visitors and over 50 feeds created each day this week.  Now I realize those aren’t HUGE numbers, but it’s a hell of a lot for an hours work.

If those numbers keep up, this site will have a sizable user base in less than a year, and it may just have a chance at making us some $.  I think the next step will be to add more to each feed - include affiliate links to download the album and buy from several places other than Amazon, and also insert AdSense-like ads into the feeds.  I’d say that I’ll probably do that sometime in the next few months, and I’ll re-evaluate things if it really grows.  I love the simplicity of the site, so I’m going to try to work around making people register when monetizing it, which will likely limit what can be done.  Then again, keeping it simple and forcing those constraints might be what makes the site standout from all of the cluttered crap out there.

I did add one feature to the site today:  you can now add artists to your feed.  All you need to do is click the “Add to Your Feed” in the upper-right, enter your feed key (the last 8 digits in the feed URL), and enter the artist name.  A nice simple feature that addresses one of the main weaknesses of the site.