There are even fewer that I like so much that I tell everyone I know about. I’ll bring the sites up in conversation, I’ll email friends who might find them interesting, I’ll tweet about them, I’ll blog about them. I’m like a one-man PR team for them, and I like filling that role because I think they deserve every bit of it.

Here are five such sites. Hopefully you’ll find some or all of them useful.

Adagio Teas (www.adagio.com)

My favorite place to order tea online. I like to buy as much tea as I can locally, and I really like visiting tea shops when I travel, but I always seem to come back to Adagio. Their e-commerce shopping experience is awesome. The usability of their site is fantastic. They have tons of great information, from product descriptions to reviews. The teas are priced very affordably – most teas can be sampled for around $3. Shipping is fast, usually one business day from New Jersey, and if you spend $50 or more it’s free.

Still Tasty (www.stilltasty.com)

I’m big on not wasting food. If I buy it, I try to eat it before it expires. It just seems like the right thing to do…both economically and morally. If you’re anything like me, you often wonder “how long will this last?” Still Tasty has the answer for just about every possible food. They give you information for how long it will last in various conditions – refrigerated, room temperature, and/or frozen – and they give you storage tips. It’s been an invaluable reference for me.

Simple Desktops (www.simpledesktops.com)

Simple Desktops is exactly what it sounds – a beautiful collection of simple desktop backgrounds. I like to keep my computer (and well, everything else too) clean, neat, and organized. I’ve probably downloaded more desktops from this site than I have all other sites on the web combined. Their rules for submission are awesome:

• All images should be 2560px by 1600px
• No gradients
• No drop shadows
• No lens flares
• No words, but abstract type is okay
• No on-image attribution, the attribution is only on the site
• Save the image as a .png

It’s a great example of “more is less”.

All Over Albany (www.alloveralbany.com)

It’s no secret that I think Albany, NY is a great place to build a business. But once I moved back after living in Connecticut I often felt “out of the loop” with what was going on. I wasn’t in college any more, nor was I in a traditional work environment where you typically hear about those types of things. Truth is, this area is a really cool, diverse place to live. I just never knew how to find out about all of the cool stuff going on until I stumbled upon AOA (I believe Google Reader suggested it to me…score one for Google Reader). This blog has literally changed my perception of the area that I’ve lived in most of my life. My girlfriend and I have found countless restaurants, events, hiking trails, and even tiny New England towns just a short drive away that we never would have known about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forwarded or passed along an article from AOA to friends or family. Their “Stuff to do this Weekend” post every Friday morning is my favorite. Whenever I don’t have plans, but I kind of want to have plans (you know that feeling, right?), that post is the first place I look. There’s always something interesting going on.

Song Meanings (www.songmeanings.net)

There are a billion lyric websites out there. What sets Song Meanings apart is the comments section where people discuss, you guessed it, the meanings behind songs. They’ve been around since 1999 and have a pretty active community. I’m the type of guy who always gets curious about the artist intent behind a song that I like. I’ve never once visited Song Meanings and not found at least one comment on the song, generally there are many pages of comments. Most people just debate their personal opinions and use lines from the songs to debate each other, which is interesting in and of itself, but people also routinely link to sources like articles or interviews with the artist to back up their viewpoint. It’s a really cool twist on an otherwise crappy genre of websites.
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What about you: what are some of your favorite sites that I have to know about?

There are definitely no regrets to taking this approach though. We have a lot of success with the freemium model on SportsLizard, and going back a few years it worked pretty well on iPrioritize. There are also plenty of successful freemium web apps in the business-to-business arena. We knew this industry was different, but it was still worth taking a shot. The overwhelming consumer expectation is not to have to pay for news of any sort, even if our software makes it more efficient, easier to discover new news, etc etc. Right or wrong, that’s just the way it is. I love the free and open web, so you won’t hear me complaining. Plus, this doesn’t mean that we can’t charge for features in some capacity down the road. It just means that the functionality we have now will be available for free.

There were a few other important factors. We have worked out a lot of technical kinks. It takes a while with a site of this magnitude. We have almost 800k stories in our system right now. Every step, from “polling” RSS for new stories, to delivering them to our users, has needed a lot of work. We also had plenty of server issues early on. Not that things are perfect now (far from it), but we have enough information to say pretty confidently that we could handle a large influx of users. The pay wall indirectly acted as a barrier to slow down growth.

And finally, we have a lot of good momentum with LockerPulse right now. The Chrome Web App store brought in a lot of new people. Our widget has been very well received and is starting to drive us traffic. It’s rare that a day goes by without someone telling us how much they love the site, and without multiple site owners asking to have their blogs included on our site. There’s something to be said for keeping that momentum rolling. With George leaving the company last month, we’ve had to reshuffle everyone’s responsibilities. I’ve become more involved in Detailed Image on a day-to-day basis than I was before. I’m really excited for all of the projects I’ve taken on, but that does mean that LP development will slow a bit. Features that we anticipated might come out in the Spring now might be pushed back to the Fall. Had we kept the pay wall up to wait to see if college teams or fantasy sports features pushed our subscription rate over the edge, we risked losing almost an entire year of growth if we were wrong. Now, every single day we’ll be building our user base, collecting data and feedback, and slowly increasing our ad revenue.

I’ve been itching for a few weeks now to make this happen. I’m glad that it’s done, and looking forward to seeing how LockerPulse grows from here.

Mark Cuban professes to read three hours a day. [He points out] that one great idea he gets from a magazine he spends hours reading will pay off a thousand times over for his business. The challenge then is to limit the crap you consume and focus on what’s actually going to help you. You know, so you can actually make progress with your company. I might not spend three hours a day like Mark Cuban, but I’d say I read close to two a day.

I stand by that quote I wrote in 2008. Since writing that post about what I read, and the follow-up post in 2009, there has only been one major thing that I’ve changed about the way I consume news: I listen to Podcasts.

I listen to an array of shows, but my favorites are TWiT podcasts “This Week in Tech” and “This Week in Google”. Each are weekly, over an hour long, and jam packed with the important tech news I want to know about. The hosts, led by Leo Laporte, are some of the most intelligent, knowledgeable people in tech. Often times I feel like I’m sitting at a coffee shop listening in on their conversations. The shows feel that authentic.

Which has led me to ponder the question: do I still need to read TechCrunch? The answer I’ve come to is no. 190.6 posts per week is too much. It’s not that they don’t produce good content or interesting content, it’s that there are probably only 5-10 really important tech stories per week that I want to see. It’s not worth the effort to scan close to 200 stories to find a handful to read.

To compensate, I’ve subscribed to Wired Epicenter (15.4 posts/week) and ars technia web (8.9 posts/week) to keep some tech news in my reader, and anything else I’m sure I’ll hear about on the podcasts or through Twitter. I also trimmed down my Lifehacker reading from the full feed (125.3 posts/week) to the top stories feed (31.5 posts/week).

There’s nothing like not reading your feeds for a few days, and then opening up Google Reader to find 200+ unread Lifehacker + TechCrunch stories. It begins to feel like a chore, and that’s not the way I want it to be. Picking up my CR-48 and opening up Google Reader is one of my favorite things to do after a long day. Hopefully this will cut down the time spent reading and scanning hundreds of headlines, freeing up more time to read more of the really great long-form articles on the blogs I follow, keeping up better with the magazines I subscribe to (Inc., Fast Company, Wired), reading a few more books, and, you know, having more time to do a few other enjoyable things with my free time.

It’s always interesting to me to see what browsers people use. Increasingly I’m surprised by how many non-tech savvy people I notice not using Internet Explorer, something that was rare even a few years ago.  First Firefox and now Chrome have done a great job of pushing the idea that not every browser is the same.  Just the simple fact that Google hits you with Chrome ads every time you visit Google to do a search or YouTube to watch a video has led to widespread awareness of the fact that there are other options out there than what came bundled with your OS.

Our analytics show this too – our sites tend to mimic the browser reports on w3Schools – Firefox is our users the primary browser, IE8 is #2 and losing market share fast to Chrome, IE6 and IE7 are (thankfully) dying off, and of course there has been a noticeable influx of mobile browsers.  I remember a time not that long ago when it was IE6 on Windows XP and then everyone else. Certainly not the case any more!

I’ve personally settled into a nice little routine for my browsers. For testing purposes, I’ve got the latest of everything from IE9 Platform Preview right down to Opera. But for everyday use, I use the following:

• Firefox – all work and all web development.  It’s all about the add-ons, particularly Firebug (I have a full list of the add-ons that I use in my Web Design & Development for Business essay, updated today to add a few new ones). Until something comes close to Firebug and the like – and there are a lot of ok products in the other browsers – I’m sticking with Firefox as my main development browser.  I can’t even comprehend how many hours of debugging Firebug has saved me.
• Chrome – all of my personal browsing.  I have it open up with my most used tabs – LockerPulse, Twitter, Google Reader, and my fantasy football page.  It’s just so fast.  I love the minimalist interface. I love the way it auto-updates.  I love the way it uses Webkit and supports the latest and greatest (side note: wouldn’t the internet be a better place if every browser just used Webkit as their rendering engine? Would save us developers so much time, and saved time = better products)
• Internet Explorer – banking sites. Some just don’t work correctly (or at all) in the other browsers.  Kind of lame.  I often wonder what people on Mac or Linux machines do when this happens…

I find that by having completely separate work and personal browsers I’m better able to compartmentalize my online life. When I’m working, Chrome is only open if I need to test something. Similarly, when I’m not working I only open Firefox is I need to jot down a quick work-related note in my task list or a Google Doc. It’s also nice to always be logged in to my personal Google account on Chrome (the one I use for Google Reader and to sync with my Android phone) while our business one (for Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, etc) and our Google Apps one (Gmail, Docs, Sites, etc) are always signed in on Firefox.

What about you – what is your browser of choice and why?  Are you like me in that you use multiple browsers on a daily basis?  If you’re a developer, is there something you like better than Firefox? If you’re not a developer, do you download and try different browsers or do you just stick with what you’ve got?

Here’s what pops into my head:

• Are we moving toward an app world where the browser becomes less relevant?  Are we already there?
• How do closed apps affect search and the “link economy”, the primary infrastructure in which our modern day web is built?
• As a new developer, would it be more intelligent to skip the web all together and start learning a more “traditional” programming language like Java or C++?
• Are we going to keep seeing more and more app stores for more and more devices?
• If so, how does this divergence effect businesses and users?  Right now you already need to make an app for Android, Blackberry, and iPhone/iPad. What happens when WebOS becomes big? Or any of the many other proposed app stores. Can developers keep up?  Should they try to?
• How do HTML5 and CSS3 play a role in all of this? HTML5 can interact with the desktop in ways that browsers couldn’t do previously (geo-location, desktop notifications, etc).
• Does this whole thing swing back full circle and result in app stores becoming the walled gardens that no one wants to partake in, similar to CD Roms and desktop software (an idea planted in my head by Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis during various TwiT podcasts)?
• And then does the web and mobile web end up being what we’re all using in 5 years? And is it then actually a long term competitive advantage for small web development companies with limited resources to not spend time and money developing mobile apps?

Now keep in mind, I’m asking these questions in the context of thinking about LockerPulse, a web app that depends very much on the “link economy” of Google and therefore the browser, as outlined in my last post, and DetailedImage, an e-commerce store that might actually be less dependent on the browser, but in general e-commerce is still more of a browser thing than an app thing, at least compared to things like Twitter and Facebook and email.

Then the other day Wired declared the browser dead, as they also (wrongly) did in 1997:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunsh, fired back with When Wrong, Call Yourself Prescient Instead. Sometimes I totally agree with Arrington, other times I couldn’t agree less, however I have enormous respect for him because he isn’t afraid to speak his mind. In this case, I think I actually agree with him, although I’m clearly biased towards the web browser:

The browser isn’t dead. Web pages aren’t dead. HTML works really, really well. Check out Facebook’s iPad “app,” for example. You don’t download it from an app store, you just point your browser to touch.facebook.com. Not only does it work really well, Steve Jobs doesn’t get to have a veto right over people using it. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a surge of traffic from the iPad to our site, via a browser.

Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious. Only a bunch of hipster tech journalists checking email on their iPads all day* would think otherwise, and then make up a bunch of data to support their argument.

*Wired, not us.

Fascinating to ponder. What do you think?

Here’s the thing that frustrates me. It’s so simple and seemingly so obvious that it hurts to think about. They have a revenue model right under their nose that will make them a lot of money right off the bat AND improve the user experience: charge for commercial accounts.

The #1 thing that sucks on Twitter as a user is that there are all sorts of spammers everywhere. That goes for legit businesses and personal users alike. Charge $9.99/month to be allowed to Tweet commercially. Put a “report as commercial” button to report anyone who posts commercially without one of these paid accounts. Anyone who is reported could be reviewed by a Twitter moderator and then warned/removed, or they could crowd source it (3 strikes and you’re out)…or maybe build an algorithm to investigate the nature of the Tweets and what they’re linking to. The resources to make this happen would be minimal compared to the resources they have at their disposal.

Within a month you’d weed out the majority of the crap. As a business owner who only has a few hundred followers (@DetailedImage), we wouldn’t think twice about paying that. It easily makes that back, plus it’s a great way to intimately connect with some of our most loyal customers. Most businesses that really apply themselves have far more followers and would probably pay $99/month without blinking. New businesses would gladly pay it because of the huge opportunity that Twitter presents.

If you really wanted to get fancy, you could also charge for the right to display a specific ad to a specific user, or the right to direct message someone who isn’t following you. This isn’t rocket science here. If done even reasonably well Twitter becomes a better business and improves the user experience.

Question then: with the $160M in funding they’ve received and the 140+ employees that they have, why hasn’t their team even attempted to build a profitable business?

I’ve had a cold the past few days. I’ve only been able to mentally handle a few hours of work per day. I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping, reading and watching TV (and by TV I mean a little Hulu, some DVDs, and Sports Center).

Lucky for me I’ve been enamored with a new book. More precisely, a free eBook entitled What Matters Now. The book was organized by marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin and can be downloaded on his blog.  The book is a collection of 70 essays from some of the very best entrepreneurial minds. The essays are concise, elegant, and thought provoking.  I highly recommend taking the time to download it and work your way through the essays.

I was shocked to see the list of writers. There were an unbelievable amount of my favorite entrepreneurs, bloggers, and authors. Among the names that stood out to me:  Jessica Hagy, Chris Anderson, Alan Webber, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chip and Dan Heath, Fred Wilson, Aaron Wall, Gina Trapani, Ramit Sethi, Merlin Mann, Penelope Trunk, Jason Fried, Arianna Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, and of course Godin himself.  It’s a freaking all-star cast.

When I first saw that list I didn’t believe it.  How did he organize this?  It’s seemingly impossible.  A few years ago it probably would have been impossible.  In 2009 though, the very best minds are willing to take time out of their super busy schedules to be a part of something special like this.  Each one of these people truly value giving some of their expertise away for free – no strings attached.  They got nothing more than a link back to their blog, which also gives away free information.

The collaborative environment that we are living in right now is fascinating to me.  It’s awesome.

And for what it’s worth, my favorite essay was called Enrichment (page 16) by Rajesh Setty – a entrepreneur, investor, author, and speaker that I had not previously heard of.

Last night I picked up the latest issue of Fortune Small Business magazine and started flipping through. I almost never read the letter from the editor, but the headline ”Hail and Farewell” caught my eye. I thought maybe the editor was leaving and moving on. Turns out that this would be the last issue of the magazine. Time Inc is shutting it down. Damn. This is the second great business magazine that’s gone down in the last few years – Time Inc also closed Business 2.0 down in October of 2007.

I get why. There isn’t enough advertising out there to support the costs associated with running a magazine. Writers, editors, printing costs, and shipping costs are just too high when you make next to nothing on your subscriptions and your advertisers are buying less ads. I get that the internet takes away a lot of readers, and that most readers would rather not pay for the content.

But I still can’t help but feel like there’s a gap being created every time this happens. I can get all of my day-to-day business news on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb and others. I don’t need a newspaper for that. And when I want to delve deep into something there are plenty of books available. While the book industry is in transition, it’s not dying.  No one is talking about books becoming extinct (or at least they shouldn’t be).  They’re too valuable.  We’re just not sure of the medium that they’ll be consumed in the future.  The Kindle seems to have at least partially solved the problem.

Magazines are great at feature stories.  The kind that take a month or two to research and half an hour to read.  Take for example, the recent Wired writer Evan Ratliff who wrote about people who vanish and try to create new identities for themeslves, and then decided to do it himself, placing a $5k reward for anyone who found him within one month.  People from all around the world pooled their resources and finally caught him. The articles were fascinating.  Great reads that I’ll never forget.  TechCrunch doesn’t do stuff like that…and neither do books.  Magazines have a very unique and specific niche.

However, the magazine model seems so flawed that I can’t help but see this as a trend that will continue.  They charge essentially nothing for subscriptions (many times $10/year or less) and instead rely on hefty ad rates to subsidize the ever-increasing costs.  The model used to be brilliant.  You charge to create perceived value – both in the mind of the customer and the advertiser (it stands to reason that people are more likely to read something that they pay for).  It’s not working anymore.  Magazines are dropping left and right.

So how do you save that niche?  I don’t think that ad-supported blogs alone are the answer.  Do you charge for an online-only version?  Do you charge more for a print version?  Do you just run your business leaner – less writers, less issues (say bi-monthly), and less filler pages with misc news that people already know?  Do you run as some sort of hybrid, blogging regularly but charging for a quarterly magazine with more in-depth articles?  Something else?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’d like to see some people start trying some of this stuff instead of folding or becoming a blog in a niche where there are already plenty of blogs.  Especially magazines with a focus on business and entrepreneurship.  Come on guys, think outside the box a little.

I recently discovered snailmailr, a nifty website that lets you send real mail (i.e. “snail mail”) online for only 99 cents per letter, postage included.  As you can see from the picture, the interface is dead simple.  You can write your letter with their online editor or you can attach a Word Document, PDF, Powerpoint Slide, etc.  They use laser color printers, 100% recycled paper, and even purchase carbon offsets for their paper use.  And it works internationally.  You can opt to pay 10 cents extra to have the snailmailr.com logo removed from your envelope, and you also have to pay about a quarter extra for every page over 2 pages, but that’s still pretty reasonable.

Cool right?  I mean, there are definitely times late at night or in crappy weather when I’d rather spend the 99 cents and fire out a letter like it’s an email and be done with it (in my apartment complex the mailboxes are quite a walk).  I also don’t always have a printer available.  I can see how this could be incredibly useful for someone who is constantly traveling, especially internationally.  Or if you rarely send letters and don’t feel like keeping stamps and letters in stock.  Or if you flat out don’t have a printer.  It really is useful in a lot of scenarios.

Here’s the best part though, the part that left me kicking myself and will probably do the same to you:  the startup costs for this business are almost zero.  Any of us could have done this.  It serves a pretty big need. One that amazingly isn’t really being met elsewhere.  I’m almost stunned that no one has done this before.

Granted, a laser printer costs a few hundred dollars.  The paper costs a few bucks, as does the postage.  And you have to be reasonably tech savvy to throw together the website.  But nothing that any of us couldn’t have taken a legit shot with for under $1k.

I did some searching and wasn’t able to find out who started it or who has funded it (other than some guy named Kevin who left a comment on a blog post review…Kevin if you’re out there, drop me an email).  But there’s no reason that this couldn’t be started by a student or part-time entrepreneur.  It’s one of those rare examples where the startup costs are low but the upside is very high (and scalable). 

The downside is of course the low barrier to entry.  Can anyone think of a better way to do what snailmailr is doing?

I think people are kind of missing the point.

If you haven’t had a chance, watch the short video below and read the live blog of the event from TechCrunch.

I installed it as a virtual machine using VirtualBox, as you can see in the picture above. Given that there aren’t any guest additions, it’s somewhat limited – even with a ton of memory allocated, it lags a bit and has a 800×600 resolution. So I’ll withhold my real review until those are released. Some people in the comments on TechCrunch and Lifehacker don’t understand this and are blaming these things on Chrome.

The two things that really stuck out to me while playing around were how freaking fast it booted, and that there is no “install” like a typical Windows or Linux OS – it just boots into the OS the first time around. Really cool.

If you’ve watched the videos or read the articles, I’m sure you’ll agree that it does some pretty cool stuff right? Like boot up instantly. And like save everything in the cloud so you can instantly jump from one computer to another without missing a step (even keeping your tabs open). And it’s super fast.

But everyone is focusing on the wrong things. They’ll only be supporting minimal hardware at the start – you won’t just be able to download it and install it (easily), you’ll have to buy a “Chrome OS netbook”. And it’s just really not practical to have NO hard drive storage at all. And you can’t use other web browsers. And you’re screwed if you don’t have wi-fi. And that it’s basically the same as Chrome the browser, so why bother?

Yes, if you look at things as they likely will be in 11/2010 when the OS launches, that’s probably all it will be. It’ll be great to give your kids. It’ll be great to have a secondary computer that boots up and down in a second for when you’re on the go.  For most people though, they’ll stick with their Windows or Mac or Linux primary computer.  It won’t be a game changer next year, so everyone is writing it off.

The thing that people seem to be missing is that this isn’t about November of 2010. It’s about November of 2015 and November of 2020. Google is placing a bet that we’ll all be operating out of the cloud in a few years. DVDs and MP3s will be a thing of the past because it’s all available at super high quality anywhere in the world. Photoshop and video games and all of our computer-intensive software will all be better online. There will be absolutely no need for local storage of anything for the majority of computer users.

Now, they could be totally wrong. Personally, I’d say it’s 50/50. But – and this is a huge but – if that is how things turn out, they will be light years ahead of the competition. They will have been tweaking and improving their OS for five years while Microsoft and Apple are playing catch-up. They will have suppliers building their “netbooks” with their components. They will have a market share of greater than 0%, whereas Microsoft and Apple will have nothing.

I don’t know how it will turn out.  I do know that it will be fun to follow.