This has been a whirlwind year for startups across the bay area and my startup, TY-Combinator really is no different. Barely a month into 2008, Slide, Inc announced it had received funding, the recent news about the bid from Microsoft to purchase Yahoo! for just above the GDP of Croatia and now great news for the TY-Combinator.

I'm pleased to announce that the TY-Combinator has received an unsolicited bid from Microsoft that values TY-Combinator shares at over 400% under market value. Microsoft is willing to offer TY-Combinator a half-eaten sammich in exchange for 85% of TY-Combinator outstanding shares. This is an exciting time to work for TY-Combinator, with the prospective addition of the capital Microsoft is willing to offer we will be able to finance new projects to expand our global reach over 1000%, up from our reported reach in the 2007 fiscal year of 1.


Microsoft's bid for a stake in TY-Combinator

Facebook has been pretty nice to Free Gifts in the past, despite originally being a blatant rip-off of the real Gifts application. Prior to today, I have only received one complaint from Facebook regarding Free Gifts practices. They asked me to remove a gift that looked similar to one of their gifts. I was okay with that even though mine was a lemon and theirs was a lime; maybe it was tough for the color blind audience to decipher? Today, I received my second complaint from them, which stated:

Your Facebook application, Free Gifts, is currently in violation of the Platform Application Guidelines section I.3 (see http://developers.facebook.com/guidelines.php). Specifically, please note that the Terms prohibit applications from acting in a manner that is misleading, deceptive, or fraudulent.

The application's link under the profile picture uses the same wording as Facebook's Gift application (please see attached). Please change this to reflect your application's name to differentiate Facebook's Gift application and "Free Gifts" application, as it is currently misleading users to think that this refers to the associated Facebook features.


I will admit it is relatively the same wording, but they failed to explain how using "Send xxxx a Gift" is deceptive or misleading to users. First of all, Facebook provides a tool tip when you hover over a profile action which says "Provided by the xxxxxx Application," which immediately makes a distinction between Gifts and Free Gifts. Second, as far as I know, users are still sending a gift when they use Free Gifts. Third, I have been using this text for longer than I can remember now with no complaints. With over 50 million gifts sent, I have never had a user say they were "trying to use the real gift" application.

I did comply somewhat by making all future profile actions say "free gift" instead of "gift," but there is no easy way for me to fix the 8 million profiles already containing the text. As of now they have failed to respond to my question of how exactly I was deceiving users, but I am really interested in hearing their reasoning.

I'm not proud of it, but I do read TechCrunch every now and again, if for only the occasional gem that comes across that causes me to hate buzzwords and everybody that uses them.

In the second paragraph of this article almost caused an entire system shutdown in my central-buzzword-processing unit (CBU):

"Both Imeem and Anywhere.FM saw a lot of synergy in the deal."

I couldn't read any further into the article after reading that, whenever anybody uses the word "synergy" seriously I have a tendency to tune out completely and think the absolute worst of them until they offer me chocolates, caffeine or other goodies.

Courtesy of Adonomics

We've been working pretty hard for the past month (well, for the past 8 months too) but I'm particularly proud of the work that my co-conspirator and I have been putting in on Top Friends (we're that green line that creeps up from behind on FunWall and Super Wall).

One of the most helpful "tools" that's been available to me has been Slide's competitive spirit. In addition to the 2,000+ developers on the Facebook platform we have some pretty healthy competition going on inside Slide as well. Between Top Friends, SuperPoke and FunWall there is plenty of trash-talking and "friendly competition" (read: if it weren't an HR violation, I'd of already resolved to dirty tactics). In doing so we've cultivated an environment where some of the most often heard phrases are: "Is Facebook down again?!" and "OH SCHNAP!"

Another key factor to our team's enjoyable demeanor has been (in my opinion) our liberal use of the "rubber chicken" as part of a sort of group hazing. In essence, when you have glaring mistakes that somehow get pushed to the live site, you will come into the office the next day with rubber chickens adorning your monitor. This group acknowledgement of when we "fuck up" encourages more of a social-pressure to write good code instead of relying on policy, etc to ensure code quality, especially on the rapid release schedules we adhere to. Rubber chickens are the truly quintessential gift at Slide, it is always feels better to give than to receive.

As we near the end of the first month in 2008, I wish Facebook and Bebo continued success with there platform(s); not because I love FQL and FBML oh so much, but because I work for Slide, on the Facebook team, where competition and rubber chickens reign supreme in the land of embedded videos, sortable friends and flying sheep.

(Now seriously, Slide is hiring)

Recently the bank that financed my car switched their phone payment systems over from their more traditional "press a number to do stuff" to a "talk to a computer and try to do stuff" interface, and my reluctance to pay my car payments has increased tenfold.

Before they switched the phone interface, I almost had the correct sequence of numbers to press entirely memorized to where I could press 3-5 numbers in sequence and be done with my "payment session" in under two minutes. Meaning in a matter of two minutes, I could initiate a transaction from my checking account, to send almost $300 to Chase, in two minutes. I hated losing the money, but I loved the efficiency.

Recently however, they've "pulled a Vista" and replaced a wonderfully functional system that "got the job done" with a bloated, slow and buggy system that infuriates me everytime I need to talk to the computerized woman at the other end of the line. A rapid mashing of touch-tone keys on my phone has been replaced with:

PaymentBot: Welcome to Chase Auto Finance!

*pause*

PaymentBot: If you would like to make a payment, say "make a payment." If you would like to check your payoff balance, say "payoff balance." If you would like to blow a goat, say "baaaaaaaa."

Tyler-Unit: make a payment

PaymentBot: It looks like you want to make a payment, if this is correct say "yes."

Tyler-Unit: yes (at this point I'm usually irritated that I've past the two minute mark)

PaymentBot: First I need to find your account, please say your account number or your social security number, or enter them into the phone

Tyler-Unit: *mashes on keys*

PaymentBot: The number you entered was 1-2-3--4-5--5-6-5-4, if this is correct, say "yes."

Tyler-Unit: YES

PaymentBot: I'm sorry, I didn't catch that, if the number you entered: 1-2-3--4-5--5-6-5-4 is correct, say "yes."

Tyler-Unit: YES

PaymentBot: Okay, if you would like to make a payment over the phone, say "phone." If you would like to make a payment via mail, say "mail."

I could continue, but I won't .

Just to get to the point where I finally need to enter my payment details (because Chase couldn't update their system to, god-forbid, remember the same information I've been mashing into a keypad for the past two years) takes close to five to eight minutes.

Between the various financial institutions that I need to deal with every month I get to fight with terrible websites, miserable phone interfaces and idiot-customer service representatives, it almost makes me regret being fiscally responsible (our government isn't, why should I have to?). I'm hoping there's a special portion of hell reserved for whichever numbnuts in middle-management at Chase decided "OMG! Voice interfaces are TOTALLY kewl!!!!!"

Are there means of consolidating smaller (think below $10,000) loans from one bank to another? While it's pretty obvious that Chase can effectively handle its finances, they certainly can't handle "user-experience", if your customers' only interaction with you as a company is over the phone, or over snail-mail, it's usually in your best interest to make sure those "interfaces" to your customers are top-notch.

I hate voice interfaces.

It was recently announced that Slide (this little start-up that I work for) raised some more money. Neato.


Since Max isn't the aeron chair kind of CEO, it looks like we're going to spend that money on things like "engineers, hardware, etc." Bummer, I've always wondered how an $800 chair can exist that doesn't rub your feet and write your code for you.

Regardless, should be a fun year.

(p.s. we need more engineers)

At what point, as a man, do you give up hopes of being in a rock band?

A very long time ago I wrote about my backup script for archiving my entire Perforce repository. I can finally write the obvious follow-up to the post, as I've finally had to use my backups.

In my scenario, the last backup I took was in February of 2007, almost an entire year ago (my development slowed around that time). During my transit from San Antonio to San Francisco the "server" my Perforce repository ran off, also known as orange (seen on the bottom here), a "headless laptop", had its disk completely fail. Up until recently however I haven't had a replacement for "orange" but now that I have pineapple sitting in a colocation facility, I have a new candidate for a Perforce server.

Luckily I had made a habit of burning my backups to DVDs every two weeks, since two weeks of nightly backups would fill up an entire 4.7GB DVD (I still have no idea how my own source repository grew to 120MB or so). After rsync'ing the latest backup tarballs, it was completely up to Perforce to reliably restore them.

Perforce's documentation is very good, so I suggest going over the backup and recovery procedures if you find yourself needing to recover from backups.

Within about 15 minutes I had restored the Perforce database files as well as the actual source code itself and begun to sync a new Perforce client up with the new server (thanks to my p4tunnel script).

I can't talk enough about how much I really like Perforce as a version-control-system and am nothing short of elated to finally have my repository back online, it only goes to show how backups are crucial for anything you might ever want later, in my case backups albeit old backups, were still better than no backups.

I spoke with Tammy (our PR mastermind) about whether or not Slide was going to let me out of my cage to go to South by Southwest Interactive this coming March and it seems like they might actually let me! (I'm just as surprised as you are)

Unfortunately things with Facebook were at such a ridiculous pace when SXSWi was accepting panel submissions, that I never got a chance to submit my panel idea: "Slide is awesome, now let's talk about how great Slide is." This leaves me in a slightly awkward position, I cannot remember the last conference or event that I went to where I wasn't speaking or talking or dancing with a baboon in front of a live studio audience. Even at the last SXSWi I was there for about 36 hours and most of that time was spent setting up and then helping run BarCamp Austin². Ideally I'd like to get on stage with some of the guys from Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Google and maybe even Myspace to discuss the more open social web that we seem to be moving towards and a bit about how awesome Slide is. It's probably nothing more than a pipe-dream however, since the panels seem to be quite locked down at the moment.

Of course, if nobody will have me, then I might be relegated to slumming up and down 6th street in Austin hanging out with the usual drunkards that I know in Austin (you know who you are) and getting into trouble. Mmm, trouble.

Regardless, if you're going to be in Austin for SXSWi let me know, I've got a stack of swanky new business cards I want to get rid of :)

I had mentioned previously that iChatAgent in Leopard leaks, I'm going to take that statement back. iChatAgent in Leopard hemorrhages memory, and I think I know why now.

While I was napping, there was a network hiccup causing iChat to get disconnected, when the network connectivity returned, it first tried to sign on a couple of Jabber accounts, both of which use self-signed SSL certificates. Being the lovely old chap that iChat is it prompted the user (napping at the time) to accept the self-signed certificate. While the dialog box was up, iChat sat waiting around before it signed on the other accounts and spun and spun and spun.

iChat spun and spun and spun until all the available disk space for virtual memory was used up by every process that had to swap out to make space for iChatAgent's demands on real memory, and then by iChatAgent itself swapping out.



God fucking damnit.