PAT KINSEL

Good times at Andover 10 year reunion.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:29:07 -0400

Good times at Andover 10 year reunion.

Redfin

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:22:04 -0400

I talk a lot about how implicit context can power new search experiences on mobile. I think Redfin’s iPhone app is a tremendous example.

I’m constantly on the move in Boston and frequently visit SF. I love looking at different homes for sale. Whenever I see a for sale sign, it’s become second nature to pull out my phone and open Redfin.

Above all of their sophisticated search capabilities, Redfin presents the closest home for sale. It’s their equivalent to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky.” Through hundreds of uses, Redfin has a near perfect score. They always manage to find the home I’m standing in front of.

In a single tap and without searching myself, I’m standing in someone’s living room, admiring the view from a top floor unit in Pac Heights.

The combination of Redfin’s single purpose (real estate), my phone and its signals (location), and my implied intent (looking at houses) enable this incredibly quick, yet rich experience. Simple, but so powerful.

What we'll lose in a new era of fragmentation

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:54:40 -0400

For the past several years, Facebook and Twitter have captured the VAST majority of social content I care about. I’ve been able to keep in touch with nearly everyone I know and care about via just these two services.

Things are changing.

It’s clear that my friends’ attention is being splintered across countless new services and their content is scattered accordingly. Because I can’t check so many services (and don’t even know which services people are using), I’m seeing less content. I’m less connected with my friends.

Facebook kept ahead of this trend by allowing apps to pump their content back into my News Feed. Even as my friends have adopted new services, I’ve still been able to consume everything in the same familiar place. This no longer feels true. There are a few potential causes, I’m not sure which is valid:

Facebook has largely abandoned passive sharing to the Open Graph in favor of explicit sharing. Perhaps people are explicitly publishing to Facebook less. Or perhaps they always explicitly shared less and I’m just not seeing what had been shared passively.
Perhaps developers are investing less in the Open Graph for distribution (I doubt this).
Perhaps 3rd party apps are reaching critical mass and are focused on their own social networks over sharing to Facebook for growth
Perhaps Facebook’s algo is showing less of my friends’ content in my News Feed. (More ads?)

Who knows, the point is that my News Feed feels much less interesting and comprehensive than it has for the past several years. There’s just less content from my friends.

It doesn’t feel like Twitter has this same problem. Perhaps people are sharing less as well, but I treat Twitter differently than Facebook. I have a defined set of friends on Facebook and rely on them to produce content. The list of people and organizations I follow on Twitter is much more fluid. I’m constantly following new accounts and the content I see better follows my interests over time.

I’m excited that everyone is using so many new services. But, if content does splinter across many services, I will certainly miss this time period when I’ve been so easily able to keep up with the people I care about.

This talk by Jeff Seibert really resonates with me. I talked...

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:36:00 -0400

This talk by Jeff Seibert really resonates with me. I talked about this exact issue just last week on a panel for Andover at YC.

Building for mobile enables amazing experiences, but it’s frustrating and hard as hell. We have every ability at Spindle to build beautiful products for iOS thanks to Keh-Li and Alex Jenkins, but we’re constantly limited by the time it takes to ship client code. We’re forced into a less agile process. Just as Jeff describes, it can take weeks and even months to go from idea to public feedback.

A slow iteration time is harmful for apps, but it’s even more difficult for apps + services like Spindle. Our product relies on an entirely new search technology that we’re constantly developing. Because apps pull platforms, the speed of our ideation and the development of our search technologies are limited by the speed with which we can build, test, release, monitor, validate, and improve new features through our app.

Big companies can work toward longer development schedules because they’re not worried about funding. In startups, where resources are scarce, the number of iterations you have remaining is even more important than your runway expressed in remaining weeks or months. More iterations means more opportunities to succeed.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to take advantage of the more complex ideas Jeff describes (multiple features in development concurrently by many teams), but we’re making huge strides thanks to work by Alex Lambert to automate our deployments and Simon Yun to automate testing of our service and client.

This shit is important.

gregcohn: EFF: Who has your back? No real surprises here.

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:45:55 -0400

gregcohn:

EFF: Who has your back?

No real surprises here.

Personalized Results

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:55:00 -0400

We took a big step toward personalized results in Spindle 2.2. We’re now boosting results from your favorite places & allowing you to hide all updates from places you don’t like. This change means that we’re considering each user’s preferences with each query, the foundation for personalized results. More soon :)

Spindle is now live in 12 regions throughout the US. We’re...

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:53:13 -0400

Spindle is now live in 12 regions throughout the US. We’re finally hitting our stride and just brought 5 new regions online in a few short weeks. What originally took months now takes days. Such great work by the team. Read more.

Beer delivery!! Props to @andyhannon and @DrizlyInc (at Spindle)

Fri, 03 May 2013 14:57:40 -0400

Beer delivery!! Props to @andyhannon and @DrizlyInc (at Spindle)

at The Esplanade

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:39:20 -0400

at The Esplanade

Spindle Blog: Spindle Expands to Los Angeles

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:53:19 -0400

Spindle Blog: Spindle Expands to Los Angeles:

spindlelabs:

Few cities offer the diverse possibilities of Los Angeles: You can surf in the morning, check out unique shops during the day, have dinner at a world-class restaurant, and catch an amazing band at night. But in a city as dynamic as LA, it’s sometimes hard to discover the best stuff happening….

I pity the fool that’s not getting @spindle Alerts for...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:06:39 -0400

I pity the fool that’s not getting @spindle Alerts for “beer tasting”

Spindle in bright lights on the App Store

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:09:53 -0400

Spindle in bright lights on the App Store

Photo

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:36:51 -0500

So proud of this release. Felt unachievable at times, but we got...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:48:24 -0500

So proud of this release. Felt unachievable at times, but we got there. http://spindle.com/download

Spindle Blog: Announcing Spindle 2.0

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:56:39 -0500

Spindle Blog: Announcing Spindle 2.0:

spindlelabs:

Early feedback tells us that you enjoy browsing Spindle’s feeds to discover what’s happening, but there are times when you want to search for something more specific. So as we worked on our latest version, our goal was to give you greater power and control over how you find and navigate results,…

On Twitter & Facebook Follower Counts

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:30:19 -0500

Facebook and Twitter now both use the term “Followers” to describe people that have subscribed to your public updates. Perhaps it’s widely known, but I just realized they calculate the numbers very differently.

On Twitter, your followers are people who explicitly followed YOU. On Facebook, your followers include that same set, but also people who follow a list that you’ve been added to.

My Facebook followers recently shot up by over 1,000. I couldn’t figure out how or why I gained so many followers instantaneously. Digging a bit deeper, I found that I had been added to a list. About 1,000 people followed that list. These people never really expressed interest in me or my content, but I get “credit” in my follower count.

So, Facebook’s and Twitter’s follower counts really aren’t equivalent. Plus, with edge rank and with your content falling off the bottom of Twitter’s feed, it’s really impossible to know how many people will see your content on either service.

Google's biggest letdown: Latitude

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:49:40 -0500

I absolutely love passive activity tracking. When it was discovered that the iPhone was logging everyone’s location history, I was thrilled and spent hours looking over the data while everyone else was pissed.

And I’ve been a huge fan of Google Latitude. It has tracked everywhere I’ve been over the past two years:

Although one of my greatest goals is to reach the moon, I’m considering shutting Latitude off. Why? Simple:

Google has done jack shit with Latitude. I’ve been staring at this bullshit message for over two years. The entire promise of passive activity tracking is that you give a service enormous access to your personal data… and that service does something amazing with it. 23andMe is a great example of a company doing it right. Latitude is failing to deliver on this promise. I don’t think a single update has been pushed since I started using the service.

There are countless shortcomings. For example:

Latitude fails to place me at “Work,” even though the GPS places me within 50 feet of the defined location. As a result, Latitude says I’ve spent “0 hours at work.”
Latitude doesn’t even attempt to eliminate huge leaps in recorded location data that are caused by bounces between cell towers. Smoothing this data seems entirely possible.
It doesn’t resolve my location data to actual places like Placeme. Google has better place data than anyone.
There is no ability to view data over a period greater than one single day.
There are no interesting visualizations of my activity or insights about the places I’ve visited.
It doesn’t generate interesting reports that I can download or share.
There are no stats about my activity relative to the community at large.

I’m sure that the Latitude community is small, but it seems to me like an amazing test group. Google, please get your shit together and make Latitude a service worth using indefinitely.

tinsely: 58 Joralemon Street (by Hobo Matt) Every city has its...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:01:00 -0500

tinsely:

58 Joralemon Street (by Hobo Matt)

Every city has its secrets, it’s just a matter of finding them…

On a street in Brooklyn that takes you towards the river, where the cobblestones begin paving the road, there is a townhouse that deserves a second look. Despite its impeccable brickwork, number 58 Joralemon Street is not like the other houses. Behind its blacked out windows, no one is at home; no one has been at home for more than 100 years.

You guys, this so cool.

Thoughts on Google Glass

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:12:54 -0500

I think Google Glass is a bold leap into the future. A heads-up overlay that’s constantly augmenting your life experience would be an amazing tool. My mind melts considering the endless possibilities - it would open so many opportunities for Spindle to help people discover interesting and useful info as they explore. All that said, I’m not confident it will work as currently conceived.

Google has produced several beautiful videos. Noticeably absent from all of them? How people actually interact with the system and invoke what they’re seeing / what Google Glass is doing.

The system works via speech. As you watch this video, stop and ask yourself what you might have to say and if you’d actually be willing to say it at these particular moments. Imagine looking at someone and saying “Take Picture!” and then “Share with Tom” mid-conversation. Imagine wondering how to say something in another language, pausing an active conversation, speaking into a system the person isn’t aware of, and then trying to correctly pronounce what’s shown.

I hate it when people say something is “too ambitious” and you’ll never hear me criticize Google for their moon shots. I truly hope Google Glass is everything it could be - it’s just hard to imagine how i might actually interact with it.

He just stares at the fire

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:50:32 -0500

He just stares at the fire