We went to a benefit last night for Leadership High School, a charter school in San Francisco. When is the last time you heard about a high school with a documented academic philosophy? When is the last time you heard about a high school that requires it’s students to have demonstrated social responsibility, personal responsibility, critical thinking, and strong communication skills in order to graduate? 100% of last year’s class graduated. 100% of last year’s graduating class went to college. I’m going to say that again, 100% of last year’s class went to college.

Ten years ago, a group of teachers and administrators set out to change the face of public education. Right now Leadership High School is changing the face of public education.

What is your ten year goal?

This week music companies announced a partnership with MySpace to offer a music download service. I have to believe that most of the articles written simply copied the press release because nobody seemed to have asked even the most basic question: “when?” Or even better, “Haven’t you announced something like this before? That didn’t seem to work out so well. How is this different?” The rise of digital music has produced more press releases announcing intention than any technology shift I have seen. When will this industry realize they actually have to do something as oppose to just announce something? Is it the music companies, or just a large company problem? Why do they feel the need to announce intention instead of announcing product?

Let’s write some headlines post-success:

[Sept, 1999] Steve Jobs announced Apple would redefine the music player and how users interacted with their media. The device, yet to be designed or built, will play music, but eventually support video and maybe even a cell phone. “I’m really excited about this idea. I talked to the board about it and I’m just forming a team to design a prototype. It is going to be an amazing success.”

Or maybe sports:

[Aug, 1993] Tiger Woods, a student at Stanford University, announced today he would become the best golfer of all time. “I feel like I have the foundation and the background,” said Mr. Woods, “all I need to do is execute.” He will team up with Jack Nicklaus as his mentor. “I have the experience, and Tiger has the youth, ” said Mr. Nicklaus, “it is an amazing combination.”

Maybe, I’m wrong. Maybe this time they will do something. Maybe it will be an amazing success. But the quote below doesn’t give me much confidence.

MySpace Music will be run by an executive team that will report to a board composed of representatives from MySpace and the music labels.

Meanwhile, while the board is driving the project into mediocrity, I’m going to go buy some music from iTunes.

I got a chance to check out FriendFeed this morning while Niko was watching Sesame Street and was really impressed. I was up and running with a consolidated feed of:

• Twitter
• Two blogs
• Netflix
• Google Talk status
• Flickr photos
• Picasa Web photos
• Google Reader shared items

I also hooked up LinkedIn and Facebook but I’m not sure what that means exactly.

I was really impressed with how quickly I could pull all this stuff together and how easy it was to find other friends using FriendFeed. Kudos to the team for putting together an app which is so easy to use. I also tried Plaxo Pulse but it wasn’t even in the same league.

Here are my asks from the team (in order of priority):

1. [important] Let me read a feed with just my friends updates. Right now my only option for a consolidated feed includes my updates — short of a drinking binge I usually know when I make updates. The feed also includes speculative “friends of friends” updates which I would love to disable.
2. [kinda important] Give me a badge for my wordpress blog. I know I *could* write one using the API, but I’m lazy and busy.
3. [just a thought] I sometimes had trouble understanding what I was getting by adding a feed. What is a LinkedIn profile feed? I really appreciate the simplicity of the add interface (signature Kevin Fox) but wanted a way to learn more or get a preview.
4. [just a thought] My “movies at home” would have a much higher signal to noise ratio than movies I put into my queue. I personally would be more interested in movies my friends are watching now, as opposed to movies they may watch some day. Netflix offers this feed but the FriendFeed Netflix service didn’t seem to recognize the feed.

I dropped my friends FriendFeed feed (how is that for a mouthful) into Reader. I’ll see how that goes for a month or so and report back.

http://friendfeed.com/happyinwater?format=atom

A long time ago, at a start-up named Kintana, a developer named Dave Gauthier installed a wiki. We already had a ton of documentation on a shared drive with a web server on the front end. Because we didn’t want to fracture the documentation we asked him to uninstall it. Meanwhile I continued to be mystified by the fact that the documentation was never updated. Years later, after we were acquired by Mercury Interactive (and Dave had moved on), we took another stab at using a wiki and it took off. In fact, I left Mercury for JotSpot, a wiki company. See the irony here?

I wanted to take a second to publically apologize to Dave. I was wrong. We should have used a wiki from the beginning. They are amazing, and I love them. I may not have gotten it the first time, but I got it the second, and I got it the third (JotSpot). And now I’d like to think I got it the forth. Yesterday we announced Google Sites, a free hosted site collaboration tool for teams. It was a long road to this release, but I have an amazing team that put their head down and powered through a tremendous amount of work. I am amazingly proud of what they did. I couldn’t be happier with where the product landed and I’m super excited for the road ahead. This launch was just a start, not a finish.

Slow on the uptake, but good on follow through.

I’m in Ann Arbor talking to small businesses about Google Apps (see AA Business Review). Yesterday we went to the Michigan/BC basketball game. I saw (from afar) my 7th grade social studies teach, Mike Madison. I remember the first day of class he told us we would have a test on US states the next day. So the following day we took the test and didn’t think much about it. Turns out the class average was something like 15 states. The day after he graded the tests he stormed into the room and SLAMMED his briefcase down on his desk. He marched up to the chalkboard and in big block letters wrote, “ASSUME.” Then he shouted, “I ASSUMED you knew your states and I ASSUMED if you didn’t you would study. But apparently when I ASSUME THINGS, you make an ASS (circles A-S-S) out of YOU (circles U) and ME (circles M-E). AN ASS OUT OF YOU AND ME!” The next day we all aced the state test. Interesting the things that stick with you.

Now which one was Delaware again?

No other encyclopedia would ever include a reference from “Gestalt” to “The possibility of the Transformers’ team to combine into a bigger robot.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt

A couple months ago, the founders of ConnectU (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) sued Facebook and Mark Zuckerburg claiming he stole their idea (and code) when building Facebook. Then Aaron Greenspan recently claimed it was actually all his idea.

These people are just absurd. Ideas are easy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Anybody can have an idea. Only a select few can execute on the idea and turn it into something great. I’m talking about the real work: designing a usable product, building a scalable solution, recruiting a team, responding to mistakes you make, building a loyal customer base, etc. The list is infinite. Say a friend gives you the idea to run a marathon. You train and end up winning. Does your friend deserve a cut of the winnings or credit? Absolutely not. Why is Facebook exploding while ConnectU flounders? Because Facebook out executed them. Because Facebook built a compelling application and ConnectU built a mediocre one. Why doesn’t Aaron get any credit for the idea? Because ideas are easy, making them real is hard.

There are a lot of pretty useful Firefox extensions, but none equal that of Tab Mix Plus. It is less “how much it does” (although it does a ton) and more that it provides four critical features that vastly improve my browser experience.

Multiple Rows of Tabs

I hate scrolling tabs. Who wants to scroll to get to a tab? I also hate shrinking tabs because it kills the often overlooked “locality” factor in user interaction. Let’s face it, I’m a hater. But Tab Mix Plus fixes all this hating by providing a setting which keeps tabs fixed width and just uses multiple rows of tabs. Done and done.

Duplicate Tab

There are lots of times where I want to duplicate a tab, history and all. Right mouse on the tab, and presto, duplicated tab. Double delicious.

Undo Close Tab

How many times have you closed a tab, and thought, “Dammit, I didn’t want to do that.” Tab Mix Plus gives you the ability to undo this action, or even select from a list of recently closed tabs.  (Note to use this feature you have to add it to the menu via the Tab Mix Plus settings.) Very nice.

Open Links in Tabs

Now lets say you are looking at a page with a list of links.

You want to review this list of pages. Instead of having to click on every link, you simply select the text containing the links, right mouse, and select “open in tabs.” Smooth like butter.

There is a lot of love in this extension, but these four features make it for me. I highly recommend it.

Graham pointed me at Grey’s Law which is another form of Hanlon’s Razor.

First you take Hanlon’s Razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Then you modify it to take the form of Clark’s third law:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Which results in Grey’s Law:

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Not shockingly, this came up in a conversation about phone companies.

Here are a couple of iPhone links I have been using. Part of the problem with iPhone Safari is it looks like a normal browser to our servers, so we don’t automatically switch to the mobile version. This works fine in some interfaces, but in gmail, calendar, and reader, you want the mobile versions.

• Gmail: to get a mobile version of gmail simply go to http://m.gmail.com
• Google calendar: http://calendar.google.com/m (no trailing slash)
• Google apps email
  • URL: http://mail.google.com/a/<your domain>/x/ (trailing slash important), for example http://mail.google.com/a/google.com/x/.
  • POP setup:
    • incoming host name: pop.googlemail.com
    • incoming user name: recent:username@yourdomain.com
    • outgoing host name: smtp.googlemail.com:465
• Google apps calendar: http://calendar.google.com/a/<your domain>/m (again, no trailing slash)

Michael N. reminded me of the email interface to Flickr. Flickr creates a random email address which you can email to add photos to your stream. Create a new contact named Flickr and use the email address provided on your account page. When you are looking at a photo click on the icon in the lower left, choose “Email Photo” and use the Flickr contact. Done and done.