There’s that old statement “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” — that is definitely true in the startup world. There are tons and tons of people who will happily lecture you about the right way to do anything. But despite their best intentions, if they’re not actually doing it — right now — odds are their experience and advice is obsolete. So stop asking and start doing. It’s so much faster, easier, and funner to learn how to build wheels by reinventing them from scratch, than by trying to find someone to teach you. Because when you’re done, you’ve learned not only how to make wheels, but how to make anything.

And you thought your commute was bad!

via http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2009/9/3/circle-of-death

Anyone else seeing this on their Mac (with Snow Leopard) after waking from sleep?

I LOL'ed at this one.

I recently read an article on a popular news site (that I can't seem to find) claiming Twitter defies previously accepted models of technological adoption. While it was widely believed that that teenagers and young-adults were the classic early adopters, Twitter's growth has interestingly come from an older generation of users - those between 30 and 50 years of age. There were various quotes from select teenagers in that article along the lines of "I don't want to share what I do all day. That's just creepy!" This may all be true, but there's problem with this: Twitter is widely misunderstood. 

Although Twitter may be used for sharing the most inane details of one's life, that is not the value it provides. I don't care (and in fact most people don't care) about when you brushed your teeth or what you are doing right now. It is akin to stating cars are meant for storage. While you can store items in your car, that is not a car's primary purpose!

First, Twitter allows for an elegant social grouping model quite different from Facebook and most other social networks out there. Instead of the standard two-way friending process, the "follow" mechanism allows for people to follow you, but you don’t follow back; people to not follow you, but you follow them; you both follow each other; neither of you follow each other. It allows for much more diverse social interaction. (Andrew Chen has a much more detailed article here on Friends versus Followers).

Secondly, and more importantly, Twitter's value comes from link sharing and aggregation. Instead of checking a multitude of websites daily, I simply log onto Twitter. Using Twitter, I am able to get my news (by following @NYTimes), read blogs (e.g., @TechCrunch, @gruber), learn from some smart and talented people out there (@sgblank, @cdixon, @anildash), keep track of startups I'm interested in (@posterous, @Dropbox), and even get a dose of humor (@BacVC). This is in addition to following friends where I can see vacation pictures, keep in touch with what they're doing, and so on.

Now you may ask how will Twitter make money? Well, I'll leave that for them to figure out.