Selling out...

Overheard in the lunchroom:

"Does advertising really make that much money? Is it worth it?"
---"Yes"
"But it's like selling out. Like when an indie band signs with BMG..."
---"Exactly. And what happens to them?"

The air is busier than we think

Hope you don't have a garage door. Because you all know that one day when it's pouring rain, you're going to drive home and click the button and... nothing happens. You'll park in the driveway, get soaked, drop your papers and curse your luck.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/06/tech/main659343.shtml

Until you realize that your garage door opener has actually been a threat to national security as it's using military-owned frequencies all this time. Now that those frequencies are needed, well, guess it's time for the super-deluxe garage door opener. (notice it has 'idrive torsion')

When random isn't so random

A very humorous report came into customer service today, though I can imagine it wasn't nearly so funny for the user who reported it.

They had received an email from LinkedIn which included a URL intended just for them. The URL includes a 8-character key which is randomly generated. Here it is:

https://www.linkedin.com/e/isd/NN/F3cunt7G/

What are the odds of this? Turns out it's about 1 in 2 million for a given 4-letter word like this. And if you assume there a few dozen possible words and you ignore case, the odds can fall all the way to like 1 in 100,000. (thanks to Leo for the math!)

So be careful when you're randomly generating strings. With over 2.9 million people in LinkedIn, we just might have done this more than once.

Guess it's time to write the bad-word-filter :)

(note: I replaced a valid number with NN to prevent the link from working. But I didn't change the random key)

respond early and often

Now, more than ever, openness and honesty with your customers are fundamental to success. If there's anything I learned from my years at RealNetworks, it's that if you don't listen and respond to your customers you'll lose them.

Today's example shows how easy it can be to get and respond. All I did was set up a Feedster feed for searching for "LinkedIn", and read what people say. When the opportunity arises, I love to respond and get involved in the conversations for how we can improve LinkedIn.

Building products has become more fun than ever now that we can listen so actively to the conversations around us.

Blog-sumer

I like to call myself a "Blog-sumer". As you can tell from my, uh, "blog", - it's pretty clear that I'm not an A-list blogger. I don't really write about my industry musings, add pithy commentary on the world at large, I don't track the interesting articles I find on my blog. Heck, I haven't even changed the damn Blogger default styles (like most of Blogger users). And pretty much no one reads this (except for you?).

Not that I'm unique, but blogging has completely transformed the way I discover information and learn about what's going on. And beyond that, I've got Feedster alerts all set up for main topics and my job (search for "LinkedIn") so that I can grok what's going on as soon as it gets mentioned. I spend way more time in BlogLines now than I do visiting sites. No more going bookmark by bookmark searching for a new articles. Who needs that?

So does that mean I need to be a blogger to be into blogging and believe this is the new way that everyone will experience the web soon?

Nah. Coming soon, the vast majority of us will be "blog-sumers" and that'll be just fine.

When reading is "comfort food"

Some things never change. Bruno and Boots have been my "friends" since I first read about their antics at MacDonald Hall. With so much going on now, it was nice to take a break this afternoon and feel like I was 12 again. At the library today, I tried to hide my face as I rushed in and out of the children's section. I was checking to see if there was anything I hadn't read find my favorite author from the past - Gordon Korman.

I picked out MacDonald Hall Goes Hollywood and skimmed through it in about 90 minutes resting outside in the backyard. It was nice to go back and experience all the joy and antics of these old friends who haven't grown up. Probably the longest time I've spent in the backyard and will do so much more this summer.