All web services I use on a regular base to interact with different kinds of media and how they are connected.
(via Welche Services ich nutze und wie sie zusammenhängen | Luca Hammer)
Wondering why there isn’t much about Startups? Nothing new to say there.
A blogpost I wrote for work|i|o some time ago that will never be published there because of it’s length and style.
Hello World
I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Luca and I love to write.
Who the fuck are you and why should I even care?
In most cases I will be the first person to talk to about anything related to work|i|o. No matter if you want to know something about our past, if you are interested in a partnership, if you want to work for us, if you want an interview with Bruno, if you have any problem with the service or anything else. I am the one you can reach 18/7 and jumps up at night if you got something important that can’t wait until tomorrow (Please note that I am located in Europe at the moment which means there is a time difference of -9 hours (west coast) to -6 hours (east coast)). You still can reach the rest of the team but if you want a fast answer I am your best choice. If I am not able to help you instantly, I am connected to the rest of the team most of the time and know whom to forward the request to. Am I Bruno’s personal assistant? Sometimes. I like to have all information flow through me and know what is going on.
But that’s not all I do. The blog, the twitter account, facebook, google+, quora and what else will follow is managed by me. I won’t be the one who writes ALL the content as I think in many cases it’s better to have the affected person to talk for themselves. My job is to make sure that they do. I will nag Bruno to write about the bigger vision, ask the developers to explain how a new feature works or interview a customer on how they use the service.
The third field, besides handling communications and talking myself, will be the integration of communicative features into the services. I think about viral effects and how to mesh them into the product. How should we connect users to each other, where should we have social sharing integrated and how, which APIs are useful for us? Here I work closely together with Bruno who is responsible for the product itself and the company.
Lastly I keep an eye on stats. I am thinking about which metrics are useful for us and how to measure them. I am playing around with funnels and help to measure different landings pages. I pay attention to the growth of the different social media channels, sign ups, retention and how sharing features are used.
Why did you join work|i|o?
In summer 2010, after blogging that I have no clue what to do in the next years, I received a facebook message from a guy called Bruno Haid. He said he got something that could be interesting for me. Only three short sentences and he didn’t even care about proper punctuation. But he did mention «startup, rethinking work and international». I had some offers from marketing agencies but didn’t feel like working for the causes of other people who didn’t really respect me as though I would only cost them money. After asking some people if they knew Bruno and if he is one of the good ones, I replied that we could meet. Thanks Andreas for standing up for him.
It was a warm evening when we met at the restaurant ‘Immervoll’ in Vienna and he had some raspberries with him which he asked to be stored in the kitchens refrigerator. We than sat outside and talked mostly about me. I instantly liked him. I can’t really say why. He has an open, understanding, no-bullshit nature. He asked me stuff I would only tell my therapist and answered him without questioning it. After we both felt comfortable he told me about that idea of his. A startup that would change how we all work. Back then it was a loose vision. But I liked it.
He asked if I would like to join. I said that I didn’’t know how I could be of any use. My self esteem back than resembled that of a little gollum. He told me that I already added value by providing feedback on his idea and believed that I could play an important role. He recounted some stuff from his first startup and that he thought that they hadn’t done enough marketing and stuff in the beginning. Also he wanted someone with good knowledge about social media. We started the same way as my relationship. Let’s try it and see how it develops. Last summer I moved in with my girlfriend. It looks like work|i|o will go into the same direction.
What’s your background?
I am addicted to new things. Maybe it started with the constant change of my local focus of my life. I went to kindergarten in the village I grew up. While everybody else went to elementary school in the same village my parents thought the one in the next village was better as they had a strong Montessori influence. While all others beside me and my best friend went to the local school I went to a humanistic high school in the next major city. After that most of my classmates went to the local university while I went to the one in the federal capital of Austria. Last summer I moved another 800 kilometers to move in with my girlfriend and we think about moving into a bigger city.
I started blogging at 16. In the beginning about my personal life later about all the stuff I found interesting. Mostly internet related. I loved and still love to test new services and wrote about them on the blog. Over time I became one of the better known bloggers in Austria. After moving to Vienna I was part of an initiative to support Bloggers in Austria and we held some events and tried to generate awareness for blogs. At some point I set up and customized blogs for clients of an angency and wrote concepts how the clients could use social media. Then I became a speaker at some conferences and held talks about the topic at companies and the university. After some appearances on national television a friend of mine made me a shirt which said «Social Media Superstar» and we had a great laugh about it. Not everyone thought it was funny and I attracted some haters but they were quiet most of the time as I was well respected in the blogging community.
In 2009 some students occupied the University of Vienna and I was interested what was happening. So I went there and tweeted about it. I was disgusted by the loud music, the smoke and the drunken students. But over time and after hearing people explain their intentions and seeing that the party people were only one part of the occupation I sympathized with them. I set up a livestream which had over 500k views and built the first website. Later I held talks about it and wrote an article for a book on how other movements could learn from what we did there. The book is CC licensed and anyone can read the articles online for free or buy the book. It’s in German though.
I think I know a bit about how to use social media. I also have some insights in journalism as it was the topic I studied and got in touch with some professionals. From time to time I write articles for newspapers and magazines.
As part of the Viennese web scene I came in contact with some startups but can’t say that I really know how they work, what’s important and stuff like that. These are things I learnt over the last year and still do.
My biggest issue is English. I understand everything as long as there isn’t some crude dialect involved but I sometimes reach limits when I try to express myself. I know that I make some bad grammar mistakes and my vocabulary isn’t the best. A real problem if you want to be represent an international startup. But I keep trying. (You are welcome to correct me on any channel. I am thankful for that as it helps me to improve.)
Next steps
I am fascinated by most startups and learn new stuff every day. work|i|o is one of the best things in my life and I am thankful for the trust Bruno has in me.
Over the next weeks and months I want to provide you with more insights on what work|i|o is, how it works and how it will improve your life. We will also cover surrounding topics like smart sourcing and the future of work.
If you have any questions just write a comment, send a mail or head over to quora where we try to answer questions related to work|i|o.
I am most active on Twitter and Quora. If you understand German you can also take a look at my blog or Facebook.
Photo: Tony Gigov
The first twenty years of my life were focused on education. My time horizont ended with the next term. When I moved to Vienna I had no clue what to study. I was registered for informatics, started economics and ended in communications. I read a lot about different jobs and got some insights at university. Most of them from people who tool a completely different path but said it should be possibly with our degree too. I knew that my degree won’t limit what I will do. Most stuff happend through contacts. From talks at events and companies to appearance on television. I made some money from blogging. Over time I stopped worrying about what I will do with my future and started to let it happen. I got in contact with interesting people and tried to help them. I worked for some. I never thought I will end up with one occupation. Startups always fascinated me. Those people who jumped on an unsolved problem and gave it a try. Failing and trying again. They need to adopt fast enough to new circumstances. Data helps but doesn’t solve. Decisions are neither wrong nor right, but need to be made. One more step and you could fail. Stay still and you will fail for sure.
Over the last months I troubled myself often. I stood still and risked the bets of the whole team. It’s time to move faster.
Path and hundreds of other Apps upload the iPhone adressbook without asking. I think it’s stupid to question this behavior as long as the data isn’t used to spam the people.
Asking someone if it’s ok to upload someone elses data is pointless. Asking the people of whom the data is would be spam.
Contact information is normally public (phone books, websites, facebook,…) to make it easier to contact someone. Making it private only makes it harder to get in touch.
As soon as I give someone my contact data and don’t explicit state that it should stay private I can’t expect it. I give away contact information if someone asks me if I know someone who does X.
I see adress books not as private phone books but as a list of favorites. The data itself can be found somewhere else. With whom I am connected is public on facebook, twitter and many other networks. The only use of my adress book is to make it easier for me to get in touch with someone. It doesn’t matter if this is over phone, mail or Path.
If I type in every name from my contacts or upload a file makes no difference but in convenience. I will give every app access to my contacts as long as they don’t spam them. You can’t stop me from doing that.
See also Andreas rant that phone numbers are stupid.
Longer german version of this post.
Don’t judge the things your cofounders/coworkers do by your own terms. It may seem unnecessary to spend several hours on thinking how to integrate share buttons if you have all the uncoded code before your eyes. But it makes a difference for the person who implements it and for those who uses it.
If everyone does it’s best in their area, all is great.
(Don’t be a perfectionist.)
Today I had a little telephone conference with Bruno and Andi. I prepared a roadmap of social media integration in work|i|o for the next three releases and wanted some feedback.
Long story short, if we were in the same room, after I put all my documents on the table and explained my thoughts, he would have thrown them on the floor, put one clean sheet on the table and told us to focus on this single problem.
At the moment the developers do their best and we come closer to launch date. At the same time I am motivated but don’t feel to be able to do much. Therefore I tried to think about stuff that comes later. Problem: As a startup we work on assumptions and every additional feature makes it more complicate to recognize the core problems.
As Andi said, it is good to think about the possibilities but we shouldn’t implement too much in the beginning as long as we haven’t verified our assumptions. I will keep on planning and making concepts but they will stay documents for the moment.
The title may be wrong as they already are #1. But I wanted to bring the act of their transformation into it.
Andreas Klinger, one of my mentors, wrote a new blogpost: Sh*t… twitter is exciting… again! In a nutshell, Twitter is using the massive content from their users to generate the best realtime news in the world. Nobody else has the manpower to do that. And they are pushing to generate better ways to consume that stuff than in 140 character streams. He thinks one step ahead that Twitter will provide news outlets with the tools to moderate the realtime content for their publications.
I may be the wrong person to give feedback on that as I don’t read any conventional news on a regular base, but as he asked me too, I will throw in some thoughts.
Most people are still lurkers
This is good news for all media companies. People like to consume. Only thing that changed that they talk about what the consume online and not only in their peer group. Distribution grows. Some write comments. Mostly unimportant.
80%* of Tweets aren’t original content
People link to articles, reply to famous sources and retweet. *I make this numbers up.
New elite
Most of the famous sources became famous in the conventional media world. It wasn’t to hard to translate the attention into online. But a new class of highly connected individuals came up and they are able to push news in a similar way.
Lurkers become one hit wonders
This is the most important part. They are everywhere and if something important happens, boom. Nobody is able to achieve the same speed. This is the part that Twitter needs to show. They already do it with Trends. But that is only the testing area. Being able to say what exactly is the important part of the trends is essential.
Wavii in realtime
I love Wavii. Just look at the related news (sry, only way to give a live sneak peak at the moment). One sentence per event. I can follow hundreds of topics and know everything important by sifting five minutes per day through the feed. This is who I want news to look like. That’s the interesting part. Sometimes I will dig deeper, of course, but not for most of the stuff. If Wavii would not only look at newssites but also Twitter, this would be the most awesome news thing of the last years.
Realtime news will be written by one-time-wonder-lurkers (hudson, osama,…), new elite (everyone who puts his spare time into Twitter to connect and stuff) and conventional media (these will be merged into the new elite or the other way round). Some of it being reported on Twitter itself and some on websites to whom Twitterer link and make it go boom.
I will check out teleportd now as Andreas suggested.
Disclaimer: I can’t predict the future. Don’t take this stuff to serious and rather see it as inspiration who we can build the future.
Simplicity
There is no clutter. The homepage reminds of Google in its better days. Just one input field that is used to find contacts and dial numbers. I enter the name, press enter and it already calls the person. Nothing to install. Just talking. Nobody uses IP adresses to visit websites, why should we use telephone numbers to call someone?
Quick Call
Being able to generate disposal call links is a cool idea. I can send the link to a journalist or whoever I want and with one click they can talk to me. As they are already in front of their computer this is great.
Group Call
Why should I add numbers to some conference call tool or whatever if I can simply send a link to the people I want to talk with. It is so easy and fast. I can even generate a Google Calendar event with the link to send to the participants. Yeah!
vox.io isn’t just another voip service. It finally brings calling to the internet in a meaningful way.
Longer post that says the same on my german blog.
I want a service that combines notifications from all services I use. Twitter, Facebook, Quora, soup.io, gmail (?), tumblr, disqus, quote.fm … .
At the moment most of these are delivered per mail into gmail. Some of them have iPhone apps and with them push notifications. Some are able to use Growl to send me notifications on the Macbook. All have some notifications on their website.
Gmail already published their smart labels which removes most notification mails from my inbox to their dedicated Label. This already helps to unclutter my inbox but doesn’t really help me to stay up to date wherever I am.
I like notifications. I want to know when someone interacts with my content. But most notification systems are implemented bad. I hate it to get an email, go to the website and see the same notification again. Even worse if I get a growl notification, a push message on my iPhone, mail and when I go to the website there waits another notification about the same event. Quora already does a better job than most others. The have a tracking image in the email and if I already viewed the mail the notification is marked as read on the website.
One problem are the settings. They are often hidden somewhere on the website and aren’t nearly as granulated as I want them to be. And if they are it is too much.
This is a problem nearly every webservice has, as notifications are important to get a better retention rate. But I tend to deactivate them all after registering as they are often annoying. And the service was never visited again.
I imagine a service where I can view a feed of all notifications. Can easily change how the are sorted. Turn off notifications directly if I think they aren’t useful and activate others. I want to say at which times I want to get push notifications. I want it to only show me growl notifications if I am working at the Macbook. I want it to mark seen notifications everywhere as read if I have seen them. From the notifications I want to get directly to the item at the webservice or app if installed.
At the moment I only know of some mail based services which can’t be satisfying as they aren’t deep enough integrated.
I am sure there are enough people who would pay for such a service. I also think webservices would be open to it and pay too. Some already have the APIs to accomplish it.
Please leave your thoughts on this in the comments.
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You can use this idea in any way you like. Program a free open source service, start a commercial company, sell it to your grandmother.
After using tumblr to recycle my soup.io posts since a year I will start to use it as my first public blog in english. If you followed me because of the images please head over to my soup and follow me there. I can’t provide you with a tumblr of it as the automatic import isn’t supported any longer.
Why?
Because I can. I am blogging since 2006 in german at 2-blog.net and was for some time quite successful. I still am. But who cares. Since some months I am part of work|i|o, a startup that tries to change how we work. My main role is communications at which I am awesome. In german. But my english sucks that much that I still have lots of problems with it and it makes me damn insecure. I was hiding, wrote concepts, planned stuff and everything but never went out there and told people how we want to achieve ALL the things.
This year is important to me and the startup. We need to get momentum. In the last months I was able to postpone stuff with stupid excuses. Now I am hungry and I want to see things happening.
My english is still bad but most of the people are able to understand what I am trying to say. Even if not they can always ask. Not doing anything won’t make me better. And it is just the language. I sometimes get told that I am still better than the majority of people for whom english is their first language. No excuse.
Correct me
This is one of the few blogs where corrections about spellings and grammer are more than welcome. I can only improve myself if I get feedback. Of course you should correct me on a substantive basis too. If I write something wrong I hope someone will tell me. If you don’t want to do this in public shoot me a mail at lucahammer@gmail.com.
What to expect?
I don’t know. One reason for this was a post I wrote for the work|i|o blog which was too long, too unfocused and to unimportant. It will never be published there. But I think that I might still be interesting for some people who want to get the whole story. The content here will in most cases be centered around me. If you don’t like me or aren’t interested in what I do and think, you shouldn’t follow this blog. It won’t make you happy. To everyone else: Welcome to the future. If you have any suggestions use the comments or ask-a-question or mail.
[Reposted from nitael via luna]
[Reposted from nameherhope]
