Robert Scoble shows how various services are causing online conversations to become more real-time and less permanent.
Blog
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Thank you firefighters
My sister lives in Santa Barbara. Last Thursday evening around 6pm she and her husband got a phone call telling them that they had 15 minutes to evacuate their house. A dangerous fire had flared up less than a mile away. They grabbed what they could, put the kids in the car, and took off with embers flying through the air and the fire coming towards their house. They went to their in-laws (who later also had to evacuate) and started listening to the radio. Chances for their house were low. Late into the night they heard confirmation that their neighborhood had burned to the ground. Their hopes sank to near zero. Then, after being up all night, they got a call from a neighbor. She had managed to get back up to their street and told them that miraculously my sister’s house and two others below it were still standing. Everything else around them was gone.
My sister thinks that the fire hydrant on their property might have saved their home. Firefighters must have climbed on their roof, chainsawed off the breezeway connecting their house to a smaller building (a recording studio) and started hosing down their house. The studio ended up burning to the ground, but the main house made it through. Even the ancient oak and eucalyptus trees next to the house survived.
My heart goes out to the over 200 families who lost their homes in the Tea Fire. And my gratitude goes to the anonymous firefighters who saved my sister’s family from losing their home and all their belongings.
Update: A picture of their studio on fire from a CNN video feed:
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Union Street
I was walking down Union Street yesterday and noticed a bunch of shuttered stores and a bunch of newly opened ones too. There seems to be constant store and restaurant turnover on that street. Makes me wonder what has a higher failure rate: Silicon Valley startups or San Francisco retail stores?
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Welcome PollDaddy
Polls like the one to the right are now a built-in part of WordPress.com, thanks to Automattic’s acquisition of leading poll and survey platform PollDaddy! Congratulations to the PollDaddy team of Lenny, Eoin, and Jonathan, who have built a great company with lots of users (including many WordPress bloggers) and partners, and they did it with a small team bootstrapping the company to profitability over the last two years. Lenny and Eoin are joining Automattic and will continue to run PollDaddy as a standalone platform that offers polls to any publisher on the web. As a matter of fact, the two have been witnessing team Automattic in action for the last couple of days, as we are holding one of our bi-annual company meetups – this time we are in the lovely Rocky Mountains in Colorado spending time together and working on group projects (you might see some of the fruits of our labor emerge next week).
Special thanks to Fergus for introducing me to Lenny, and to Mike and Barry for jetting over to Ireland to help move PollDaddy to Automattic’s infrastructure, integrate the service into WordPress.com and create a cool new PollDaddy plugin for WordPress.org bloggers. I met Lenny last Spring at the Web 2.0 conference and we got talking about the big demand for polls among WordPress publishers. We started working on a partnership, Matt went to visit PollDaddy in Ireland – here are his thoughts on the deal – and we decided that PollDaddy would make a great addition to Automattic’s family of services. Scott was advising PollDaddy and helped negotiate a deal, and voila, here we are with a great polling service as part of WordPress.
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Automattic acquires IntenseDebate
Boulder based IntenseDebate is joining team Automattic! Check out their blog for the news. Congratulations to their team and welcome to Automattic.
Comments are one of the key features of blogs. Over the past year, several startups (including IntenseDebate, Disqus, SezWho, and JS-Kit) have launched improved commenting systems for blogs (and beyond) and have shown that they can create better comment flow, management, tracking, and organization. Given how core comments are to blogging, we decided a while ago that we’d like to offer a top-notch commenting service ourselves. We got to know the ID (IntenseDebate) team through Matt’s involvement with the TechStars program and as we started talking to them in more depth, it became clear that we have a lot in common. ID is a small and frugal team focused on technology and product — just like us. Several thousand publishers have already
enabled ID on their sites including many WordPress users.ID will remain a stand-alone service that can be used with WordPress as well as many other types of web sites (similar to the way we run our Akismet and Gravatar services). In addition, some ID features and technology will be built directly into future versions of WordPress and Gravatar.
