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Prague, London, and Munich

No, I didn’t go on Pig in a Poke (video) 😉

But I did hit a few European cities this past week for meetings, a VIP team meetup and event, a Top Gear show, and for the DLD conference.

Snapped a few decent fuzzy pics from my phone:

Quora – Some Quick Thoughts

When I see the excitement and 24/7 coverage of Quora lately, these song lyrics jump in my head:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

The rest of the song doesn’t really fit — but the buzz and sense of wonderment is ever present. From the people I talk to, nobody seems to know exactly why this is happening with Quora — a relatively young questions & answers site — but it’s growing fast and attracting great people.

Here is a good example by way of a tweet on how people are feeling about Quora 😉

http://twitter.com/#!/pmaiorana/status/22470864280756225

No doubt, the site is solid, well built, and takes advantage of the facebook/twitter socialgraph in a very smart way. But Q&A sites have been around for a while, and most haven’t become a part of my day-to-day the way Quora has lately.

For me, the signal/noise ratio is incredibly high, and from it’s early days, it’s felt like a site for us internet industry people — lots of questions about startup life, funding, and valley specific stuff. I think a bunch of hand curation is going on to keep things very clean and smart. Here is a great recent example that I just wouldn’t expect to find on other q&a sites – and with people I know and respect answering the question: I run a SaaS company that just turned profitable…

But there are some mysteries too. For example, I hadn’t logged in for a few weeks, and when I did, I had over 150 followers — and was pretty sure I had close to 0 only a few weeks ago. How did these people find me ? I haven’t answered any questions yet — only voted up a few answers. Part of the answer might be because of this thread which alluded my google alerts for my own name: Who are the best business development people in Silicon Valley? (nice to just be mentioned among some of these rockstars).

The other mystery to me is that all these Quora pages are indexes in Google, but didn’t trigger a google alert — so maybe Google doesn’t see these responses to some of the questions. But where is the follower discovery happening ? Could it be just the facebook/address book import plus that sidebar ? Maybe ? Reminds me a bit of Instagram too — these social graphs grow very quickly now, without a ton of in-your-face promotion.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops. I don’t quite see a general q&a site taking off – in that it gets diluted like some of the previous q&a efforts, attracts lots of spam, and most importantly it’s hard to trust people from outside your industry — you just can’t be sure they are subject matter experts. It also feels like niche sites win over time — if I want travel/hotel advise I’m still checking out tripadvisor.com. If I’m researching a new gadget, I’m heading to gdgt.com . But maybe this time it will be different. I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

Paul Maiorana Joins Automattic

I’m really excited that Paul Maiorana, formerly CTO of Mansueto Ventures (FastCompany & Inc Magazine), is starting his first day today at Automattic as Director of Platform Services. He’ll be working to help expand and support the fast growing WordPress.com VIP services program.

For those who are wondering, as part of the VIP program, we support and (for about half of them) host WordPress sites for amazing organizations such as CBS, Time Warner, Conde Nast, Linkedin, New York Times, National Post, NFL, NBC Sports, Yahoo News, Dow Jones, Red Hat, and many others who are using WordPress for all their blogs and vertical sites, and increasingly to run their entire sites, as CBS is doing.

Some of these VIPs are hosted with us on the WordPress.com grid, and others run their own WordPress in-house or at a 3rd party providers such as Rackspace or Amazon.

Paul is based in NY, and as a current Drupal user promises to launch his own WordPress site soon 😉

And yes, to answer the obvious question, I will be relaunching this blog on WordPress (but only because I want to, not because I have to!)

New Linking Feature in WordPress.com

This morning WordPress.com users woke up to a handful of new features including a linking feature that is something I’ve wanted to see in WP for quite some time.  The idea now is that you have a nice little tool to assit you in linking to content that you’ve already created inside your WordPress by simply searching using keywords:

These new features are part of WordPress 3.1, which is still being tested, but as a developer you can grab via SVN, or just fire up your WordPress.com site to see it now.

WordPress for Nokia Live in the Ovi Store

Coming out of beta, the new official Open Source WordPress for Nokia mobile app is available to everyone via the Ovi Store. I’ve been using it on my N8 and it’s really slick.

Big thanks to everyone at Nokia, especially Sanjeev Gil and Anssi Mäkelä and the entire dev team at Futurice.

Check out the video below to see the app in action:

And more info is available on nokia.wordpress.org, including how developers can get involved.

Native VS Mobile Web Apps & Ideas for Gmail Mobile Web App

I was at the excellent GigaOM Mobilize Conference 2010 last week as we, Automattic, were a sponsor with our WordPress for iOS app.

At the conference there was an interesting panel about mobile web apps VS native mobile apps.

My gut feeling re: this debate is that we are at a place in mobile that is similar to where the web was in early 1994. In 1994, you had very rich desktop clients such as AOL, Compuserve, and others that delivered a great web experience. And you had this Mosaic browser that just got ported to Windows, that everyone was raving about but was clunky, a bit buggy, and served up pretty plain looking web pages. Fast forward a few years, and we all know how this story played out.

I think that the mobile web apps vs native client debate will play out in a similar fashion — in that the mobile web will come to dominate native clients in much the same way — it’s a matter of time — but it’s probably a good 2-3 years out. Also native apps today are moving into games and video that require a big local storage component, and since mobile networks can’t stream fast enough, and today have terrible latency issues, I don’t see how mobile web apps will compete in the short-term for that category. But the advantages of mobile apps — fast iteration, no need for specific hardware testing, instant feedback, built on open source stacks, etc — that’s a winning combination.

This prediction is coming from someone who has invested a ton of time in the WordPress mobile apps, and I still sees plenty of value continuing to invest in native apps for at least the next 2-3 years. It’s also very possible that a hybrid approach will emerge, where it’s a native app embedding a mobile browser, and just using some of the native hardware capabilities and processing power, but in essence a 95% mobile app inside.

So in reference Gmail — after the sessions I was chatting with a few people, and on twitter a few folks were asking me which mobile app was the best. My response:

Re: those asking what the best mobile web app is: to me hands down it’s gmail. Local storage, fast, and better than the built in iphone mail

For context, I use Google Apps for all my email — both work and personal, and have been using Gmail mobile since it was a BlackBerry app back in 2007. With my type of work, I live in email a good chunk of my day.

Scott Eblen who works at Google on Gmail mobile then kindly reached out asking about any suggestions to improve the service. Since I can’t quite fit that into 140 characters, I though I’d blog it. Here is my take on Gmail mobile – the web app – used mostly on my iPhone4 using mobile Safari:

The good:

  • It’s fast and efficient — I use it probably 90% to triage email — erase, star, label, and archive, and about 10% for actual composing and replying
  • Since there are no iTunes approval waits, or extra device testing — the team seems to be iterating very quickly. The new buttons and new placements have improved a ton in the last month. The new feature for moving inside a thread is wicked — wish desktop Gmail had that feature to be honest
  • The local storage feature is great — even offline I can load up recent messages, and it adds to the overall snappy feeling of the web app
  • Related to the local storage item, the web app, unlike many others, loads up with the icons, buttons,etc already loaded
  • The main pane scrolls without showing the location bar now — hard to describe but you’ll notice it when you use it
  • Search rocks, and was the #1 reason I started using it instead of the built-in iPhone mail

What Can be Improved:

  • My number one issue — I can’t choose which email account for sending. It defaults to my ‘default’ which covers me 95% of the time, but wish I could switch to my other accounts
  • Related to the above, would be nice if it matched my account based on the email address that it was directed to. Regular web Gmail does that
  • When I switch between wifi connections or 3G, I sometimes need to reload the page. Refreshing within the app just spins ( happens much less often then it did a few months ago )
  • More of a UX thing with mobile, but I’d like to see better options for inline replying and cutting & deleting. Might be an HTML5 limitation, but a smarter way to select and delete would be helpful
  • Would like to see phone numbers automatically highlighted and clickable for a call. Bonus points if it can launch the google voice native or web app
  • Would like to see some way on the iPhone for Gmail to have access to local hardware capabilities like the camera and GPS. Android OS already supports this, and the HTML5 spec does as well.

So that’s my take — looking forward to seeing what the Gmail team does next. And keep an eye on WordPress in the mobile space — some exciting stuff in the works.

Windows Live Spaces Migrating to WordPress.com

Big news – at TechCrunch Disrupt we announced today that Live Spaces will be migrating millions of blogs to WordPress.com, and that new blogs will be created automatically on WordPress.com.

In addition, we’ve added support for Messenger Connect as a Publicize option, which enables you to automatically share new posts on your WordPress.com blog with your buddies on Windows Live Messenger. This new Publicize option joins our built-in support for Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!.

WP.com today has nearly 14M blogs, reaches over 260M uniques, and is growing at a nice clip. With the addition of all the MSN Spaces blogs it will add to the great community of bloggers and amazing content being produced each day on WP.com.

As Matt posted a few minutes ago:

I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s regard for their users in providing a solid upgrade and migration path with a really smooth experience

Ditto — too many services today provide very weak or super manual tools for migrating over. Big props to Microsoft to working on making it as smooth as possible and easy for their users — really impressive. On our end, we make sure to preserve all the content with original post dates and the like — and we redirect all the old URLs over, so nothing gets lost or drops out of the search indexes.

For Spaces bloggers looking to make the move, check out the MSN announcement post, and our welcome post on WP.com.