I had the good fortune this past week of speaking with Leigh Drogen of StockTwits to get an inside look at the mastermind lair they have setup in Manhattan. More importantly, I was able to discover some of the key aspects of StockTwits that make it irresistible to it’s fanatical user base, and hopefully pass some of this understanding on to other interested proto-founders, curious StockTwits fans, and other traders who may not have heard of this fun way to share tips.

Intro

History of StockTwits + Why Every Trader Can find Critical Value on the Web Service

Where StockTwits is Headed Next, Datamining their Stream of Curated Information

Big thanks to Howard Lindzon for helping me set this up, the StockTwits team for hosting the interview space, and Leigh Drogen for giving a dynamite inside interview.

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I only came up with 24 out of 100 this morning. That’s where you come in. Drop your wisdom bombs in the comments below, and don’t forget to start with the number the last one leaves off with.
These are merely guidelines, some of which are highly opinionated and biased by own narrow perspective. Skip the ones that don’t resonate, latch on like a tic to the ones that do:

The Ways:

1. Learn the basics of a web programming language. You don’t need to be a master, just learn enough to transfer your ideas into a barely functioning tool and know where to find examples/docs. There are a ton of generous hackers out there that will help you get over the hump (Github + Git basics). Web coding isn’t a spooky animal
2. Just because you’re a master of design, doesn’t mean your users share your preferences. I’m getting a little burned out on the minimalist extreme, if I wanted an empty screen, I’d keep my browser minimized. Sure keep it simple & clean, but let end users trick out their own interfaces. Integrate the most popular designs into your tool, and reward the folks that build it. Build a set of tools instead of one size fits all. Share your “vision” as one sample template
3. Shut up and code (Mark)! I spend way too much time considering alternate methods and implementations. My biggest mistake is asking my cofounder for permission to try some hairbrained scheme out. Hacking web programs isn’t a permission sport, just f’ing do it. If it crashes and burns you learn and move on. Don’t waste your breathe convincing other hackers do to your dirty work. They’ll jump all over it when they find it interesting. You’ve got to make it interesting. Cash helps but only goes so far, if you create a hacked up prototype that genuinely gets people interested, it’s GO TIME
4. Don’t hesitate to ask when you get stuck. You don’t need permission to try stuff out, but it’s more than fine to ask other web hackers for help, expect ~60% to say RTFM (read the “funky” manual) because:
   • they had to
   • have no idea
   • or are too busy downloading anime porn torrents

   Web programming is becoming a solid social gravity for more than just geeks

5. You don’t need seed, angel or VC money to build cool tools. You can’t buy genuine interest and excitement. Don’t believe me? Go to a noody bar and spend a few hundred dollars – how much love do you walk out with?
6. If your cool tools/framework and passionate hacking team finds community traction (10 fan-atics), then you can focus on building out a business. If you can do it well enough with revenue, your group can “own” more of their labor by delaying liquidity. Otherwise cash some of the equity in to Angel/VC money and use that to build the business up and out. PS don’t give up more than 49%
7. Leverage open data, source and standards whenever possible. It’s a lot easier to start with plenty of breathing room as your web tools grow up, as opposed to locking in designs to a closed (externally owned and regulated) source. Sometimes you won’t have a choice because some eccentric wannabe hacker* will start with a single service ad tool. Quickly Jedi mind trick him into building a ground breaking adaptive open web tool
8. Don’t latch on to one programming language too hard. Sure Ruby on Rails is fun and zen, but it’s not the right tool for every job. If you’re doing heavy numerical analysis or anything that is super time critical you may need to swap in some other tools
9. No matter what web framework you <3 i suggest you learn the basics of Javascript & Jquery. They’re a fantastic way to offload connections and dynamic web content on the client side
10. The slowest parts (bottlenecks) of pretty much any big web app are:
    • Remote API hits
    • Database writes. Concurrent reads makes reading not quite as slow
    • your inner most loop. Stop recalculating a million digits of pi in that loop hoser
11. Talk to a bunch of folks that share a common difficulty. Learn about every angle of the problem and why it’s so tough. Take all that community knowledge and lay the foundations for my favorite new augmented reality virtual smartphone pingpong game. The world needs this, I need this, NOW
12. Don’t get another degree. Don’t delay what you need to learn and go do it now. If you must, take online courses for free, or read and workthrough free subject texts online. The world has enough people with epic qualifications that can’t do anything. Beware the “walls full of proof” crowd, they suffer the horror of group think and love the taste of their own bath water. If you can’t think of anything better to do, a multidisciplinary degree from a university won’t help. My advice, go get a job at a tech startup
13. Don’t deliberate too long. When tight on time just go with any reasonable option instead of getting stuck on a tough choice and burning up all your mind candy (sugar in the brain gets used by each decision)
14. Don’t lock into one solution or concept. The biggest threat to your next mind expanding web application is weighing your preconceived notions too highly. The “not invented here” syndrome infects us all. We’re much more biased by the devil we know, compared to alternatives. Dig into the docs, and use the alternatives to make a rational decision. Not everyone is the same kinda genius, but (almost^) everyone is brilliant in their own way
15. Learn to listen for the brilliance in others. Cultivate it if you are in a position to do so, without telling others what to do. Folks do best when they discover their own calling and rockstar expertise
16. A rich web tool can have many different angles of attacking a problem and solving a need. Orthogonal (different info) solutions can be mashed together to make stronger utilities. If I know your favorite movies, music, tech companies, and choice of clothing I can better suggest bloggers you may enjoy reading
17. Pick a few features or just one to start with and wrap your mind around it. All your great ideas don’t have to get shoved into one tool, library or object (Mark)
18. Garbage in equals garbage out. Before you crucify the latest method (latest methods get a bad rap because 90% they reveal a bug in your earlier design) make sure it’s getting quality inputs
19. That last guideline of garbage in, garbage out extends way beyond programs to you and your personal information diet. Cancel cable tv and your World of Warcraft subscription and start a company with your newly freed 70 hours per week. Review every news site, email, blog or “social media” platform and critically decide if it’s helping your bottom line now or ever will. This includes this blog, if it’s not paying off drop it or check less often. My posts bounce all over. I’ll be damned if I have to “wear a straight jacket” for my own blog topics
20. There’s nothing worse than being told what to think, and how to solve a problem. Empower everyone you work with to make their own decisions, and only interject if a poor choice will actually kill your web utility. Broken code gets fixed with a git revert (mulligan)
21. Don’t be afraid of arguing an important decision for the tool you’re working on. But don’t argue every point, Contrarian! Every moment spent arguing is another lost fix/development. Worst case you can fork it and go different directions and decide which is the more elegant/appealing choice later, but I suggest a third party nerve staple the pissing match. How important is that shiny spinning feature or killing it? (my pet rotating images)
22. Don’t repeat yourself. Modularize and compartment your code whenever possible. I’m lazy so sometimes I don’t do this. I almost always regret it later
23. The the correlary of don’t repeat yourself, automate whenever you can. Automate the automating. Automate, the automating of the automating
24. Don’t reinvent the wheel. If millions of open source coders haven’t put it out there then by all means be that guy or gal. Fork some useful starting point and get with the new hotness hacking

Notes:
* any similarity between this author and such a wannabe hacker is completely intentional
^ Some people are beyond help, and are helplessly stuck in bad thinking land.

The breadcrumbs were eaten

In the previous incarnation of opengard.in (in development, formerly imm.victusmedia.com) you could see what your friends (or a lists) main topics discussed were in a moment by typing in the URL /users/twitterusername. Now with the expansion of potential information streams being “the web”, there’s no guarantee or meaning in /users/victusfate being me (unless I claim that identity on our site). We’ve had to rethink the way we handle flowing information, and how best to connect that to a user identity.

The biggest challenge for shifting the social tools at Victus Media away from a fading legion of twitter-apps, and becoming a world wide web application has been maintaining relevance. It’s clear that the url breadcrumb doesn’t have the same instant meaning as it once did to the community of twitter users. But identity methods, and the sources of web information we can process has expanding immensely. Where once we could potentially cater to 5 million active users of social media, we now can engage over 1 billion & growing possible web users.

The trick to making the transition is staying focused on relevance, and expand on a simple way of creating order from the chaos of information overload.

• Relevance to the user means providing an obvious interface, a simplified initial setup, and quality filtering and organizing tools to track their favorite dynamic web sites (social/news/media).
• Relevance to other applications translates as accurately representing users expressed interests, for adaptive sites that choose us as a way of customizing their content to a users expressed interests.

We’re not like any other social reader/aggregator

At Victus Media we believe in self curated input channels. But being able to direct one’s own info stream doesn’t mean you can’t borrow the ubiquitous attention of super human filters. Generous folks like Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Mahendra Palsule create numerous public web streams that you parse with our filters. We extract entities, or the most important people, place, ideas from as many feeds as we can handle. Simply add your favorite feeds as sources you follow. Our plan is to make it so that users can identify

• content they create (i.e. this blog, or my Twitter account @victusfate is me)
• or content you wish to keep track of, like some of the mortal portals I mentioned above

There will be a feeds overview page to add, delete and organize feeds. We’ll work out the details with helpful user feedback.

Mobile and location are additional sources of info we can use to aid in the neverending search for user relevance. The more orthogonal data we can get, the better our suggestion algorithms can eventually get. Our longer term vision leads us down a path that makes a highly functional web agent that can negotiate great deals of data and highlight relevant serendipitous sources browsers may normally miss. The same agent can be used to make each web browsing adventure adapt to our preferences. As our interests change the web agent will shift it’s criteria and learn from our recent behavior.

Recently I picked up a new living room computer (Acer Aspire Revo, named “Ouroborus”) and a pretty juiced up LCD*. I decided it was time for an upgrade from the 10 year old projector tv, which hasn’t been able to stream web content since the XBOX 360 red ringed (died).

Windows 95 (the purchased OS) had some issues. Nothing major, but I couldn’t get the audio driver to enable Nvidia HDMI audio. My fiancé had a windows trojan catastrophe a few months back so neither of us were excited about having another time bomb to constantly have to monitor, soothe, and coax into functionality. Being very satisfied with the switch to Ubuntu on my desktop I decided to do the same for Ouroborus (the Revo).

After I setup a USB stick with the latest 64bit Ubuntu install a couple of days back, I finally got sound working on Ouroborus connected by an HDMI cable to the living room display. I snagged Boxee and sat back on the couch ready to enjoy some Netflix instant queue goodness with Michelle and my brother Ron. But to my surprise, there was no Netflix option. A few hurried searches later and it sunk in that there was and would not be for some time a “Silverlight” Netflix streaming solution on any Linux systems (without virtual windows/Mac operating systems). So I did what every content hungry shopper would do, I looked for competition!

Netflix is the only Subscription Content Streaming Game in Town

I was a happy user of Netlix for over a year, and enjoyed the content they enabled with their streaming service. As I mentioned above, I moved away from Windows to Ubuntu flavored Linux and it tastes great, except I’ve noticed a couple of issues. Web Content providers aren’t comfortable porting to Linux. But wait, isn’t one of principles of the web enabling smooth information flow through it without concern for underlying operating systems?

First I bumped into iTunes problems, that’s a big no go unless you trick out your WINE (I had issues) or run a windows/osx virtual machine. Then Kindle reader showed itself to be another Linux no go. So DRM streamed content isn’t really “web content”. It relies on specific operating systems, and I’m left wondering where to look for content (that I can pay the creator for). I’m more than willing to pay for content I enjoy. There’s something comforting and reasonable knowing that perhaps a few pennies on the dollar are going to the people that create engaging entertainment.

So far I’ve come across Amazon streaming content, and I’m pretty sure it will work over any browser (with Flash). Is there another subscription web video service that streams to any browser?

*new LCD: Phillips, 47″, 29000to1 contrast, 120hz meh, “has sound“

This post let me air out some rebellious feelings and frustrations with a world that changes 100times slower than I’d like. Patience is a virtue.
I’ve got a bone to pick with fixed wages, incumbent business systems and outdated financial models. I’m thankful that they’ve been the foundation of our economy and sustained my life until now, but they have unerringly lead to a society of doing just enough. Productivity is stuck in a local optimal that’s shrinking every day.