If you're me, Scott Johnson (Feedster), and Ray (Feedster), quite a long way.
Ray and I headed up to San Francisco on Wednesday evening so that I could check out Feedster headquarters. We met up with Scott, checked out the place, talked about my gadgets, and then headed out for dinner. But we made one mistake. Well, two mistakes really.
- We left the building without a plan more specific than "wander around San Francisco until we find a good place to eat". Bad idea.
- We let Ray lead. Ray has a, uh, well... an "unusual" navigation style. Let's just leave it at that.
Needless to say, we probably walked around for an hour before settling on a place. Along the way realized it was a lost cause, asked a homeless guy for advice, stopped outside the only decent place we could find, and tried calling Mark--figuring that someone who lives in San Francisco would have some good advice. But he wasn't around. We toyed with the idea of calling Russell. However, thinking of him made us realize that we had three mobile devices that had varying degrees of Internet access.
Duh!
In short order, we found some real problems with Yahoo! Local on Scott's Treo and took that as a sign to just eat where we were: The Public. (Mental note: Talk to mobile and/or local folks about that Treo problem.)
The end result was a pretty good meal and desert. The only real surprise was getting the bill and figuring out that Ray and I each paid $8 for a bottle of Newcastle!
After dinner, we headed back to Feedster central where we found Scott Rafer (Feedster's CEO) and chatted for a bit. I told them about my idea for a service to build on top of Feedster: "meme tracker" or "influence tracker". It's the same one I told the Technorati folks about last week. I should blog that sometime.
So now I wonder who will build it first... :-)
Oh, we also snapped some amusing Channel9 guy pics. One outside an adult entertainment establishment, some near our food, and assorted others. I'm sure Scott will have those on-line soon.
Speaking of soon, it's 2:30am. Bed time! I'll play with the new MSN Search Beta in the morning, since it's just spewing errors as me now.
Posted by jzawodn at November 11, 2004 02:27 AM
I'd like to see a "meme tracker". It seems to me that PubSub might be doing something too -- they vaguely describe it in their LinkRanks About page (at the very bottom of the page):
http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks-about.php
Newcastle? As in Newcastle Brown Ale? They sell that in the States? Wow. But $8 a bottle is a bit steep.
I too just tried the search Beta and it wasn't wanting to play either. But it is a beta...
I found myself in a similar situation recently, but in Hartford which is significantly smaller than SF but also turns into someplace you really don't want to be on foot really, really fast. I used google's sms service, it worked great.
I'd like to see a meme tracker that spits out an RSS feed of memes, each item a link to another RSS feed with items matching that meme. That would be fantastic.
Do you mean something like Attention.XML Jeremy? I haven't read the full spec, but I know Tantek's quite hyped about the possibilities for it.
$8 for a beer?! I live in a dry city and even to me that's high...
re: meme tracker... Have you seen the recent ChangeThis manifesto on A Physics of Ideas? "Nova Spivack describes a unique approach to organizing, filtering, and tracking information and meme spread using principles of Newtonian physics."
http://www.changethis.com/7.PhysicsOfIdeas
[and, no, I'm not the author :)!] Might be worth a glance...
