Mark Pincus Blog

Blogging from israel

I'm at the kinnernet conf and its really inspiring. Israelis are soo energetic. I havent slept yet.

I've done yoga by the sea of galilea, had two massages and argued about overthrowing the govt.

Now I'm listening to a brilliant presentation about how to create a better dating system by recognizing the need for spontaneity and mystery and chance. She's totally right. I think online dating is soo boring. I don't want to meet anyone that way, esp my next wife. Her final idea is really smart too - to create 'seeds' people can plant of people they like which eventually lead to meeting.
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Readers sending me to hiedelberg!

Thanks to devendra for recommending hiedelberg. On a train for it now as I got nothin better to do. Another reader posted that I'm stuck in the most boring city in europe, that doesn't even have a city guide which is true!
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How do you spend 12 hrs in franfurt?

Found myself with a 12 hour layover in franfurt (if only I had read the itinerary!). Anyone have suggestions for how to spend 12 hrs in franfurt?

This will be my first time stepping foot on german soil (airports don't count). a lot of jews like me have weird feelings about this place. Time to face them and realize its a new germany, right?
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the new sopranos sucks!

now i know why they waited two years and decided to end this formerly great show. the last two weeks episodes with tony in the hospital is beyond boring. what happened to the unmitigated violence? who's the idiot who decided to turn this into a bad version of ER meets the godfather? how many more hospital scenes can they subject us?

my advice, start killing the main characters off and then take the writers out and shoot them too.

israel bound

i'm about to leave for israel for yossi vardi's kinnernet conference.  honestly, not sure what this conference is about. i've heard people compare it to foo camp but it sounds a bit more like an israeli TED. i'm psyched to get to participate and get back to israel after a 31 year absence. i'm also planning to visit jerusalem and study torah for a few days at a yeshiva.

let me know if anyone has tips on cool things to do and see.

danah boyd on what drives social networking

danah has a terrific essay with her take on what caused friendster's downfall and myspace's massive success. according to danah, fster didnt win because the site didnt allow playing where myspace did.

my take is that friendster was more like the facebook (i'm an investor in both) in that it was a *real* network, where myspace was more like tribe, in being an online only community.  friendster failed to scale its network so it got really slow. also, they failed to add more interesting applications so there was nothing to do with your people. the facebook remains a useful closed trusted resource for a college community manage their social lives.

today, people are just starting to see the value of maintaining an online identity. myspace's comments area serves as a public message board like the old chalk boards on our dorm rooms. in fact, myspace profiles are a lot like dorm rooms, covered in crazy decorations.

the big question is when, why and how adults will want online identities and what they'll want to do with them. seems like that remains an open space. blogs serve this purpose in a crude way, but probably way too much work. will a social network host emerge as the myspace for the rest of us? what will be the killer apps, if they're less dating focused?

My old boss mark warner running for president

There's a great nytimes mag piece on warner today as the dem party's 'plan b'.

I worked for mark at columbia capital in the mid nineties. It was my last job (which I was fired from) before becoming an entrepreneur.

Mark was a pretty good guy. He always struck me as the president of your student govt type (which I don't like) but was surprisingly smart and grounded.

I remember talking to mark about his political ambitions and trying to argue he would have more positive world impact overthrowing our corrupt two party system than being yet another hired gun president working on behalf of special interests.

The nytimes reporter, matt bai, seems to agree for pragmatic reasons, saying that mark will have to run as an outsider and attack the dem machine to win votes and support against hillary. Yet mark seems unwilling to do so. He's always been the consumate insider so its hard.

if warner did step up and attack both parties and their horribly corrupt ties to special interests he might seal his name in history. See mark's worth over $200 million. This is a guy who could say fuck you to a lot of important donors and still be there.

And ill predict a strange secondary impact of that move, a lot of other rich and not so rich fuck you'ers would come out of the closet with big checks. That's the $50 million we saw for dean but its also the coffers of guys like pierre omidyar (ebay), george soros, the google guys, ted turner.

How cool would it be to see a fuck washington campaign funded by a small group of billionaires and millions of ants?! Hell yes. Politics could get fun.

And mark, what do you have to lose? Let's see, you can go the safe pussy route and be the next kerry backup in case hillary trips. Even then your just an alternative to condie or whichever lame republican stick figure.

OR you could emerge as a leader with passion (like al gore became after he gave up). You could stop being so fucking polite and point your brains and money against washington to give the power to the people. If not now, when? After you're elected? Nfw.

Ill repeat what I said on your farm 12 years ago, there's no point in being president if you're just another incrimental politician. You will only make the history books if you lead a revolution which our country needs more today than either of us realized then.

And we love risk takers. That's why we hate the kerry candidates. Lose the handllers and take it to the people. Its ok to say that bush is an idiot leading our country back to the middle ages. Its ok to say that hillary is a scary woman who nobody can relate to. And why not just seed your campaign with 50 mil of your own money and tell all those important 'bundlers' to go 'bundle' someone else.

What's your fucking money for if not to overthrow a corrupt system and restore democracy to a once great country? Wow, I can't imagine a better blurb in the 2085 edition of 8th grade history textbooks.

If you ever do decide to run a real campaign give me a shout (markpinc@yahoo). I'd love to help. Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

lala - bill nguyen's latest

my old friend and startup compatriot bill nguyen is at it again with a new music sharing service called lala. i havent tried it yet, but the concept sounds really clever. lala sounds like netflix for music and takes advantage of the fact that we can all legally sell or trade used cd's. basically, it sounds like i can rip all my cd's and then send them in to lala and get a whole new batch sent back. this sounds like something that could be very popular with teens and twenty somethings.

bill has a terrific track record and is backed with $9 million from bain and ignition. nice way to launch a company. bill has a nack for ui so i'll be excited to play with his newest app. 

Add more classifieds players - Msft, edgeio and blogbuy

here's my take.

Msft www.expo.live.com - Pros: winning in classifieds is about abundance first and msft is one of the few companies that has a chance of getting there fast. also, they stuck with a very clean interface that is easy to follow and lends some credibility. Cons: there is some garbled language about this being social and doing things through 'your buddies'. who says 'buddies'? sounds like something my dad would say. i didnt get why or how anyone would ever connect with their 'buddies' on this site.

i'll say this again here, if any of these big walled gardens would ever bother to do something in the interest of their users they'd start working on connecting everyone's social maps (foafnet) so that they could seamlessly and implicitly connect us all with our 'buddies'. and guys, it's no longer a big selling point that users can do all this for free!! they know that.

edgeio - this one goes in the category of new sites and services that i totally dont get. other than the people going to these web 2.0 conferences, i'm not sure who cares about 'owning their data' which seems to be the premise behind all of us posting our listings to our blogs. and when one thinks of the scale of listings it will take before you get a viable marketplace in any category and locality, we see why it's taken 10 yrs for craig to be craig. also, oodle already aggregates a ton and it doesnt sound like they're building huge traffic so far either. and once people ever did post to their blog, what's stopping everyone else from scraping it all too?

blogbuy?  huh? they're just focused on letting us post listings to our blogs? these seem like services looking for problems. i dont know anyone who woke up and asked how they could post a better listing to their blog today.

nuff said. i applaud all attempts as they do move the ball forward and i've obviously been a believer in classifieds for a long time. i just dont see the breakthrough with any of these services.

waiting to see a big guy step up and start connecting our disconnected data silos. suck in my social maps from many places and then make that useful. if you're just doing plain old classifieds i'll stick with my craigslist.