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    Reflecting on Women 2.0 Startup Weekend

    Two weekends back I joined over 100 people for my 4th Startup Weekend, this time in San Francisco at the newly launched coworking space cubeSF

    It was awesome,  I was (as usual) feeling like I should be working but I dragged myself there for the panel on Friday night and once I began talking to people I was able to shed my work-related stress and focus on the ideas people wanted to make a reality.  As the Women 2.0 blog summarizes:

    Kicking off Friday night, Tina Seelig (author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 and Executive Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program) moderated a discussion between an expert panel about how they would build a company over a weekend. Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work and Founding Partner of Y Combinator), Xochi Birch (co-founder of Bebo – sold to AOL in 2008), Shanna Tellerman (founder and CEO of Sim Ops Studios), Danielle Morrill (Marketing Director of Twilio), and Dan Martell (angel investor) shared their opinions about how to best utilize the short 54 hour time period to build a startup, how to utilize the strengths of each individual, and drew from their experiences to advise the audience on how to build a successful startup.

    That’s right – I was on a panel with those fantastic people and it was so fun watching them think of their feet for the panel – where we had to basically go through the process of coming up with an idea, making plans, and answering some tough questions from the audience.

    What did we do?  How did we do?

    I posted over at Seattle 2.0 about how to get the most out of Startup Weekend, and decided to test three things:

    • Could I successfully run a Startup Weekend team based on these principles?
    • Could I be a little less nice, and get a little more done?  (I put a sign on our table that said “If you’re not on my team, don’t talk to me — or anyone else on my team. kthxbai”)
    • Could I build the entire front end (HTML/CSS) – my first time being a technical contributor on a SW team?

    To see what we came up with check out EscapeMyDate – warning though that it is currently broken because our Twitter account was suspended yesterday in that whole Gov 2.0 expo debacle.

    AND WE GOT TEH MOST VOTES – effectively “wining” and getting free office space from Plug and Play in Palo Alto for one month!  Yipee

    More posts on the event:

    What happened at sw20sf

  • Posts

    Twitter Accounts Suspended – Gov 2.0 Expo Related?

    UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:35am: My personal account @DanielleMorrill looks like it is up again, I just sent a test tweet to see.  Right now my following/follower counts are both zeros and while I hope they’ll remove any cruft from those lists (I’ve noticed a lot of latency with updating my relationships) I definitely hope I don’t have to rebuild my network entirely.

    UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:25am: It appears this has impacted a lot of other people as well, and TechCrunch is reporting that suspensions may be related to tweets about the Gov 2.0 Expo: read the full story here… and now there are rumors that it may take as many as 30 days to reinstate accounts.

    About an hour ago I logged onto Twitter, or tried, only to find that my personal accounts and the account for my company were suspended.  I quickly checked Twitter search to make sure no tweets had been sent from those account that I didn’t know about (which you might expect if the accounts were hacked) and also checked Google Reader since I figured they might have already removed any offending content from the public timeline.  I found nothing, and sent requests to Twitter for each of the accounts to be unsuspended.

    Now Twitter itself appears to be down, and not just with the “Fail Whale” but with a real 503 error, which I asked a friend about that explained that error is often served by a load balancer when the load is more than the server can bear.  Sounds like a potential DDoS attack.

    So, I’m glad in a way that our accounts are suspended because I wouldn’t want any spam coming out of them — but this has me reflecting on just how dependent I’ve become on Twitter and Twitter search to feel connected to my network.  Ironically, just tonight I posted on Facebook that I’d decided to delete Whrrl from my phone and return to the Facebook community.  Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup and Twitter will have things figured out in the morning, I don’t envy them the task of dealing with this and frustrated customers (like me).

  • Posts

    Just Like That – Twitter Makes Move to Cut Down on Automated Follower Scraping

    I was going through my list of Twitter followers tonight to see who I needed to follow back and weed out some of the less interesting people, when I noticed a change:

    See how the number there is now a big integer, instead of a page number like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.?

    Why This Matters to Spammers & Hackers

    Have you ever visited the Twitter page of one of your major competitors (company, personal brand, whatever) and noticed that they have a big chunk of their following list that closely resembles who is following you?  Odds are, if they’re smart, they went and followed a lot of the people who you were following (or were following you depending on what they’re trying to accomplish).  They game the system by simply unfollowing anyone who doesn’t follow them back, “purging” people who are uninterested if you will to keep the ratio of followers to following balanced.

    Despite the fact that it is generally frowned upon as bad Twitter ettiquette, a lot of services are selling exactly this so it will be interesting to see how they innovate around this change.  The reality is that Twitter probably should have included obfuscation of all ordered pages long ago to prevent spam and auto-mated scripting on their site outside of the API.

    How Much Does it Really Slow Spammers Down?

    You can still page through a person’s following or followers manually, and it looks like the page numbers are not dynamically generated so running a script to click the “Next” button and collect the page IDs for a user who you want to scrape relationships from wouldn’t be that hard.  But it is interesting to notice these small changes Twitter is making to enhance security by making it a bigger pain in the ass to scrape than it was before.

  • Posts

    What Were You Doing When…?

    1 year ago (September 2008)

    I was working at Pelago and the Whrrl iPhone application had been launched for about 2 months.  I was transitioning into a marketing and community management role from my previous job on the “data team” as a content monkey.

    2 years ago (2007)

    I was a newlywed and Kevin and I had just returned from our honeymoon so that I could finish the interview process at Pelago and begin my job there, at my first tech startup (woo!)

    3 years ago (2006)

    I was recently promoted to Business Process Analyst at Expeditors International and was in the process of saving millions of dollars for the company through improved business processes.  I lived in my little penthouse studio apartment in Downtown Seattle (5th and Wall St), and had a pomeranian dog named Zeus.

    4 years ago (2005)

    I was recently hired full time at Expeditors International after spending 3 months as an intern, and I was living in a room in a tiny dirty apartment in Downtown Seattle with the strangest roommate ever.  I had been dating Kevin for almost six months.

    5 years ago (2004)

    I was returning to college for my sophomore year after spending the entire summer traveling around the U.S. and driving cross country.  I was recently moved back in with my parents on Bainbridge Island to save money after traveling so much, and I was working for both the family business and also starting a web consulting business of my own. I was remaking my vision of my life, trying to figure out if I should take my deferred offer at the University of Washington and move to the city or if I should just start working. I began to contemplate an internship at a large company to see what it would be like.

    6 years ago (2003)

    I was living in Bremerton fully immersed in the music scene with my cat Rocky.  I was about to begin college classes at Olympic Community College after a long summer following high school, with very little motivation or direction.  I took many amazing road trips, read tons of books, and had an incredible amount of angst regarding what to do with my free time.  Ah, those were the days… I also joined another McDonalds near to my apartment and worked a lot of extra hours to pay for all my adventures. I saw the poor working-class side of the world first hand through a lot of my friends and began to realize that without direction it was likely I would end up stuck in this world forever. Time for a change.

    7 years ago (2002)

    I was restless high school senior who had completed so many credits she only needed to attend part time.  I filled my days with music and art, and a lot of soul searching and wandering.  I was playing and singing in a couple bands and really into the music scene and my boyfriend.  It’s amazing that I graduated, looking back. I was, as always, working for my Dad and the tennis club where I played as well as doing odd jobs on the side, as well as working at McDonald’s which I enjoyed.

    8 years ago (2001)

    I was realing from the suicide of a friend, and only days from both September 11th and another friend’s drug overdose that would leave him in a coma for six months (it is a miracle he is alive and can walk and talk again) and my best friend (his girlfriend) in limbo for the next year. I was playing tennis every day and was pretty good at it to, and played tournaments around the state.