TweetToCall is Becoming a More Social Phone Book
My beloved side project TweetToCall recently turned one year old, and I’ve been procrastinating on re-styling it to look more like a Web 2.0 service and less like a weekend project. This post on TechCrunch tonight about the death of phone numbers motivated me to give it an hour of my time while playing Mario Cart with Kevin and digesting an awesome steak dinner I made for us. Because really, when else can I justify working on a side project these days?
The Changelog (Sort of)
I had updated the main page with this lovely style inspired by a cool piece of graphic art I bought on iStockPhoto, but still needed to refresh everything else. Tonight I went through and tested everything again to make sure it is all working. The signup process, phone number validation and listing of TweetToCall enabled friends have been reviewed end-to-end and I’m happy to report the code has aged nicely. I think we might be doing some inefficient things with API requests to Twitter on certain commonly reloaded pages (really need pagination for those users who are developing a bigger phone book), but that won’t impact the majority of users at this point. Definitely on the list though, since it drives me nuts when I’m testing.
As for the design update, all I have to say is CSS is amazing (there is knowing this and really KNOWING IT, I’m feeling the latter)… the time savings on this update after the previous were minimal. I updated the header, deleted a couple divs, and bam. While it’s still ugly (hey, I’m not a designer) it is a lot less offensive than before.
Other Improvement Plans
I’ve talked a lot about adding Facebook Connect as the next integrated social network, and now I’m thinking Firefox/Chrome plugins could be cool as well. Ultimately, I think I will probably move this all over to DialSocial.com where it will be much less Twitter centric. Other than a few media mentions from back when Jajah launched their @call feature almost a year ago, I don’t think I’ve accumulated much brand value, and having the Twitter account suspended endlessly makes it even easer to abandon the TweetToCall brand.
Another thing on my list is to get @tweettocall unbanned on Twitter, it has been stuck in that state for over a year now and I haven’t been able to get any responses to my support requests (this happened when my own Twitter account @daniellemorrill and @twilio got banned in a widespread block to try to control some malicious spam during the Gov 2.0 Summit in D.C.).
Why It’s Just a Side Project
Beyond the fact that I am super happily employed at Twilio (the voice API platform TweetToCall is built on), I just feel like there’s no point in really building this out and pumping a bunch of money into marketing it. There is a big barrier to getting users to sign up – getting them to give their phone numbers. Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, have all their users and this is really just a feature they could easily implement. The one way I might be able to make it more valuable is to have more networks that you can hook into from a single place — but for now it just feels like a feature, not a full product and certainly not a company. If you feel differently, please let me know I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Tons of Stubs, But No Posts
I’ve been writing a lot of starts to posts these past two weeks – but nothing that feels fit to publish (yet). Here’s a teaser of some of the topcis I’ve been mulling over, I’d be curious to hear which of these (if any) interest you:
- Startup Stuff No One Seems To Talk About – based on a trend I’ve noticed in my conversations with other entrepreneurs about the “unmentionable” elements of entrepreneurship that no one really brings up
- Twilio Quickstart with Ruby on Rails — port of the Twilio quickstart application from PHP to Ruby on Rails
- Understanding the Value of MVC Architecture — yep, writing it as I come to really understand it, so far the key point is the huge increase in efficacy
- Living Intentionally — stuff about career plans, goals, and some reflection on goals I set for 25 (which I turned in April)
- If I Were An Angel Investor (Part 1) — a list of early-stage startups I think are really interesting, and might be killer investments
- No Room for Tall Poppies — response to story I read via Hacker News about anti-intellectual culture of hiring
- Thoughts on Inception — movie review, thinking I will need to see it again (smart producers!)
- U.S. Government Requirement for 1099s to Stifle Small Business — activism post
- Finding Your Own Everyday Entrepreneur — seeing the scrappy awesomeness of everyday choices
- We Live in Public? — thoughts on Facebook, public/private life online and off, etc. — thinking this won’t go out until the Facebook movie hits theaters
Simple Tactics to Get Started with Activism
Today we heard an excellent talk from Yaron Brook about the importance of defending capitalism, and he ended his speech with a rousing call to action for the audience. “I’m willing to put it all on the line, are you?”
People stood and clapped, but I left the room wondering whether they realize this isn’t just something that a small set of us need to do. Activism, in small and large ways, is something all of us can help with. As much as I wish there were enough people who held the right ideas where I could hide behind “division of labor” as my argument, and just go on building businesses and being productive, here is the harsh reality: if you want to see the world change in your lifetime, you have to live in the future today.
In the most basic terms: it’s time for each of us to do SOMETHING. I’ve been relaxing at the pool today with Trey Givens, Earl Parson, and Mark Wickens and I asked them to help me brainstorm some ways you can get involved. If you’ve been helping advocate Objectivism for awhile, this might seem self-evident but please take a look and see if there is anything here you can add to your own playbook.
Activism in…
5 Minutes
- vote up news stories and bog posts you like on Digg.com
- add Objectivism and/or capitalism to your online profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, etc.)
- republish content that you think is good (e.g. link to an ARI op-ed from your Facebook back)
- make yourself or your car a moving billboard for Objectivism (with a shirt, bumper stickets, etc.)
- check out out the free articles on The Objective Standard (or subscribe!) and follow them on Twitter
10 Minutes
- comment on items posted on Facebook, blog posts, etc. – encourage people to keep blogging
- donate money to ARI
- contact ARI about donating money to buy books for your local high school campus club
- comment on items posted on Facebook, blog posts, etc. – encourage people to keep blogging
- comment on news stories, or even blog a full response to a news story
30 Minutes
- subscribe to other blogs that forward ideas you agree with
- call into radio shows, or television shows (or at least email them)
- write a letter to the editor
- write a letter to local or national government etc.
More Time & Other Ideas
- distribute the Undercurrent to your local schools
- share your values with non-Objectivists — for example, art at the Cordair Gallery (not just Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead)
- start your own blog (lot’s of good free platforms out there)
- donate money to the Undercurrent, to your local campus club
- join local organizers that you’re interested in, and influence the outcomes of their decisions
- telling stories about your own success or people that you know – about how Objectivism has helped you
- meet up with people in real life to reinforce your ideas, sharing your values, finding people you can relate to, learning new things
- join groups like Toastmasters, where you can speak about your ideas to a captive audience
More check out post from Burgess Laughlin about “in-line activism” -about being an activist within your profession
What the Heck is This #OCON Thing?
I’m going to be tweeting a bunch about something with the hashtag #OCON, and I know a lot of people are going to ask me what it is. #OCON stands for Objectivist Summer Conference, and this year’s event is taking place at Red Rock Resort & Casino, about 30 minutes off of the Las Vegas strip.
One of my less public, but very personally significant, interests is philosophy — and I’m particularly interested in the philosophy Objectivism, which was created by the late Ayn Rand. You might remember her, she wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which are required reading in a lot schools.
I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the conference, the ideas discussed there, and other goodness tomorrow through July 10th. I hope you’ll find some of it interesting, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Returning From a Week on the Road
I’m onboard my return flight from D.C. with Kevin and so happy to be coming home to San Francisco. I’ve basically been on the road for two weeks, last week I was in Seattle for the Seattle 2.0 awards and then I made a quick flight back to SF Friday to do a 12 hour turnaround where I repack and jump onboard the redeye to New York with Adam for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. Flying the redeye can be painful since usually i don’t fall asleep, but it does save money on a hotel — which is worth it for New York. Fortunately I flew Virgin America, and the sleep deprivation caught up to me and i was asleep before we even took off.
We got to New York, and due to last minute planning we didn’t actually have a place to stay yet. Fortunately, our friend David Lifson from Postling connected with us on Twitter and he and his girlfriend met us over at Dogpatch Labs to drop our backs and grab dim sum. $4 per person dim sum in Manhattan – amazing!
We parted ways with them after lunch (they were headed up to the Apple store to get their iPad!) and headed over to the conference location to get ready for the hackathon. New York is so awesome, jump in a cab and we’re there. So the hacakthon begins, we have a little table for Twilio and try to chat with as many people as we can. Its so amazing having people walk up saying they already use Twilio, and even more incredible when they gush about how much they love the API. By late in the night, a handful of the hacks being created were using the Twilio API (including the Mr.Stabby robot from NYC Resistor!) and everything was going well, but the one problem was we still didn’t have a place to sleep.
Fortunately, the AirBNB folks were at the event too and offered to help us with our search. I had been working the website all day for an affordable place (hotels were coming up on Priceline for a minimum of $600) and around 10pm we got a message back letting us know we could get a 1 bedroom apartment in Soho for just $190 per night ($95 per person!!). I razzed the landlord bait about he bad reviews he got for cleanliness to make sure he would take care of it before we arrived, and we headed out. All in all, when we got there it was clean enough to fall asleep and thats all that really mattered.
The rest of the New York trip went smoothly, including many highlights:
- new friends from SimpleGeo
- Catching up with Jeremiah and the MediaTemple crew
- Awesome app demos from 6 hackathon projewvts using Twilio
- camping out at Fedex off for 5 hours to make sure we got collateral to our friends at TechCrunch by 3am
- A walking tour of parts of New York with Tim from Foursquare, followed by several games of shuffleboard
- delicious steak dinner at Quality Meats, courtesy of Bradley from 2tor
- meeting Cyan, founder of Zivity.com
- extending my streak of awesome iphone photos of the Empire State building to 3 trips in a row (link)
On Tuesday afternoon, with Disrupt still in full swing and the rest of the evangelism team headed to Colorado for Cloudcamp and Gluecon, I hopped my short flight to DC to meet up with my husband and get us all set up to represent at O’Reillys Gov 2.0 Expo at the a washington Convention center. Major discovery: the JetBlue terminal in JFK has these little counters where you can sit and order food to be delivered to you. I didn’t use it this time, but what an awesome idea!
Connected with Kevin at the airport after a three hour wait and we headed to a place i had booked us, a 2 bedroom townhouse within walking distane of the convention center. We arrived in a neighborhood that was pretty rundown (the house next door had all the windows busted out) and were greeted by our host and a friend of hers (a woman) carrying a gun – turns out she is a police officer but i am just not used to that i guess. We were only getting a room, turns out there was a long term tenant in the place and airBNB had listed it wrong. $149 per night for a room in. A house in a crappy neighborhood we couldn’t walk around in at night seemed lame, so we spent one night and switched to a hotel for just $10 per night more and lucked out and got a huge suite because things were slow! Two days of tradeshow goodness, which pretty much amounts to education people about Twilio and cloud technologies in general, collecting businesss cards, and dreaming up new uses cases. I spent Friday in the hotel room catching up on work and that brings me to today, where we worked and went to the National Gallery to check out the sculptures (my favorite medium) before heading back.
And there you have it, links and typo fixes coming later when I’m not on the iPad. Happy to be bak and hope to see many of you soon