Name: Jecca Cervero

Section:  0OC

Chapter 16

Joshua Shachter

Founder, del.icio.us

 

Joshua Schachter started the collaborative book marking site del.icio.us in 2003. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. As often happens with startups, del.icio.us began as something Shachter built for himself. He was just inventing a wonderful thing and he just realized that he had evolved his own filing sytem, and it worked for him. He used it for a long time before del.icio.us even showed up. It was the codification of that pactice. And time came that he founded del.icio.us. Del.icio.us started in his blog where anyone can send him an email and gave him good links.

Over time, he had these links that just piled up- links that he had found or surfed for, or had been sent in. by 2001 or so, he had a text filled with 20000 links. He couldn’t find anything in that file anymore, so he started putting in notes. He had put the URL, a space, a hash mark, and then a word or two describing it.

After a while, he realized that he couldn’t do it and because he needed a way of organizing his collection of bookmarks, he hit on the idea of “tagging” them with brief text phrases to help him find links later. He built a sort of next generation of that text file, which was called Muxway, in 2001. It was not like del.icio.us.. There was a bookmarklet; you saved things; you could describe and tag them. It was single-player – no one else could use it-but the actual website was visible to other people. He discovered sometime that people were subscribing to his book marks. There were some 10,000 daily readers looking at his sstuff. And he found it interesting.

He did several other projects along the way. He did GeoURL. Something called Reversible that is long gone. Reversible was also like del.icio.us in many ways, but different in a few key ways that made it fail.

In late 2003, he started working on del.icio.us, which is a multiplayer version. He was actually trying to come up with a better Memepool-something between Muxway and Memepool which was more vital somehow, and he ended up with del.icio.us. He put del.icio.us on a server and opened it up to other people and it began to spread by word of mouth.

 

 

For the first several years, Schachter worked on del.icio.us and other projects, like Memepool and GeoURL, while working as a quantitative analyst at Morgan Stanley. But all the while, del.icio.us was growing, and by November 2004, a year after its release, it had 30,000 users.

In early 2005, Schachter decided to turn del.icio.us from a hobby into a company. In March 2005, he left his job to found del.icio.us and focus on it full-time, raisig 1 million in funding.

In December of that year, Yahoo acquired del.icio.us for an amount rumored to be about $30 million.

 

 

 

Three things I have Learned

·        Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

·        Joshua Schachter started the collaborative book marking site del.icio.us in 2003.

·        Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done. Do less of it; get it done. If you’ve got two things that you want to put together, take away until they go together. Don’t add another thing. Because you can understand it better, you can analyze it more cleanly.

 

 

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Name: Jecca Cervero

Case Study

Chapter 17

 

Onelist and Bloglines

Mark Fletcher

 

 

Mark Fletcher is the founder of ONElist and Bloglines. He created ONElist and Bloglines. Mark was a senior software engineer for Sun Microsystems when he created ONElist, a free mailing list service. He loves programming. He was working for Trustic, an anti-spam company before he founded ONElist and Bloglines. He recruited some people that can work with him and it’s self funded.

 

He created ONElist to start a mailing list on the net for his parents.

 

Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for reading syndicated feeds using the RSS formats. He wanted to manage his own bookmark list. He decided to do this as a startup.

 

Later he had this problem from ONElist. ONElist is growing so fast that they had a million users. They had horrible scaling problems, they had lots of downtime because they didn’t know how to set up monitoring systems. They’re running out of money. Mark had poor communication skills.

 

 He had problems in Bloglines too. People had no background in doing blogs. He worries on explaining it to the people how. He also worries of adding features because people email him asking for more features. Yahoo purchased ONElist in 2000 and became eGroups. AskJeeves purchased Bloglines in 2005.

 

 

 

 

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Name: Jecca Cervero

Case Study

Chapter 18

 

Craigslist

Craig Newmark, Founder

 

Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist. Craigslist is a Local classifieds and forums for more than 500 cities in over 50 countries worldwide - community moderated, and largely free.

             

It all began when Craig was at Charles Schwab and he was working with the computer security and some other stuff but his real work there was to evangelize the internet, telling people how the equity brokerage business will work someday. In early 95, Craig Newmark started to send out notices some cool events. CC list, using Pine and it worked out pretty well. A lot of people wanted to be added on the list. They were calling it “Craig’s list”. Over time, people suggested other kinds of things, like jobs or stuff for sale.

 

A guy showed up and his name was Jim Buckmaster. He was a CEO and does a great job that the reason why Newman’s title is currently “Customer Service Rep and Founder”. Craig spent 40 hours a week or more for doing customer service.

 

In 1998, Craig Newmark had joined a startup, but left because he wanted to continue his project, craigslist. eBay purchased a 25 percent stake in the company from a former craigslist employee in 2004, craigslist remains a privately held company. It continues to expand and now has sites for 500 cities worldwide.