easy + powerful+ flexible  = imeem

So, if you are reading this, you probably already know that imeem is very good at sharing things privately.  (Can you say "designed from day 1 to be secure")

But that's really not the whole story.  We want to make it easy to effortlessly share things in a public way as well as a private way. And everything in between.  It's a lot closer to how people really think about things in the real world.  Some things you would say loudly in a crowded room (or on a website) and some things you would only say to your best friend.  IMHO, most software sucks pretty hard at accomplishing these sorts of goals.

there is no such thing as "delete" on the web

Based on personal experience, most people don't know about "the wayback machine" (http://archive.org) The idea is that once you put something on the web, it is out there forever.  If someone can crawl it, then assume that there are a lot of people with a copy of it.  This is pretty cool for a lot of reasons, but do people putting deep dark secrets on a site realize it? Same thing with usenet; if you asked a dumb question in a newsgroup 10 years ago, it's still there. And searchable. (http://groups.google.com)  Don't get me wrong, that's exactly what the web is good and and what it's for.  Go web! It's what got us here.  But things start to fall apart when you start to think about access control and privacy.

software is hard

Why has it taken so long for easy-to-use/flexible/powerful privacy-aware systems to be implemented?  As a computer scientist I would say "because it's really hard."  A lot of people that work here have PhDs, and a lot of that knowledge is used on a daily basis.  The biggest factor in inspiring us to start imeem was the complete lack of technical innovation in approaching these huge, looming problems.  Looking back on the decision now, I'm really glad we did it.  We have clearly hit a nerve.  The half-hearted/crippled attempts of some of the Big Guys to start working on this show which way the wind blows. 

imeem is different

A lot of people that we talked to in the early days had a hard time understanding exactly what imeem is, and how it was different than what you could do with a bunch of seperate pieces.  That's sort of missing the point.  To understand imeem you have to realize that imeem is a different way of thinking about sharing things (photos/blogs/files) than most people are used to.   Big things happen when a disruptive technology gets released and lets you do things you weren't able to do before.   Once people wrap their heads around imeem (and I'm not going to say that is always easy), they see the far-reaching implications of the approach we are taking.

Get it?

(P.S. want to try out our web-publishing features?  What Dustin said: http://blog.imeem.com/dustin/tMnw0ExX.html)

Well, we just put out a new version of imeem and managed to move offices at the same time.  Don't try this at home, kids. 

In the past 5 days I have found myself pulling cat6 cable, vacuuming, writing code and going to the hardware store a lot.  Never underestimate the incredible glamour of startups.

There were several aspects of construction and contracting in some deep recess of my brain that came out. (For instance, evidently I recalled a lot about fish tape)  When I was a kid I learned about this stuff from relatives.

Why Category 6, you ask?  Wishful thinking about 10gbe.  More about that later.

As a reminder about dead tech, the wires we yanked and replaced were 10Base-2, aka ThinNet.  Pretty sweet, huh?

So, a couple days ago I had the chance to attend the Google engineering open house.  It was a who's who of alpha-geeks.  I had high expectations and I was not disappointed.  They put on an interesting program... I heard a lot more "meat" about how they do things over there than I have before.

As anyone who reads slashdot etc. knows, people like to slobber all over google at every change that get.  So, rather than talk about google itself, I'll talk about the food and the people attending.

Google Open House Highlights:

-It was on Cinco de Mayo, so there was lots of beer, margaritas and a tequila tasting. (seriously)

-Saw Don Knuth within first minute of showing up.  He was all over the place the entire evening.

-Saw the author of my artificial intelligence textbook. 5 minutes later I saw the professor who taught my artificial intelligence class at Stanford. 2 minutes later I saw a bipedal robot eating guacamole. (OK, I made the last part up)

-Sat next to Guido Van Rossum during presentation.  He was wearing a python t-shirt. He's really nice.

-Think I saw Larry Wall walk by.  Not sure.

-Spent time talking to Phil Zimmerman (creator of PGP).  Had some interesting advice about running a company.

-Saw about 50 other important people that I recognized, but this is getting tedious...

Conclusion

Google is probably going to take over the world.  And yes, they do have good food.