Update: If you emailed about his, my sincere apologies for not getting back to you. The position has not been filled. It may be changed; thus my delay. Perhaps I jumped the gun. Will try to get back to you soon.

Obvious is ramping up in 2008. I need someone to help with various things. Some of these things include:

* Paperwork
* Money tracking
* Research
* Looking for an office
* Fielding resumes
* Going to get stuff
* Booking trips
* Scheduling
* Calling people about stuff
* Writing
* Setting up systems
* Random other things

You're a good candidate for this job if you: a) Are or aspire to be the world's best executive assistant and/or office manager; or b) Aspire to be a kick-ass entrepreneur or startup person and want to hang around Obvious to see how companies are built and make connections for a while first (and don't mind being paid not-that-much and aren't above some menial tasks).

I'm flexible on skills, background, and experience. I'm big on attitude, personality, and smarts.

The job is full-time in San Francisco. It will be hourly (1099), at first, until you set up the payroll system for the company, and then we can discuss salary and insurance (once you set that up, too).

Send me a note and a resume to people AT obvious DOT com.

Labels: jobs

When we started Obvious in October of last year, we had a good feeling about Twitter. However, it had been launched publicly three months before and was only growing slowly. I wouldn't have guessed that by March it would be consuming all our resources (our weekends, our servers...).

As I've mentioned before, the plan for Obvious is to build a series of products, which hopefully gain from being part of the greater whole. I also said, "When justified by growth, resource needs, and desire of the team, we will spin off growing properties to form their own entities...."

The time has come for Twitter to make that leap. We're happy to announce that Twitter is graduating from the home of Obvious and becoming its own company—appropriately named, Twitter, Inc.

What does this mean? By some measures, it's just a legal technicality. Because we haven't had time to devote to anything else, Twitter is the only thing Obvious does (except for some occasional maintenance on Odeo, which will continue until we transfer it to its new owner). And all the people who work for Obvious will continue to work on Twitter (albeit, in different capacities in some cases).

The reason for the shift is because, as Twitter continues to grow, it will gain less from being under the Obvious umbrella and perhaps even push that umbrella until it flips inside out. Which doesn't make the umbrella happy, and just gets in Twitter's way. Perhaps I took the metaphor too far. The point is, we have big plans for Twitter, and it should stand on its own.

The CEO of Twitter, Inc. will be Jack Dorsey. Besides being the genius behind the Twitter idea, Jack has shepherded the project from its humble beginnings to this day. The rest of the team (currently, seven others) will continue their roles.

My title is co-founder—in addition to board member and investor—so I'll continue to be closely involved and helping out in many ways for the foreseeable future. Twitter is still my main concern, and I have no desire to create distractions from that. But this does clear the way for Obvious to pursue new projects when the time is right.

Labels: twitter

MSNBC reports on how Americans are increasingly imposing 70+ hour work weeks on themselves to stay competitive at the workplace. This is happening cross-industry which matches my anecdotal experience. I have friends in finance, law and technology for whom working ridiculous hours is considered part of the accepted culture.

This is dumb. There's no way anyone in an information processing job can be productive for that many hours a week for any significant stretch of time. Places that foster this type of behavior are actively encouraging burnout, especially from their most junior employees. After all, it's those with the least outside experience who will be most eagerly try to sync up with such a company culture.

Yes, there will always be crunch time. And when you find yourself in that zone of getting things done, it's worth riding the wave regardless of the hour. But it's not sustainable for weeks at a time. And in the long run, companies that don't make time-off a guilt-free part of the culture will cripple themselves.

All of which is to say that here at Obvious we do serious business and also offer 27 paid days off. Also we're hiring.

So, you've got a feature idea for your personal content product that's going to make everything better for everyone. As a for instance, let's say it automatically converts quotes (") to smart quotes (“). You build, test and release it and eagerly await to receive praise from your users.

The first comment you see is from someone who says "I hate these ugly quote marks! Why did you screw with my text! I quit!"

So now you have a new feature to code called the "Disable Smart Quotes (Yes/No)" setting.

How much leeway do you have to change behavior without introducing an opt-out setting? How do you weigh your responsibility to unhappy users against a desire to design for the better? And can you avoid a nightmarish collection of obscure settings that don't mean anything to 90% of your user base?

It's a really tough call and I've frequently advocated building the opt-out setting. As an example, we built a shiny new rich-text editor in Blogger that did all sorts of fancy things. Unfortunately, it also did some things to the post output that folks found unexpected. In fact it completely broke a number of uses of Blogger where people were taking the raw post content and plugging it into another site.

After reading a number of agonizing anti-testimonials, I felt we had to introduce a way to suppress the undesired output. Sadly, we couldn't even come up with a name that made sense for this "feature" so this is what we ended up with:



Not very awesome. But it was a better option that "Did our feature break your stuff?"

Perhaps as a result of Enable Float Alignment, I now feel designers should be a little more firm is creating just the experience they feel is best overall. This makes especially good sense when your product is young and the unanticipated uses and edge cases are more limited in number and in type.

This isn't an excuse to go around making dumb changes in behavior. But I've found that folks will adapt and that change sometimes seems more disruptive when initially introduced.

In the worst case scenario, you end up losing users if you don't include an opt-out. But introducing those (yes/no) settings, while hopefully cheap in effort, also carry a cost over time. In the case of EFA, we had to build it a 2nd time when we created the new version of Blogger. You've also introduced the possibility of interaction bugs with new features down the line. More importantly, every time a user goes into your settings, they need to parse an increasing number of niche options thereby distracting them from whatever task they wanted to achieve.

I feel the better option is to thoroughly consider how your change in behavior is going to affect the different types of users you support. And introduce opt-out settings sparingly, if at all.

Update: See Hitwise report on Odeo.

In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves.

It does not cost us much to run—in fact, AdSense covers the hosting—but on the web you need to constantly improve, or fade away. We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough.

It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we're looking for a new home for it. We've been having some conversations with potential buyers, and this is our attempt to put the word out more widely in the most expeditious way (and without involving investment bankers and the like). If we don't get any attractive offers, we'll continue to run it.

To clarify, what we're talking about is selling odeo.com and studio.odeo.com, including all code, the domain, brand, database of three million MP3s, etc. Not a company, but a site and platform that could be ramped up to something much bigger.

Traffic snapshot, last 30 days:

• Unique visitors: 684,951
  
• Pageviews: 3,012,921 (does not include RSS, MP3s, or Flash widgets)
  
• Flash plays: 1,523,963
  
• Logins: 76,106

We're open to a variety of scenarios—from cash offer to an equity position. Our main concern is the ability to focus on Twitter and to see Odeo live on in some legitimate form.

If you're interested in Odeo and can make a serious offer—either in cash or the ability to invest in it while we retain some equity—email me (ev AT obvious) for more details.

Labels: odeo

BBC NEWS | Business | From Oxford to Silicon Valley: "We're now working in the offices of his new venture, Obvious.com, and I couldn't think of an environment better suited to a start up." Kulveer Taggar works on Boso.com from the Obvious building in South Park along with a handful of other startups.

Jason Goldman starting working for Pyra in 2002, shortly before we got acquired by Google, and went on to become product manager of Blogger. As I wrote about when he left Google six months ago, he kicked ass (even though it was sort of fluke that I hired him in the first place).

This time I'm prepared. So after taking a few months off, I'm proud to say that Jason is once again working with Biz and I and (for the first time) the rest of the fabulous Obvious crew.

Labels: goldman people