A couple of updates from fatdoor...

I have posted a blog entry on fatdoor blog with a couple of updates from our side, which btw was also covered by TechCrunch, Mashable and Greg Sterling and so on...

Got suggestions or feedback on what we are doing? Send'em our way: feedback@fatdoor.com!

New release on fatdoor

We released new features last night on fatdoor - check it out at our official blog: http://blog.fatdoor.com

Cheers,

Chandu Thota

Fatdoor's new release is live!

We are live with bunch of new features on fatdoor.com.

Major features include:

1. Real Neighborhoods

2. Exploring the neighborhood

3. Organize people and places

4. Neighborhood events

and so on.

I have posted more details on the official fatdoor blog - check it out for more details.

Cheers!

Fatdoor blog is up

We have been busy wrapping up our upcoming release - so I haven't been active in posting blog entries. But will try to be regular in future :)

BTW, I also setup fatdoor blog at http://blog.fatdoor.com, so if you haven't subscribed to the feed yet, please do so.

I will be cross-posting some blog entries soon when we have the bits out the door.

Cheers!

Importing ERSI Shape file (SHP) into MapPoint 2006

I used to have this download readily available on my old MSDN blog (but unfortunately that blog's content has been taken down after I left Microsoft). So here is the link again to the free download that you can use to import any shapefile into MapPoint:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ada44a9e-3ee0-4fd7-a923-c900c6c9d5b7&displaylang=en

I also found this cool C library that can read and write ESRI shape files: http://shapelib.maptools.org/

Cheers!

My book on Google Book Search

One of my friends forwarded me this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Rcw43Dm9dbkC&pg=PP1&ots=oxrNLxwfHX&dq=chandu+thota&sig=CBmtPprOqFDkkLsfBravrQt5r74

Yes, this is my book on programming mappoint in .net (from O'Reilly) now available in Google Book Search. Eventhough the entire book is not available, you can still see significant portions of the book :)

See you at Inman SF Connect 2007

I will be on a panel at Inman SF Connect 2007  where we will be discussing the aspects of Social Networking in in real-estate.

Here are some details about the session:

 

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Social Networking: New ways to participate and prospect

Moderator: Marc Davison, Partner, 1000Watt Consulting

Panelists:
David Gibbons, Director, Community Relations, Zillow
Chandu Thota, Co-Founder & CTO, Fatdoor
David Bethoney, Co-Founder & CEO, PropertyQube
Ben T. Smith IV, Co-Founder & Chairman, MerchantCircle

I would love to see you there if you are attending!

Neighbors, Interests, Aggregation of data

James Fee says

"It isn't that I don't mind knowing who my neighbors are, its just that I’d rather meet them on the sidewalk and not in some virtual chat room"

I agree with James -  at fatdoor, our mission is to connect people at a neighborhood level - not so much in the chat rooms but - at a neighborhood level. Let me explain what this is about. I have had conversations with a number of people regarding "knowing neighbors". Usually the conversation goes like this:

Me: Do you know your neighbors?

Someone: No, actually I don't...

Me: Don't want to know them, come on, they live around you...

Someone: Sure, but I don't have time... I'm too busy

Me: What if there is a service that introduces your neighbors online and you get to know them before you get a chance to meet then in person?

Someone: Oh, that's interesting, would love check it out, so I know who lives around me

We all know our neighbors, but in the sense of "knowledge" comes in different variations: we say "hello" to them everyday, we wave at them as we drive by - but we don't know their names are or we don't know their interests so on and so forth. That's the social gap that we aim to bridge. To that end, we aggregate interests in any neighborhood and present them as an "interest cloud" (ala tag cloud see below).

So how would one use it? Simply use it to enable offline activity. First you get to know neighbors who share similar interests as you do - and then we let you connect and communicate with them to collaborate better in the neighborhood - by creating a community (eg. a mothers club or a book club etc) around what you really care about.

So the key is: teardown the information-flow-barriers online to create activity offline. That's what we do - and hey if you are interested in helping us, we are hiring :)

Identity, Responsibility and Social Networks

John Udell has a post about Simon's blog and local blogging rules (Simon is the editor of my book). In that post John talks about two rules that Simon has about "local blogging"; one of them, in particular, caught my attention and resonated with me very well in the context of my current work at fatdoor:

Responsibility is inversely proportional to community size

When you’re doing local stuff, you can’t stay anonymous for long. I think that has a major impact on the tone of things. The content has to be a lot more accurate because people will call you on it. Somehow the level of responsibility increases as the size of community decreases. It really changes the dynamics thoroughly.

There are two important things to note in this rule: identity and responsibility. Just think about it. When you reveal your real identity online and when you deal with real people online (that you actually know or see in real life), that does change the dynamics dramatically. That's the same reason why the dynamics of different social networks are so different on MySpace, Facebook and Fatdoor.

When real people participate, they form a mature social networks that behave responsibly; now that makes me feel like the good old new yorker cartoon (that famously said: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog") sooo Web 1.0 :)

What do you think?

On identity aggregation

I came across this article about identity aggregation today written by a friend of mine: Mike Gunderloy; Mike and I worked together a couple of years ago on Web Services magazine stuff. Anyway, Mike says the social network aggregation hasn't reached a sweet spot since there is no huge uptake yet. I agree - and the reason for massive adoption is that most social networks duplicate our relationships (and hence the Social Networking Fatigue) - but in reality though, we do maintain number of different identities in life and we also do maintain a number of different networks of people (with some overlap). For example, I have friends at my work (LinkedIn), at my school (Facebook) and in my neighborhood (fatdoor); these networks are very different in nature and involve different people and are complementary to each other.

So in order to create value in identity aggregation, one has to approach the problem in aggregating different dimensions of a profile that does not overlap. And of course, that also depends on number of things such as open-ness of the networks and so on to ensure the interoperability of the networks. At fatdoor, we are working on several fronts to make our neighborhood network open - also please send me if you have any cool ideas on this front.

So, my question to you is - what is more valuable? Aggregating different dimensions of an identity or aggregating social networks irrespective of their dimensions?

Explore your neighborhood...

We rolled out new bits to production last night with a bunch of usability tweaks and bug fixes, but the thing that I would like to touch upon is that "explore" mode is now open (you don't have to sign-up to browse your neighborhood). You can now browse your neighborhood without signing into fatdoor.

Thanks for all the feedback (and feature requests!) - its great to see so much enthusiasm from the fatdoor community. Please keep it coming - we are listening!

PS: We have updated our jobs page if you are interested being part of our fantastic and fun team. If you are interested, send us your resume at jobs@fatdoor.com.

Cheers,

Chandu Thota

Co-Founder/CTO

http://www.fatdoor.com/

fatdoor and supported browsers

A couple of users have sent me emails asking if fatdoor works on Safari and Firefox etc. So, I thought I would follow-up with a post on this. Here is what we currently support:

- Firefox - On Windows and Mac
- IE (6 & 7) - On Windows

Also please note that we are working on a number of known issues for Safari support and will post an update on that later.

In the mean time if you see any issues, please send them using http://www.fatdoor.com "contact" form (We are reading each and every single mail that comes through) or you can directly send them to me at chandu@fatdoor.com

Cheers,
Chandu Thota
Co-Founder & CTO
http://www.fatdoor.com

Mail, Shoutout and Feedback!

Just wanted to a quick update on a couple of things.

fatdoor's messaging capabilities (such as sending emails, friend requests etc) were down this evening from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM due to our mail server down time (note to myself: post a blog entry "before" we are down next time). But please note that, none of your friend requests or sign-ups are lost during this time, they were simply queued and processed as soon as we are back up at 5:30 PM.

Based on the feedback so far, the "shoutout" feature is one of the most loved features on fatdoor; for those who haven't played with fatdoor, "shoutout" is a simple way of keeping in touch with your neighborhood online - think of it as your "news feed" for the neighborhood (you can actually subscribe to it via any feed reader too) that is generated by your neighbor activity.

We are getting a lot of feedback from our early Alpha users (both feature requests and bugs) and we are working on them quickly to roll out what you are asking for. So, please keep it coming!

As always, I can be reached at this blog or at my email: chandu@fatdoor.com

Cheers,
Chandu Thota
Co-Founder & CTO
http://www.fatdoor.com

Thanks for all the feedback on fatdoor (and keep it coming)

We have been getting a lot of blogger attention and feedback on fatdoor so far. Thank you very much and keep it coming. One of the major feedback items was that it was not clear on our site that we are only open in Silicon Valley; we have outlined it in our press release, but who reads a press release anyway :) So we added on our homepage last night that we are only open in Silicon Valley; all other users will be in an invitation queue so that they will be our first users in their neighborhood.

Also here is an interesting screen shot as of this morning: fatdoor is one of the most tagged item on blogs. Thank you for all your feedback and please keep it coming.

Cheers,

Chandu Thota

Co-Founder & CTO

http://www.fatdoor.com

fatdoor is live in Silicon Valley

We have just launched http://www.fatdoor.com/ at Ignite Where 2.0 and we are live in Silicon Valley. If you live in the area, sign-up to "get to know your neighbors"; if you are not in the area, sign-up for an invitation - we are going to open up for different geographic areas soon.

This is an exciting product that we have been working on for last 4 months with a goal to enable neighbors connect, communicate and share information in the neighborhood.

All neighbors in the neighborhood have profile pages created and they can be edited by anyone in the network (friends, family and neighbors). You can reach any neighbor either by directly writing to them (via fatdoor mail) or by inviting them to join your network (friends etc).

fatdoor also offers rich community tools such as "Geo Spatial Groups", and "shout outs" for one to many communication. You can post a shoutout (think of a message broadcast in your neighborhood) to reach all your neighbors within 5 miles or can post a group message just to reach your block. You pick how you want to communicate. And you get to keep tabs on all this via RSS feed to add to your favorite portal like MSN, Yahoo or iGoogle.

Finally, one cool thing about fatdoor is it you can see community activity around a location. For example, if you have a Palo Alto Blogger meetup at Coupa Cafe, Palo Alto, CA, visiting the profile page for Coupa Cafe will show you the blogger community meeting at that location. That gives you a good idea of all the community (group) activity that happens around that place! That can expose your community activity to more people so that you reach out to more members in the city.

There is a lot more to write about for detailed features - which I will continue to do so in next couple of posts. But in the mean time, if you are in the Silicon Valley, please sign up and give us feedback!

Cheers,

Chandu Thota

Co-Founder & CTO

http://www.fatdoor.com/

PS: Venture Beat has a nice story on fatdoor. Dan Kaplan did an awesome job in getting to the value of our service and the potential. Give it a read.

Privacy principles & online product design

Scoble posted an entry today about privacy on the web in the context of people search.

Privacy on the web is something that I think about at work every day. It's an interesting subject - because each person is different, their life styles are different and their social circles are different. After talking to many privacy experts, conducting many focus groups this is what I have learned:

There are 3 kinds of people on the internet; if you are building an internet product about people, you need to know these 3 kinds so that you can have good policies in place to take care of each one of them.

1. Public People: these are the types that don't mind sharing their phone number on their web site (yes, like Scoble). These are the types of people that have blogs, myspace profiles and don't mind getting attention. These are also the guys that do ego-searches on Google and subscribe to Google alert's on their name. Since they are so public by nature, you don't need to worry about them :) Just make sure you have the tools in place to moderate their exposure if and when they need it.

2. Private People: these are the types that do mind being exposed; these are the types that also pay phone companies to un-list them from phone books (it's a sweet deal for phone book companies btw :)). They are smart enough to know the system to take care of themselves. In some extreme cases you find them paying monthly $ to companies like Identity Sweep to "keep track of internet" to protect their identity. When you are designing a product, keep these guys at the center of your design. Privacy control tools are not just enough for these folks. So, what makes a big difference? Policy! Make sure you have right defaults in place, for example. As long as you keep these guys happy, you are good to go.

3. Public Private People: these are the people that think they are private but their information is exposed in all public places. And these are the types that are private in nature but don't know what's out there on the web about them in public domain (now this can be due to a couple of reasons: a. they genuinely don't know - such as my grand ma, who does not know how to use internet, but her address is listed in phone book and she is listed on every white-pages site on the web; b. they genuinely think they are safe online - such as many many Americans that are un-suspectingly clicking a check-box while shopping online, whose fine-print reads it's OK to share their information for commercial purposes). Some of them for sure will get a shock of their life if they see what's out there available on the internet freely for millions of others to see. Now, if you are designing a product, just make sure you build a community that makes it hard to abuse the system; and of course, if you can reach out to them and educate them about privacy and their life online, its even better.

So, its all about tools, policy and the community that matter if you are designing a consumer product online.

Having said all that, new search engines like Spock don't bother me much with respect to privacy on the web. I suspect they aggregate content that's already available and make it easy to get information about you that otherwise can be found using a bunch of existing services like Google, Wink, ZoomInfo, Zaba and Intelius. So what am I worried about? The sites that create content about people - these sites worry me a lot. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for creating content but the sites that lack tools, policy and the community to protect the privacy of their users worry me (I can show you a number of examples in this category).

And finally, yes, I work at a social networking company that aim to create content about people;
and I guarantee you, protecting our user's privacy is at the center of our product's design - but - if you have great ideas about privacy principles in online product design, I would love to hear from you.

Am I going to Google?

In response to my blog entry this morning, I got a bunch of emails asking me if my new employer is Google.

Just like Microsoft, Google is a great company to work for - but - I'm not joining Google. I'm joining a much much smaller (only in size) startup company.

I will be writing more about what I will be doing in near future but for sure we will be embracing Microsoft platforms in a big way (including Microsoft Virtual Earth! :)

Leaving Microsoft

I have made the difficult decision of leaving Microsoft and today is my last day; will be soon moving to Palo Alto to join my new employer.

Will keep you posted here on my blog as things progress further.

Cheers!