Avi Karnani, our tenacious CEO convinced me to forgo dreams of the west coast and join the team in New York. I started in the beginning of September as the Product Manager.

What are we doing?

…we’re building the first on-line, 24/7 financial advisory for young adults. We help people in their twenties and thirties gain control over their financial lives by helping them figure out what to do with their money-aside from spending it!

The Loudwater Labs team had been hard at work with Thrive before I joined, and I’m honored to be working with such a talented group of people. The website is ready for you to use it, so try it for free and tell me what you think in the comments below.

p.s. We’re also looking for talented software engineers to join the team.

It’s a big world out there and location is an axis on which everyone is dying to slice you up.

You don’t have to be on the terrorist watch list to get value putting your location online. I’ve picked my horse and it’s Fire Eagle.

There are a bunch of other horses for storing your location. They are irrelevant. Everyone else wants to trap “where” in a walled garden. Fire Eagle allows developers to create applications around providing your location. I’m using Navizon on my iPhone to update Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle also allows developers to create applications that utilize your location. Dan Choi helped me build the map to the right using Fire Eagle ->.

Why should I tell Twitter where I am and Google Maps where I am. I want to tell Fire Eagle where I am and let Fire Eagle tell everyone else – at the level of granularity I choose.

Developers take notice: Support fire eagle for location based services or you are a second tier web 2.0 app.

Make sure you register at the DEMO website. Mark your calendars! Greg and Brian will be on stage on Wednesday, January 30th 10:45am PST (1:45pm EST). We’ll probably have it projected on the wall at BetaHouse. Let me know if you’d like to come. This is a big deal for us, and we’re really excited to get a sneak peak out to the world.

Reputation
This is key. I don’t need to know your real identity. I do need to know your pseudonym can be trusted. The number of reviews a user produces, as well as the number of friends they have, compliments they have received and review votes all play in to answering the question “Can you trust what this person is saying?”. So, after a while of using the site, and by looking at the users profile, you can get a sense of a users reputation.

Users have a way to evaluate the trustworthiness of other users. Now we can go on to bigger, better and more fun things!

Yelp succeeds in attracting foodies; people obsessed with restaurants, eating out and socializing. For the most valuable yelpers in the community, they award an “elite badge”. This serves as a reward system – like with airline miles. The elite badge gives a user additional credibility – with the community at large and especially other yelp elite members. elite reviews seem to appear higher in the list of reviews on a business. Becoming elite on yelp also provides admission to special “elite” events. Off-line rewards for online behaviors are highly motivating.

Yelp and it’s community provide a great feedback loop to each user. It’s easy and fun to give others feedback. With every compliment a user receives, every friend request, every “useful, funny or cool” that gets checked on a review, with every private message received, users are encouraged to contribute more to the community. Get the wheels spinning enough and you’re elite. Then you’re addicted!

Even if users get bored of reading reviews, the message boards are a place to chat with other yelpers. Questions range from “What’s your favorite book” to more personal questions like “Where to get a colonic in boston?”. These usually trigger long funny discussions from other yelpers.

User reputation / status, the community feedback loop, and offline rewards all help to align an individual’s selfish goals of entertainment, social status and being liked and respected with yelps goals of having great business reviews. Yelp is a great model to learn some lessons when building an online community. Do you yelp?

Michelle who was on my trip had her photos on flickr and my friend Brian in Betahouse used flickr. So, I decided to give it a shot. I love it and wouldnt switch back.

Price

Flickr and Google charge differently for their service. Flickr is $24.99 for all you can eat. Google charges you depending on how many GB you want to have. They apply this storage across all google services you use. 10 gb on Google costs $20 per year. I may not use more than 10 gb in my first year with flickr, but eventually I probably will.

Features

Flickr is much more social than google web albums. It’s more of a community. As far as features, flickr is the market leader. Google may get a good foothold with PicasaWeb, but flickr is number one in this space.

Flickr just added stats. Now I can see how many people are looking at my photos and which ones they are looking at. How cool is that?

I don’t want to make this a long rant, but I was interested by my inclination to pay more for all-you-can-eat when with all likelyhood, I could have saved my 4.99, if I was just looking for someone to host pictures online.

What would you do?

At least it saw the uhaul truck I backed up on to the sidewalk when I was moving into my current place!

I grabbed a picture in case they drive by again and the uhaul disappears.

If you want to check it out for yourself, follow this link and click street view. That is not me in the picture by the way.

Here’s the link to register, drop me a comment with your email for the password.

Troy Goatley has taken the Visual Peresonality test! Click here to take your own test!

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This is great news for users. I don’t want to receive emails like this. I am however interested in receiving a notification if a friend on facebook takes a specific action relating to me… such as sending me a gift on everygift. This move will severely cripple apps abilities to spread virally. If apps cant propogate, it makes the platform much less appealing.

At what point do people make the decision to not develop facebook apps?

So here’s how it works:

1. Im signed in to facebook.
2. I then go on to yelp and add a review
3. Yelp infers who I am on facebook and sends a message to facebook that I have posted a new review
4. Next time I log in to facebook, I have the option to add that to my mini-feed.



Personally I am not crazy about adding MORE lifestream data into facebook’s clutches, but it’s a slick implementation and a solid idea.

Enjoy the beacon!

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