Nivi

560 Responses

This is amazing and sure going change the market dynamics its just the start of web 2.0

Ruchit — May 9, 2005 @ 3:15 am —
Greasemonkey will allow you to redecorate your shopping mall to your wishes, whenever you walk in, without permission of the owners.

Out goes the awful music!

Mark Wubben — May 9, 2005 @ 3:30 am —
> These scripts can change any aspect of a web page’s > behaviour, interaction, or design. This little > baby is going to blow up business model

The arms race is in full effect: http://philringnalda.com/blog/2005/03/mark_pilgrim_goes_both_ways.php

;)

Sencer — May 9, 2005 @ 5:28 am —
Opera version 8.0 supports user Javascript files. It should theoretically be able to use Greasemonkey scripts, but those that I have tried (gmail search and lickr) produce errors in the Javascript console.

Here’s a guide to user Javascript: http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/userjs.html

Dekaritae — May 9, 2005 @ 5:40 am —
Good insights, I agree with most of what has been said here. The metaphor “Greasemonkey is to websites what inheritance is to objects in object-oriented programming. is not very fitting, since in OOP the object’s class defines, how the object could be inherited, while with GM you just patch the object any imaginable way.

The clearinghouse idea looks promising!

quirkyalone — May 9, 2005 @ 6:37 am —
1) Proxomitron could already do that and more. So technically the idea isn’t new. 2) Of course, usability matters. I don’t really use Firefox, so I won’t bother trying it (but I believe that GM may be more user-friendly than Proxomitron). I suspect that pretty much the same thing can be done with my Opera (it can run user JS on every page), though. 3) It is indeed very likely that it will become popular in the future, at least among the digital “haves”. It clearly has some potential and will help us last until the Semantic Web comes along.

Danila — May 9, 2005 @ 7:05 am —
Check out the Expedia Expanded Search. It is great if you want to fly but are very flexible.

Jesse Andrews — May 9, 2005 @ 8:15 am —
You need to install Firefox. We need Greasemonkey across all the major browsers.

This is not strictly true: Many Greasemonkey scripts will work in Opera: Stay away from XSLT, XPath and Mozilla-specific extensions, and you should mostly be able to run your GM scripts in Opera.

Opera’s User JavaScript on the other hand will not always run in Greasemonkey, since it has the possibility of intervening in more places than GM has. An example of this is Plainscript.

As for your 2), Opera’s User JavaScript implementation is integrated into your browser: All you have to do is to point Opera at your User JS directory.

As for your 3) — there are two script repositories on the way, my userjs.org which will focus on Opera User JavaScript, and Jeremy Dunck’s userscript.org.

I am thinking that autodiscovery of site-specific user scripts is best handled with, you guessed it, a user javascript. Probably easiest achived by using a minimal, custom API.

Arve Bersvendsen — May 9, 2005 @ 8:16 am —
That is crazy. If it catches on it could have powerful implications for many online businesses. It is always fun to see how people are changing what they see online to make life easier, even though most of the time it is not what companies wants us to do.

Ookami Snow — May 9, 2005 @ 10:28 am —
here’s another metaphor:

“Greasemonkey is to Firefox what ActiveX is to Internet Explorer”

Or in other words, a malicious greasemonkey script can do serious damage.

Hashim — May 9, 2005 @ 10:47 am —
Nice overview…even cooler that you managed to sneak Philip K. Dick in an Amazon screenshot!

Kunal — May 9, 2005 @ 1:45 pm —
Of note, greasemonkey isn’t a firefox only thing. Opera 8 has it too, they call it user javascript, but they also have a greasemonkey compatibility mode.

Peter Tripp — May 9, 2005 @ 1:49 pm —
I hear Gm also cooks up a great plate of Green Eggs and Spam, as well.

Will wonderments never cease?

You might want to “amend / append” item #2, because I think it reads and/or implies that you don’t need to install all/each of the compiled GmScript-extensions, which you do, so, it’s not really that much different, altho I think I get your intended meaning. Perhaps a trailing parenthetical comment:

(though you would need to separately install each compiled GmScript extension, of course)

Am I picking nits? Depends on the reader and their level of understanding of FF and extensions.

Good, interesting article, though. Makes one think and consider and all that jazz.

Bill Donnelly — May 9, 2005 @ 2:47 pm —
Jeebus man, take a few slow, deep breaths… you sound like you’re talking about a world-changing invention like the Segway or something.

Dodja — May 9, 2005 @ 9:50 pm —
Greasemonkey is just the beginning of user-modified web pages. My master’s project, Outfoxed, adds commentaries and re-orders search results, hilights dangerous links, alerts you to bad business practices, and certifies the authenticity of files, all using the user’s individual social network. I’m looking for beta-testers, so please give it a look!

Stan — May 10, 2005 @ 4:16 am —
So what are these business models being blown up?

Showing competitor’s book prices on Amazon? Book Burro uses Amazon’s own API. Amazon gives away that information for repurposing intentionally. I can’t seem them being taken by surprise.

Greasemonkey isn’t introducing any new competition. It’s making it slightly easier to see what the competition is (assuming that Bittorrent competes with Netflix, and libraries with Amazon, which certainly isn’t clear to me), but it’s making it slightly easier than checking in another window.

Minor gains in convenience are great, but they’re still minor gains in convenience, and there is a vast difference between making something more convenient and revolutionizing online business.

rich — May 10, 2005 @ 1:20 pm —
This “baby” just blows.

“These scripts can change any aspect of a web page’s behaviour, interaction, or design. This little baby is going to blow up business models.”

Is this what happens when a developer gets bored? This is just what already badly designed web sites need…letting the “user” change the way it looks and interacts.

We’re going back in time, just to have the ability to do some cool new trick.

Design and usability should be left to the professionals. But, I suppose if they did their job in the first place, we wouldnt have silly little scripts like this at all.

PAOW — May 10, 2005 @ 1:59 pm —
Two comments on people’s comments…

First, a malicious greasemonkey script can blow up your browser, yes, but that’s true of any Firefox extension. The fact that you have to explicitly add scripts is a feature, not a flaw.

Second, “design and usability should be left to the professionals”? Like hell, design and usability should be left to the user. Let the user and his browser display what they want to display… they will anyway… and follow Google’s first and most successful site in just providing the content in as plain a way as possible, and get out of the way. Play “what if”… “what if” your site was an RSS feed, would it be better off with glowing shadowed shuffle-down menus or simple markup that works with all the bells and whistles left to the end-user?

Peter da Silva — May 11, 2005 @ 1:59 am —
I’t ’s interesting to note that nothing is in fact really new (from my own post on greasemonkey):

* bookmarklets have been arround for some time, and already led to amazing applications, such as when you combine Google Maps with other data sources, such as users’ pictures and annotations. * nothing new either about the concept of “Web annotation”, think of the WikiAlong Firefox plugin, letting you annotate webpages (on the public WikiAlong Wiki or an a private, company or project group wiki). * The really new thing with Greasemonkey is the ease scripts can be written (javascript has been around for almost 10 years), made available (simply put a file online) installed (right-click), and propagated (think of a user script showing the available user scripts for the site you’re browsing!!). Without any doubt, zillions of these scriptlets will be hacked together and spread like wildfire, extending and bending existing functionality. (see for example Greasemonkey for Google Maps)

Pascal Van Hecke — May 11, 2005 @ 7:20 am —
Another example of greasemonkey making money and serving a purpose: Amazon Localization User Script

Pete Freitag — May 11, 2005 @ 2:42 pm —
Design and usability should be left to the user? YEAH RIGHT!

Most users want ease-of-use, and clear design when they get there…they dont want to do that themselves.

If we all followed Googles “wonderful” plain design, we might as well be back in 1995. That’s nuts.

Design it plain, and then get out of the way? Yeah, only if I want to bore a user to death…or just really piss them off.

We can have cool developer “goodies” without having to foresake design. This isnt one of those cases.

PAOW — May 11, 2005 @ 3:12 pm —
Del.icio.us is a very useful way to see how other people have tagged the same web site, or other web sites that have been tagged with the same tag.

There has been a bit of talk about ‘tag spam’ where people use inappropriate tags to get exposure for their site. While social tags are useful in categorizing links under certain key words, it’s still hard to get a measure of “appropriateness” or “relevancy” for that key word. It does help to see how many other people have bookmarked that link, though. Some sites are trying to combine rankings with tagging to provide more relevancy and solve the spam problem, like squik.com. It will be interesting to see what happens as these sites get more mainstream.

Gina Langley — May 12, 2005 @ 9:57 am —
It’s important to highlight the fact that this is a social bookmarking site. The intent is to discover, tag, and share. Here are some things that triggered in my mind when I saw your post.
1. For the system to work appropriately, users should be able to search and browse tags easily. del.icio.us solves both these problems, but the user interface is not sufficient to meet the needs of the average user. I have to admit that even with all my magic foo I was still thrown off when I couldn’t find a search field.
2. Tag inversion (concatenating strings to make an obfuscated tag) seems to be the latest trend. Is it for privacy? Is it for selective communication? Or do people really tag a web site like Amazon with greatestWebsiteEverWithASuperDuperStore? Should del.icio.us keep a list of unique tags, or tags that are exclusive to a single user?
3. For new startups, what are the long-term effects of tagging? Can tagging be rolled into every social network, e-commerce site, etc.?
Kunal — May 12, 2005 @ 2:35 pm —
This line of discussion intrigues me, although I can’t say I understand all of it. Nor do I want my mind blown up, either.

My professional background is in technical editing. I am more of an early adopter than a techie. But this Greasemonkey stuff has really started me thinking. Clear and concise writing is one casualty of blogging and what used to be called internet time. People like me know how to bring out a writer’s voice by following Strunk and White’s famous dictum, “Omit needless words.” I have wondered for a long time how basic editing principles could be brought to bear most effectively on the net. Perhaps Webmonkey or Java scripts could provide the answer. If anyone wants to try this out, I would be willing to do some editing pro bono. A good testing setup would be something like this: 1. I am notified of a request to edit a certain text to a certain level of edit (e.g., correcting major mistakes, correcting punctuation, cleaning up grammar, flagging unclear passages, doing everything—I know of some excellent checklists that could be used). 2. I click to accept the assignment and am taken to a page with the original text and some sort of overlay (perhaps similar to that used by Book Burro). One important thing the overlay does is to let me correct the text without having to correct—or even know—the underlying code. 3. I enter my edits such that all revisions are evident (all major word processing programs provide for this). Other WP tools (ported from Open Office?) such as spellcheck would also be helpful. 4. The author gives me feedback of what edits were accepted, reasons why or why not, statements of eternal gratitude, offers of first-born sons, etc. What think, O Wise Ones? “I am sorry this is so long. I did not have time to make it short.”

Hyphena Tor — May 13, 2005 @ 1:05 am —
Two words: Easter Island

GK — May 13, 2005 @ 6:46 pm —
Be sure to also check out Consumerpedia.org – it uses a unique hierarchical tagging system…

Consumerpedia — May 14, 2005 @ 3:53 am —
If GreaseMonkey is like having your own well stocked garage, Proxomitron is like having a flying carpet.

Kumao — May 14, 2005 @ 9:19 pm —
re the voice quality: I am not sure that waiting for more advances it very much worth while. A few months ago, when the video of Steve Jobs of the first keynote showing the first Mac ( http://www.industrial-technology-and-witchcraft.de/index.php/ITW/14100/ ), that Mac used some speech synthesis for the show- it sounds identicle to the built-in speech synthesis we have today in OSX. I was actually rathar suprised to see it, but it does lower the expectations about advances in the field (espcially if you compare how graphics and computing in general have advanced since).

Xslf — May 15, 2005 @ 1:14 pm —
You should be interested by Guten Tag. Enjoy !

Stephane Lee — May 16, 2005 @ 8:21 am —
It BLOW UP EVERYTHING!!!

Thinking that people do change everything around, replacing names with random strings, trademarks with anything. Evil guys can install scripts without knowledge of the browser user, browsers in public library being modified, ….

Worse then that, not only the browser can change contents, ISP can certain does that, routers can do that, and every things being pass through the network is subject to change without notice.

Of cause, without Greasmonkey, everything can be done that way. It just make that easier. However, we are facing that dead of trust. Trust no more. Nothing can be sure any more. The web is useless.

kentsin — May 17, 2005 @ 6:29 am —
I have not studied Greasemonkey yet, but found your site via del.icio.us. (abbv: del)

I feel about del the way u feel about Greasemonkey.

First a word about me: I am not a programmer/engineer, but I love the power and significance of the Internet. My primary viewpoint is the nongeek use of the web and tools built by, for, with and on the net.

I collaborate with Rick at theinternetco.net to create quickcard.biz. And Rick is my UGC (ultimate geek connections) and partner in crime at quickcard.biz. OK on to my main point for the day:

I’m gradually morphing my cognitive skills toward embracing the “tagging” “continuum” and away from the “filing/subfiling/folder” model.

I think I first unconsciously grokked the power of tagging years ago when using hypercard and macintosh computers.

But now I’m consciously using it and embracing it thru the use of gmail and del.

What I’d like to find is some utility that would allow me to tag all the docs that i create in Word, Excel and all my other apps. That is, never put any file that I create into a folder again, just tag it and go to my tag menu when i’m looking for something.

Google desktop search has some of those capacities, but no ongoing creator of tags list (as per gmail and del).

Rick is working on adding something along this lines to quickcard.biz, which shd allow people to access a taglist within their quickcard sites, but I’m looking for something that will allow me to have an automatic tag creator for all the files I make in all the apps. that I use.

phew.

Frank Poliat — May 20, 2005 @ 9:00 am —
It is not such a big deal. And when the web site changes its page? Sigh. The toys people are impressed with …

Yo — May 22, 2005 @ 12:12 pm —
Where is this technology taking us? This and the open source applications are taking us to an ‘era’ of “Power to the People”. Large corporations are losing out their rights on Intellectual Properties, not to people who steal them, but to people who say they have no use for them anymore. Interesting development, I should say.

Venkat Mangudi — May 23, 2005 @ 7:46 am —
I wonder what, if any, impact the IBM decision to recommend firefox to all 130,000 employees will have on “greasemonkeyworld?” Granted, 130,000 people is now a drop in the bucket when it comes to the overall Firefox footprint. But combined with the fact that they are at IBM and they are also all supposed to be blogging…not that GM scripts need any help building momentum.

JF

John Franklin — May 24, 2005 @ 10:09 am —
It’s one thing to recognize the value of HTTP before there are any easy-to-use clients; it’s another thing entirely to say, “let’s develop the first web browser, which happens to be easy enough for my mom.” BitTorrent, like HTTP, is just a protocol.

There are a ton of more specialized uses for BitTorrent than connecting to arbitrary trackers to download arbitrary bits. I suspect one of those uses is eventually going to be packaged in a way that’s easy enough for your mom. I think specialization is the vector to watch, not a wholesale re-imagining of the first, most abstract BitTorrent implementation.

And yes, the necessity of punching holes in network-address-translating routers is a major impediment.

Nat — May 24, 2005 @ 11:38 am —
Hrm, the comment form ate half my comment. (after opening angle bracket).

Wow, I am amazed at the people that are downtalking the importance of Greasemonkey/Opera Userscripts. Ironic that you are doing so in a Weblog. Which from a technological POV is even a lot older than the possibility of userscripting. Increasing the usability of a task can make all the difference between something you do and something you don’t do.

Sencer — May 25, 2005 @ 3:26 am —
We have systems that allows trivial indexed searching. And the world is going crazy adding on capabilities like automatic tagging, semantic “hints”, etc.

All of this is great, but it only addresses web published content. Blogging is one resolution. If all content was in either public or private blogs, the tools out there now would blow a persons hair green.

But 95% of the information I care about is still not web published. I want all the awesome semantic processing to be applied against every piece of digital information that i’ve ever looked at. I use many different systems (laptop, desktop, pda, library terminal, etc) and some of them have spotty internet service. But I should still be able to have all the content archived and processed and made available. And I should be able to mark my information as completely securely private or completely public and a variety of levels between with trivial flagging.

you just pointed people at piggy-bank on your Daily Links. By the same people:

http://simile.mit.edu/hayloft/index.html

A million years ago I worked on the haystack project. It’s a distributed information management system with automatic syntax mining, that is currently focusing on email. The end goal is to obviate the file system.

The semantic web/world is here, and ready to save us time and create connections, but without good integrated, centrally managed solutions, who has time for it?

eric prebys — May 25, 2005 @ 10:46 am —
Half.com mitigates some of the pricing issues in the used book department.

During my years at college, I remember the bookstore would totally take advantage of students selling back their books. Buy it new for $125, sell it back at $12.

Someone needs to arb this market…

James Bachman — May 26, 2005 @ 7:37 am —
I just bought 7 used books from amazon for 33$ (i wanted three more, but they were over $20 each). with shipping, the total came to $75. And I have to wait a couple of weeks to get my books.

Living in Boston, I’m sure there is a used book store somewhere within 10 minutes that has at least 8/10 of these books. the total cost would certainly be under $75. and i could pick up my books today.

Walmart is the worst humankind has to offer. Its conveniences are at the expense of things I love.

What we need is for amazon to localize their used books functionality. I should be able to type in my zip code, go to my wish list, and get a list of local book stores that carry my books.

What amazon gets by doing this is keeping me on their portal instead of on whatever sweet ass open source solution eventually arises to address this problem.

eric prebys — May 27, 2005 @ 1:55 pm —
If book prices continue to drop, and used book sales continue to rise, both causing profit margins on book sales to drop, how could that effect the quantity and quality of authors out there? Would the change be similar to what’s happened to the music industry since people started downloading music. Or would the effect be completely different since it is a different industry and medium?

jahan — May 28, 2005 @ 12:10 am —
The best book ever written for producing great ideas is A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Young. I’ve read stacks off books that are full of with weighty theoretical ideas and backed by lots of research and case studies but for me nothing has worked better in practice than this book. The book is very tactical and essentially provides great advice on documenting and analyzing ideas. This can certainly help in forming a better starting idea but that only gets you to the starting line.

What makes good ideas so hard to create is the fact that they are inherently risky. You have to commit to something.

The best ideas that I’ve been associated with are usually very simple. But something simple is much harder and riskier than something complex. Committing to a simple design will always make some stakeholders upset and/or nervous.

As someone who has been a product manager in the software business for 15 years I’ve found that only the most courageous product teams can commit to a simple design. A simple design means making harsh and risky decisions very early in the product process. Committing to a feature rich, complex design is always the safest course because it gives something to all the potential stakeholders and distributes the blame if the product fails.

It’s interesting how the list of companies you mentioned all include some powerful figure(s) who can personally back an innovative, simple and risky idea.

Macs – Jobs Amazon – Bezos Pixar – Jobs Google – Larry Page and Sergei Brin Whole Foods – ?? iTunes – Jobs HBO – ??

I think the best way to measure passion and taste in a business person is to learn about their personal life. What are their interests and reading habits. What does it say about what they really value and what they really know? How well are their personal passions aligned with work? The best product people I know have a very strong alignment between their personal passions and their work.

This alignment doesn’t have to be in an obvious way. A software designer doesn’t have to spend their spare time reading software books to show a passion for what they do. A better clue would be if they spent their time reading about anthropology and architecture for example. Something that shows they have a passion to expand their field and take it beyond it’s current bounds. Jeff Hawkins from Palm is a good example and Alan Cooper is another.

Brian Keairns — May 29, 2005 @ 10:10 am —
iRider’s PageList feature is even better, too bad we don’t have anything like this for OS X. I will give OnmiWeb a try myself.

Andrew Ng — June 4, 2005 @ 12:06 pm —
Now that is hard core.

Todd Prouty — June 5, 2005 @ 4:48 pm —
Thumbnails are a great idea — I hope it comes to Firefox soon.

I watched the demo video for iRider… Some of its features are very impressive — the thumbnails are just the beginning. Copying a list of pages into a text list of URLs and vice versa is slick, too. Too bad a $29 browser will never take off. I’m not an extension developer (now, anyway), but I wonder how much of that functionality could be adapted for FF? The little progress bars on the thumbnails might be difficult. The makers of iRider might have some copyrights on their innovations, too, for what that’s worth.

Todd Prouty — June 5, 2005 @ 5:14 pm —
It exists.

It’s called Blogtorrent

Seth — June 7, 2005 @ 1:19 pm —
http://www.rssmix.com/

Mike — June 8, 2005 @ 11:46 pm —
Already seen this service I presume … not exactly what you are looking for, but in the right genre … http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000683.html

Steve Shu — June 9, 2005 @ 6:20 am —
I think thumbnail tabs are a waste of screen real estate. They are like icons on your desktop – you can quickly find the ones that are distinctive, but only the filename can help you find a particular word document out of a batch. Tiny webpage pictures can differentiate between nytimes.com and msn.com, but probably won’t help you tell one forum post from another or compare a bunch of products on amazon. Which sucks, because I find tabs are most useful for this latter task. Cmd-clicking on a zillion ebay entries sure saves a lot of back-button time.

It would be much better to stick with regular tabs, but put favicons in them.

Cyrus — June 9, 2005 @ 10:11 am —
I think PubSub might be your best bet (disclaimer: I work there). PubSub allows you to easily subscribe to keywords, but you can also subscribe to a full feed using SOURCE:domainx. So to create a “superfeed” you can use a query like SOURCE:nytimes.com OR SOURCE:washingtonpost.com OR SOURCE:wsj.com.

Steven M. Cohen — June 9, 2005 @ 12:03 pm —
The latest New Yorker magazine has a Philips ad with quotes from a number of prominent designers. My favorite is from Peggy Fritzsche.

“Simplicity means products of the best quality displaying essential elements, but without additional ornamentation or clutter.”

Brian Keairns — June 9, 2005 @ 9:39 pm —

Continuing the Discussion

N I V I » Working at a venture fund isn’t diversified enough for you?

N I V I » Working at a venture fund isn’t diversified enough for you?

New blog by yet another VC, pretty cool stuff. I took have friends who urged me to “never work at a startup”, interestingly, I joined Newisys when they had 50 people and they…

ayn blog — May 2, 2005 @ 10:43 pm
User scripting blows up business models

Babak Nivi on why user scripting will change the web. Of course, this applies as much to Opera User JavaScript as it does to Greasemonkey.

Virtuelvis — May 9, 2005 @ 1:51 am
Greasemonkey

There’s a new extension for Firefox that is quickly becoming interesting. It essentially allows users to add functionality to other…

Gen Kanai weblog — May 9, 2005 @ 3:48 am
Grappling with Greasemonkey

Sam Ruby — May 9, 2005 @ 7:04 am
Greasemonkeyed!

Babak Nivi posts this great explainer why Greasemonkey is changing the rules of the Web. [via Sam] My predictions of the impact on online business models: Advertisement – Greasemonkey is to online advertisement what TiVo to TV advertisement. In…

Alexis Smirnov — May 9, 2005 @ 9:44 am
Is Greasemonkey the same as Claria (Gator)?

A post over on Nivi got me thinking if Greasemonkey is a good thing. I can see the obvious benefits as a user having the ability to add

76 | Ideas — May 9, 2005 @ 10:56 am
links for 2005-05-09

Tacky Living (tags: crafty) palestine (tags: blogs political) 15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away) – Tim Yang’s Geek Blog (tags: web technology) How to detect lies – body language, reactions, speech pattern…

BooIzzy.com — May 9, 2005 @ 11:18 am
Firefox Extension Greasemonkey, will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

Firefox Extension Greasemonkey, will blow up business models (as well as your mind)…

Grubbykid.com :: Links — May 9, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
Nomenclature suggestion

I think individual user scripts for Greasemonkey should be called “Smart Tags”. Everyone who switched sides on this one since 2001, please raise your hand. (For once, I get to smugly be consistent on this one.)…

Anil Dash — May 9, 2005 @ 4:18 pm
[...] #183; Filed under mac, windows, linux, programs, interesting article Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind) To th [...]

It’s money - a tek blog » Firefox Greasemonkey — May 10, 2005 @ 12:47 am
Monkeying Around with Web Business Models

Babak Nivi: “Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)”. I’m not particularly sure that I want my mind blown up, but any attempt to answer the thorny “what does it all mean?” question is certainly to be welcomed.

Bab…

Peer Pressure — May 10, 2005 @ 1:42 am
Go, Greasemonkey, Go!

Perfect is in the eyes of the beholder. Even though Seth is talking about a billboard in Grand Central, many of businesses with websites will be stumbling and ch

think again, ideascape moves people to action — May 10, 2005 @ 6:33 am
[...] e owners no longer have control. And ofcourse, not everybody likes change. Take a look at this post by nivi, and you can see why. You would now be able to lookup an Ama [...]

sandipb.net » Blog Archive » Greasemonkey - shaking up the web — May 10, 2005 @ 8:49 am
What things look like on my side of the new digital divide, or hacking Amazon for fun.

That’s nice, but not all that spectacular. Yet I expect that the first GreaseMonkey script to screenscrape this information off of Amazon and use it within some other site is already in the process of being written. And maybe Amazon will never …

Just Imagine... — May 10, 2005 @ 10:03 am
[...] tial is noted … in addition to my old posts here , there and there … see this nice summary … some comments are elaborating on … Greasemonkey is [...]

Business_Model_Innovation Business¯Model¯Design » Update: More on Greasemonkey and business models — May 10, 2005 @ 10:13 am
Client power: you modified the page your browser receives (greasemonkey)

GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox browser that easily allows you to change the rendering of a web page received by your browser. The example image shows how Greasemonkey can insert prices from competitive booksellers right into Amazon.. Well, yo…

Paolo Massa Blog — May 11, 2005 @ 2:21 am
Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind) It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Wheth…

house of the hanged man — May 11, 2005 @ 6:13 am
Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

Greasemonkey – a fancy firefox plugin…

Daily Links — May 11, 2005 @ 6:50 am
Outfoxed

Outfoxed: I was following a discussion about how the Greasemonkey extension to Firefox will destroy many existing business models, when I saw a link to this master’s project on applying metadata to existing webpages by readers and their friends… bas…

JD on MX — May 11, 2005 @ 2:58 pm
Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 9-15 May 2005

This week: Greasemonkey mayhem, Ajax fever, Web Design Minimalism mojo, Blogpoly Fun!, Yahoo Music Engine rave…

Read/Write Web — May 16, 2005 @ 2:18 am
What You Say Or Do Doesn’t Hurt Me

hey all. Long weekend. Went to the Pacers game Friday with my brother. That rocked. They won.

Went to the Pacers game Sunday with Kelly. That sucked. They lost. (And there was a whole row of the most obnoxious, immature and insanely STUPID Pistons f…

X-Tra Rant — May 16, 2005 @ 8:09 am
Greasy CLiki

Since Greasemonkey is so cool and is revolutionizing the web (get in line), I figured I should play with it. Also I thought it would help me to know a little Javascript when the Dashboard, Ajax and Greasemonkey people…

Lemonodor — May 23, 2005 @ 2:47 pm
Grease Monkey – Its your browser

Have you ever wished that all links into New York Times pages were links into the single-page format ? Or that web-based Google Mail “auto-saved” mails regularly to safeguard against sudden network outage or laptop power failure ?

Well now you …

Sumedh Mungee — May 24, 2005 @ 1:04 am
Productivity / Geeky crappy stuffy

Geeky Stuff: Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now). Matt Haughey makes some very good arguments for not putting ads into RSS feeds for now. WinAmp Plugin for the iPod. About time this came about….

Mulley - Damien Mulley's tales from the Boggersphere — May 25, 2005 @ 3:42 am
In love with Platypus and Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you rewrite arbitrary web pages client side from your browser by installing “user scripts” that get injected into the page. As you may or may not have realised Greasemonkey has the potential to…

Vidar Hokstad's random musings — May 25, 2005 @ 8:56 am
Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

Greasemonkey will blow…

Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind) — June 7, 2005 @ 6:17 pm
GreaseMonkey is the real Semantic Web (and now works on HospitalityClub)

GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows you to totally (and easily) change the layout of any received web page. Don’t like the color of the banner of that_site.com? You can change it! Do you prefer to have the…

Paolo Massa Blog — June 8, 2005 @ 5:24 am
Nivi : The Next “Killer App” Will Be Developed on Apple’s OS X

Nivi : The Next “Killer App” Will Be Developed on Apple’s OS X

Interesting insight, but it’s hard to say. I use and love OS X myself, and most of my friends who are great programmers also use Macs as their personal computers. But I don’t thi…

ayn blog — June 9, 2005 @ 8:57 am
Channeling Content: The VC Channel

Last week, Nivi launched an RSS feed entitled “The VC Channel.” It is an aggregation of a number of VC bloggers’ RSS feeds (disclosure: including my own). In his words, “The VC Channel is for the person who wants to…

Genuine VC — June 16, 2005 @ 2:48 pm
Underneath it all

I think the same skill set that allows for interest-based negotiating can be used in product development and marketing.

What's Next? — June 17, 2005 @ 9:43 am
What i did in 2003.

In 2003, when i was 20 years old, i was insanely driven by some ideas that i had regarding the future of networks. Back then i didn’t know the best approach to make my ideas become reality, and so i was stumbling along on a weird journey, that led me …

twoday.tuwien.ac.at/Enki — June 18, 2005 @ 9:23 am
Artificial Life: EvoCell

Nicholas M. Gotts spekuliert in seinem Beitrag zu “New Constructions in Cellular Automata”

twoday.tuwien.ac.at/kybernet — June 18, 2005 @ 9:26 am
RSS Will Change The World — Again.

A complete paradigm shift is looming on the horizon. NIVI calls it, “the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0″.

It will simplify participation, break down walls between websites, replace email, provide new frameworks for social collaboration and a whole lot m…

AllStar Web Marketing Blog — July 9, 2005 @ 6:35 am
GreaseMonkey+Platypus

Slo para usuarios frecuentes de Firefox, les presento: GreaseMonkey + Platypus, la pareja perfecta.

Muchos de ustedes han de haber escuchado hablar de Greasemonkey, una extensin que permite instalar scripts que modifican un sitio Web especfico co…

andufo.net — July 9, 2005 @ 8:10 pm
Opinionated VCs “Bravely” Find Their Voice

I have often characterised venture capitalists as “a bunch of guys who — talk to themselves, evaluate guys with visions, and treat visions with money instead of medication.” So when an VC takes the time to actually transcribe th…

Sacred Cow Dung — July 10, 2005 @ 1:13 pm

Profile – Planet Web 2.0

Service: Planet Web 2.0

Launched: ??? (we are trying to establish the launch date)
What is it?
Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It&#8217;s a must add fe...

TechCrunch — July 11, 2005 @ 10:02 am

Profile – Planet Web 2.0

Service: Planet Web 2.0

Launched: ??? (we are trying to establish the launch date)
What is it?
Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It&#8217;s a must add fe...

TechCrunch — July 11, 2005 @ 10:02 am

Musing on Three Not-So-Fully-Baked Ideas

Usually, I post well thought-out viewpoints, but today I’m going to express three ideas that I’ve just been mulling over in my head. The first originated from Nivi’s post in which he conjectures “RSS is the TCP/IP packet of Web 2.0.” He goes …

Genuine VC — July 12, 2005 @ 1:39 pm

Profile – Wikipedia

Service: Wikipedia

Created: January 15, 2001
Summary:
Wikipedia has been around for over 5 years, is the largest wiki (by far) and serves over 400 million page views per month (to compare, USA Today has about 300 million).
Wikipedia is a free, o...

TechCrunch — July 13, 2005 @ 4:16 am

VC2PR: Howard Hartenbaum, Draper Richards

VC2PR is an occasional series of interviews with venture capitalists, and their take on public relations and the start-up environment. The first in the series is Howard Hartenbaum, of Draper Richards.

Musings from POP! PR — July 14, 2005 @ 10:51 am

Web 2.0 This Week (July 10 – 16)

The main Web 2.0 news this week focused on Technorati (is it dyin or is it rockin?) and the release of Atom 1.0. Lots of other random and interesting stuff as well, including important chia-pet news.
Weekly Summary:

Technorati is Dead! Long Liv…

TechCrunch — July 16, 2005 @ 3:19 am

Profile – Doostang
```
Editor&#8217;s Note: Writing this from Luxembourg airport. Free and strong wifi. Awesome.
Company: Doostang

Location:
Doostang, Inc.
```
160 Brannan St. Suite 306 San Francisco, CA 94107 E-mail: contact@doostang.com Launched: Recently What is it?…
TechCrunch — July 17, 2005 @ 8:47 am
New Silicon Valley VC bloggers: David Cowan, Nivi and the Venture Company

Updated David Cowan, partner at Menlo Park’s Bessemer Venture Partners (pictured left), has started a blog called Who Has Time For This?. And Nivi, a venture consultant to Atlas Venture in Boston who blogs about VC and tech stuff, tells us he has move…

SiliconBeat — July 17, 2005 @ 10:10 am
New Silicon Valley VC bloggers: David Cowan, Nivi and the Venture Company

Updated David Cowan, partner at Menlo Park’s Bessemer Venture Partners (pictured left), has started a blog called Who Has Time For This?. And Nivi, a venture consultant to Atlas Venture in Boston who blogs about VC and tech stuff, tells us he has move…

SiliconBeat — July 17, 2005 @ 10:10 am
Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 11-17 July 2005

This week: The future of RSS, Amazon turns 10, Yahoo HotJobs, big bucks for blogging, techie post of the week – RSS systems.

Read/Write Web — July 18, 2005 @ 12:30 am
Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 11-17 July 2005

This week: The future of RSS, Amazon turns 10, Yahoo HotJobs, big bucks for blogging, techie post of the week – RSS systems.

Read/Write Web — July 18, 2005 @ 12:30 am

A command line for the web

To the slow grasping moron like me, it meant nothing when I first heard about Yubnub by Jonathan Acquino. Jon created it for the 2005 Rails Day, a 24 hour programming contest, as he explains on his blog. That was like 2 weeks ago. Recently some guy na...

Chetan's monologue — July 21, 2005 @ 12:29 am

Nivi’s Event Ideas and Event RSS Feeds… and a plug for Your Web 2.0 List

Nivi, ever the web services innovator, is calling for a groupcast via del.icio.us of Bay Area tech events. He also highlights a potential use not only of del.icio.us, but of RSS in general… So, now I’m adding another slick app

This is going to be BIG. — July 28, 2005 @ 6:43 am
Web 2.0 This Week (August 7-13)
```
Web 2.0 This Week
```
August 6 – 13 This has been a week of challenges and successes. Challenging because I am on a driving trip from Anacortes, WA to Los Angeles, and although you can now get internet access while flying, I have no tools for getting acc…
TechCrunch — August 14, 2005 @ 10:56 pm
Nivi: Startup Activity in the Bay Area is Insane

It seems everyone’s got the start-up fever again, with potential entrepreneurs resorting to Craigslist to look for co-founders. See Nivi’s blog for an interesting smattering of listings.

foundable — August 15, 2005 @ 5:01 am
GROWING STARTUP ACTIVITY IN SILICON VALLEY… INSANE

I came across Nivi’s blog today for the first time, and he had an interesting post and observation on the current state of entrepreneurship in the Bay Area:

Junto Boyz — August 15, 2005 @ 10:50 pm
Wikipedia – Defeating Google?
```
This post by Nivi got me thinking. Wikipedia is defeating Google? 
```
If I want to learn about San Francisco, I could type “San Francisco” into Google and see what Google’s computers spew out. I can trudge through the results and hopefully find wha…
Rawsocket — August 17, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Jobs and Social Networking

As many of you that read this blog know, I’ve been involved as either a participant (Spoke Software) or innocent bystander (Friendster, Myspace) in the social networking space for some time now. There are two new social networking sites I thought I wo…

Nouveau by Zaw Thet - Interesting New Stuff — August 18, 2005 @ 2:02 am
Nivi on why people do things for free

Nivi would love to hear our thoughts on why people do things for free. Apart from the reasons he quoted, there’s this one:

For media companies, free content is a vehicle for advertising. For individual authors, free content or free code is a vehi…

Notes, links and conversation — August 18, 2005 @ 3:51 am
Everyone Will Have a Blog in 2015

By 2015, everyone will have a blog, just like everyone has email today, says Nivi. By 2015, ” your blog will be your avatar in virtual reality. And you can’t play in virtual reality without an avatar. So you’re gonna need a blog, baby.” Right now…

B.L. Ochman's weblog - Internet strategy, marketing, public relations, politics with news and commentary — August 22, 2005 @ 5:06 pm

DoCamp

I love the idea of hosting a DoCamp.  I think having a small group of tech-minded people over to just do stuff could end up being very interesting.  I&#8217;ve got a wireless connection, a Linux server currently doing nothing and enough cool friends t...

First Clown — August 22, 2005 @ 6:11 pm

WWGD: What Would Google Do

Eventually some consulting firm will be founded based on the idea that people want to know what Google will do next and is willing to pay to find out.  Actually the idea is not that far fetched since Microsoft has just one such firm tracking its every...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to 650 — August 29, 2005 @ 7:05 pm

links for 2005-09-06

Nivi : RSS is an API for Content Amen, a simple API that u don’t have to be a programmer to play with! – “Most important, RSS gives you access to your data that you have locked up on…

Roland Tanglao's Weblog — September 5, 2005 @ 11:18 pm
RSS as API – Ideas Travel In Small Circles

Last week I was meeting with my friends over at Corante. We were engaged in a day-long session on how we will be rolling out new technology and services to the public over the next few months. One of the…

SocialTwister — September 6, 2005 @ 10:12 am
RSS is like an API for content

Nivi:

“RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site’s data just like an API…

Alex Barnett blog — September 6, 2005 @ 11:47 pm
The new simple API, RSS and Atom?

A Web API lets you use a web site’s computers, data, algorithms, and functions to create your own web services. Google, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, and many other web services have APIs.

RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site�…

cubicgarden.com... — September 7, 2005 @ 4:04 pm
RSS is a Data Model not an API

Just saw Nivi’s post on RSS is an API. Agreed RSS gives you access to a web site�s data just like an API gives you access to a web site�s computing power. But, RSS is just the data model which encapsulates the bits and pieces of information in the for…

Parisista — September 7, 2005 @ 6:16 pm

Mini Experiment in Global Entrepreneurship

Frequent visitors probably noticed the new header and graphic on the site.  I&#8217;ve been tweaking it and playing with customizing wordpress in a small way the last few days. Most of it on the admin end so you guys probably would not see it.
More i...

Hitchhiker Guide to 650 — September 8, 2005 @ 9:39 pm

Apple the monopsony

Further to Is the iPod nano price too low?! How did Apple get a good deal on flash memory from Samsung? In a word, volume. As Nivi suggests, Apple is approaching monopsony status. The market dominance of iPod + iTunes…

Apple — September 9, 2005 @ 2:04 pm

Steve Jobs Has The Power

Does Steve Jobs have the power? His recent keynote might have introduced the iPod Nano and the iTunes phone but there was a subtext that most folks might not have realised, which Nivi points out so eloquently. A very interesting and compelling read.

…

jarkolicious — September 9, 2005 @ 5:37 pm

Steve Jobs to Studios: I Got the Power!

Nosce te ipsum — September 10, 2005 @ 6:58 pm
One step to challenging Apple’s dominance in the portable music player market

The problem with “other” portable music players on the market was that they were up against the market leader. They needed to do something else to challenge the iPod other than bring out yet another audio player.

Instead, Apple continued on its wa…

Julian's Blog — September 11, 2005 @ 2:34 am
Stuff You Should Read

Forget the Motorola ROKR or the iPod nano; was Apple’s big message last week that they’ve obliterated all their competitors?

Electric-Escape.net — September 12, 2005 @ 11:48 am
Additional thoughts/links on eBay and Skype

There is obviously a ton of coverage of the acquisition of Skype by eBay, and I decided to create a new threadto list further analysis. Here you go: Michael Bazeley has great tidbits that did not make it in his Merc piece. A couple of points are worth …

Software Only — September 13, 2005 @ 2:41 pm
I Love Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs kicks ass, always has, always will.

excerpts. — September 14, 2005 @ 10:08 pm
links for 2005-09-17

ad lib games 24/48 hour focused game design (tags: game design focus iteration) Nivi : Steve Jobs to Studios: I Got the Power! one take on Steve Jobs and the nano launch, the iPod is the means of hand held digital…

take one onion — September 16, 2005 @ 6:17 pm

Briefly: Baidu sued, Steve Jobs’ message to studios, Sony’s marketing, Bluetooth chips for iPod, Nano Wiki, ROKR E1 wishlist

Baidu sued over music downloads (the highly popular chinese search engine that allows you to search for MP3 files hosted on websites and FTP servers, making the labels sad; by the way, a few test searches I've run today show that the feature still ...

HiFi Blog — September 18, 2005 @ 2:57 am

…Thinking About YubNub and a GUI IOS…

Ever since I learned about YubNub from Nivi’s post two months ago, my head has been spinning about the potential power of this tool. If you’re not familiar, YubNub is a “command line for the web.” Further described, “YubNub is an outsourced O…

Genuine VC — September 20, 2005 @ 4:37 am

Audio Email

Have you been over to sign up and try Slawsome, yet? It&#8217;s still in Alpha, but it works! You can record up to 2 minutes and 22 seconds of audio, right on the internet, to their service, and send it privately in an email. You can also choose to ma...

Webfeed Central — October 3, 2005 @ 8:29 am

Rank sources of your del.icio.us links

Top sources of del.icio.us links is a place to see the top sources according to all of your del.icio.us links.
This way you can see the sources that matter the most to you, although as said in a comment to the Nivi post:
&#8220;The problem is that D...

Library clips — October 6, 2005 @ 6:08 pm

Done: Attention-Mining del.icio.us

I recently offered a bounty of $50 for a web service that would rank my sources of del.icio.us bookmarks.

Ask and ye shall receive, they say.

The (soon-to-be…

Nivi — October 9, 2005 @ 5:38 pm
delicious Add-on Service Ranks the Sources of Your Links

I found this via Pubsub – a new web service for collecting and ranking the sources of your delicious bookmarks. Could be useful for identifying your own top sources of info.quote Nivi – Done: Attention-Mining del.icio.us I recently offered a bounty

b.cognosco — October 14, 2005 @ 6:37 am
Done: Attention-Mining del.icio.us

[Source: Nivi] quoted: a new web service for collecting and ranking the sources of your delicious bookmarks. Could be useful for identifying your own top sources of info.quote Nivi – Done: Attention-Mining del.icio.us I recently offered a bounty

E-Business Library — October 17, 2005 @ 9:32 am
Don’t Take That Picture, Flickr Will Do It For You

Nivi posts an interesting idea equating Flickr with Lazyweb:…why bother with all the work of 1) taking the photos, 2) downloading them to my computer, and then 3) uploading them for her to see? There are already a million photos…

hexod.us — October 18, 2005 @ 3:58 pm

An interesting observation, but is it correct?

NIVI:  
Wikipedia defines LazyWeb as
“The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)”
I define LazyPhoto as 
The idea that you don’t need to take photographs anymore because someone...

Roel's Blog — October 24, 2005 @ 9:39 am

Lazyphoto.

An interesting idea from Nivi:Wikipedia defines LazyWeb as“The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)”I define LazyPhoto asThe idea that you don’t need to take photog…

larry borsato — October 25, 2005 @ 1:26 pm
Open Source Takes on the iPod

The iPod’s reign of tyranny may be coming to an end, as Neuros announces plans to create an open source mp3 player. As was expected the open source movement continues to grow –

ActoNetwork — November 2, 2005 @ 8:59 am

Apple: taking a bite out of video market

I&#8217;ve said some positive things about the Apple iPod Video, and I&#8217;ve said some negative things about the Apple iPod Video.  At its best, it may revolutionize the video market.  At its worse, it&#8217;ll be another mp3 player with a fancy, b...

Kiosk.net — November 2, 2005 @ 1:36 pm

Web 2.0 ecosystem

Nivi has a great post about the breakdown of the participants of web 2.0. Web 2.0 is really a tipping point in convergence between the audience and the media, and so the distinction isn’t as clear cut anymore. Nivi’s post is a good breakdown on the…

Edwyn Chan's Weblog : web 2.0 | blog media | china — November 3, 2005 @ 6:45 am
Got Nivi On The Brain

Can’t stop thinking about his post about Web 2.0 customers. He ends with: You could argue that a definition of Web 2.0 is the intermediation of Linkers and Commenters between the Creators and Surfers. I wonder if you could also…

outta beta — November 3, 2005 @ 6:23 pm
Nivi On Web 2.0 Customer Segmentation

From Nivi’s post today about Web 2.0 customer segmentation and hierarchy: Creators who create an “original” work. Examples include a reporter at the New York Times, a podcaster, a blogger who is writing original content, or the author of Harry…

outta beta — November 3, 2005 @ 6:24 pm
Trillion Dollar Web 2.0 Matrix?

Nivi has an interesting post about how user-generated content to determine the relevancy of search results, determine the media you consume, and determine the messages you receive has the potential value of a trillion dollars. One of the axis composes…

Edwyn Chan's Weblog : web 2.0 | blog media | china — November 10, 2005 @ 6:04 am
Bessemer Venture Partners Anti-Portfolio – missed opportunities and fun to read

I just saw over at nivi.com’s blog an entry where he mentioned Bessemer Venture Partners and their famous anti-portfolio – so in case you want to spend the next 2 minutes with a smile on your lips, you might read over their missed opportunities over h…

jB: no - that's definitely not good enough — November 13, 2005 @ 6:19 am
Next Big Thing

There is something big out there waiting for us to capture it. Trillion Dollar Web 2.0 Matrix

Confluence: Community Space — November 15, 2005 @ 9:25 am
A fund for Entrepreneur to diversify their risk

Nivi has an interesting post suggesting how maybe VC’s could let entrepreneur maybe put 25% of their stock in a pool with all the other similar startups in the VC’s portfolio. this enables entrepreneurs to diversify risk across the whole portfolio a…

Edwyn Chan's Weblog : web 2.0 | blog media | china — November 16, 2005 @ 5:34 am
Babak Nivi joins Bessemer

Babak Nivi, an MIT engineer, and former consultant to Atlas Ventures, has come to the West Coast and joined Bessemer Venture Partners. And as such, we at SiliconBeat have become successful matchmakers. Several months ago, we wrote this post about vent…

SiliconBeat — November 16, 2005 @ 8:19 pm

People Moves: Babak Nivi

This week&#8217;s person on the move also maintains a blog covering the&nbsp;VC market, so this news was easy to get a hold of:
Babak Nivi has joined Bessemer Venture Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He previously has served as a consultan...

The Dealmaker — November 21, 2005 @ 2:34 pm

Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist)

There are companies I review every day that I don&#8217;t write about. Reasons vary: it&#8217;s been done already and the product isn&#8217;t even as good as what&#8217;s been done, its a highly or totally one-way application, or it isn&#8217;t consum...

TechCrunch — November 21, 2005 @ 11:07 pm

Trillion dollar matrix crunch

When I saw Ethan put Nivi&#8217;s matrix into NumSum, I thought it was so cool that I had to take up Mike&#8217;s request to stick some of his thought-provoking wishlist into the matrix as well. Here&#8217;s my attempt:

I got rid of the &#8220;expe...

EconoMeta — November 23, 2005 @ 12:08 pm

Living Forever?

Ray Kurzweil has the answer…maybe. First, try taking a look at his new book, Fantastic Voyage, and see what you think.

Sure, he could be full of it, but something tells me…

The Moderate Voice — November 28, 2005 @ 6:01 am
Can Entrepreneur’s Diversify their Stock across their Investor’s Portfolio?

All ideas get a second outing, and this (Link: Nivi : Can Entrepreneur’s Diversify their Stock across their Investor’s Portfolio?.) is no different. Can’t lay my fingers on it just now, but I remember reading about something like this both in the …

FlorianDargel — December 4, 2005 @ 5:10 pm
[...] platforms » Trillion dollar matrix crunch When I saw Ethan put Nivi’s matrix into NumSum, I thought it was so cool that I had to take u [...]

EconoMeta » Blog Archive » Trillion dollar matrix crunch — December 9, 2005 @ 10:31 am
Don’t Just Look Left and Right, But Also Up and Down

I like the quote last week from Fox Interactive Media’s President Ross Levinsohn (via paidcontent.org): “[ FIM will focus on ] social portals… Why have one portal when we can have 70 million?” There is a lot merit to this strategy. Many of the �…

Genuine VC — December 13, 2005 @ 2:53 pm
Prediction Frenzy

As 2005 comes to a close, its getting very hard not to bump into a list talking about what to expect in the year 2006. With the amount of lists floating out there, I think every possible scenario is covered and played out. … If everyone of those pro…

Technological Musings — December 20, 2005 @ 1:29 am
Babak Nivi, Bessemer Venture Partners Blogger

Adding a new blog to the Ventureblogs list: Nivi

Ventureblogs — January 7, 2006 @ 12:56 am

But where does this leave Americans who hate Microsoft?

I thought this was pretty funny, especially as an American who moved to both Canada and Apple in the same year. 
So if the United States is Microsoft, and Canada is Apple does that make Mexico the North American Linux?

…

Spazblog — January 8, 2006 @ 10:58 pm

Web 2.0

Zephyer's Blog — January 10, 2006 @ 1:47 am
Top sources of del.icio.us links

Nivi suggested using the top sources of your del.icio.us links, in order to clean up your feedreader and throw out feeds you don’t find worthwile to bookmark links from anyway. It created some discussion on whether this was feasible/ethical/prac…

Notes, links and conversation — January 26, 2006 @ 3:56 pm
LazyGov – a draft

LazyGov is based on the LazyWeb concept and the RFC (Request for Comments) process. The LazyWeb claims that “The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)“. civil society take…

opolitics — January 30, 2006 @ 5:28 pm
Battle of the Mag-Blogs

Boy, we sure can’t bring ourselves to have an opinion about that whole Danish cartoon thing. Believe us, we tried. We briefly considered posting nothing but crudely-drawn cartoons of Mohammed making fun of hospital bed-bound amputee American soldiers …

Blog 57 — February 7, 2006 @ 8:50 am
Kongbird

Greetings citizens. Nivi here. I thought the cover of this week’s Economist was especially apropos.

The nice folks at the Economist say that “Media companies are suffering intense pain – and it is starting to seem worryingly permanent.” You can re…

Songbirdnest.com — February 8, 2006 @ 10:00 pm
Vertical Social Networks

In the past couple weeks, we’ve seen an additional couple of fundings in social networking. While I think that there is a lot of opportunity (i.e. ripe ad dollars for the teen/music demographic) that many of these hot new start-ups are chasing, the s…

Genuine VC — February 9, 2006 @ 1:21 pm
Gold in the Garbage

A Wired article this month features a tactic being employed by Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund. Morgan has been analyzing Mayfield’s dealflow, as well as the tech press, from the Dotcom boom to see if there are companies or ideas

SortiPreneur — February 14, 2006 @ 5:44 am
Quick Hits
1. Doc Searls, droppin’ some knowledge on all ya’ll:I think we’ll like the results (of the relationship economy) we’re willing to relate, and not just transa
ActoNetwork — March 30, 2006 @ 5:52 pm
Don’t Target Large and Obvious Markets

Nivi pulls this gem out of The Innovator’s Solution:“Because the process of securing funding forces many potentially disruptive ideas to get shaped instead as sustaining innovations that target large and obvious markets, the very process of getting …

SortiPreneur — June 21, 2006 @ 10:05 am
Helloguys

What we need is a combination of public financing (so that all candidates are on the same level playing field) and a third party administrator of campaign contributions (to dole out funds to incumbents that have indeed fulfilled the wishes of their c

MYblog — July 7, 2006 @ 5:19 am
Spam injection from 50webs…

About two weeks ago I notice that one of my old blog entries had spontaneously reappeared in my feed reader – with a bunch of spammy-looking links attached. A couple of my friends also notice, and one sends me screenshots. Sure enough, stuck in the m…

Greg Yardley's Internet Blog — October 16, 2006 @ 11:36 am
[...] – Do you know Dunbar’s number? I’m guessing you don’t. The number isn’t as important as understanding the concept well enough to articulate a compelling idea (of say, network growth). [...]

Knowing More By Knowing Less (or, How Do You Learn?) at Disruptive Thoughts — October 17, 2006 @ 7:06 am
[...] I just saw an interesting thing pop up in my Bloglines. Nivi, a blog I’m subscribed to, was showing dozens and dozens of entries being updated even though there was no discernible difference. However as I started looking closer, I noticed if you view the source, for example on this post, there is are ton of spam links there. You can click the screenshot to the left. [...]

Photo Matt » Spammers Hack Blogs — October 18, 2006 @ 4:59 pm
[...] Nivi, a rakish startup rockstar whom we’ve run into at all manner of geek events, posted about a new project on his blog that’s now in public alpha, Slawesome. It’s a super-simple way to literally send a shout-out to somebody over email. More importantly for webworkers, it is a quick way of sending messages via email, without typing them in, or using the cellular minutes. [...]

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Audio Emails With Slawesome « — October 21, 2006 @ 8:34 am
[...] Slawesome is a very interesting project that was just announced today. It’s voice in e-mail basically. Give it a look while you Google it, okay? [...]

PicLens, MusicNation, YesNoMayB, Paint.net, Loma Linda, Slawesome « Technically Speaking — October 21, 2006 @ 9:20 am
[...] Hire People for their Stengths (You Can Fix their Weaknesses) [Nivi Blog] [...]

Weekly Linkage XL [12-15-06] at Experience Planner by Scott Weisbrod — December 15, 2006 @ 1:03 pm
[...] And let me know if and where these should fall in Nivi’s matrix. [...]

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist) — December 22, 2006 @ 11:50 am
Hire People For Their Strengths…

Here is a post entitled Hire People for Their Strengths (You Can’t Fix Their Weaknesses). It’s from my brothers business blog. You can check out his blog here. Randomly, this post of his relates to our last post. Enjoy. Marc…

Grockit GMAT Blog — December 26, 2006 @ 10:17 pm
What is learning?…

The following is a post stolen from the Nivi Blog. Nivi in turn stole it from Ackoff. If it’s something you’ve never heard before and it totally opens your mind and changes your world view it probably came from Ackoff….

Grockit GMAT Blog — December 28, 2006 @ 11:21 pm
[...] I liked this, from Nivi, summarizing some of the points in the book Re-Creating the Corporation: [...]

Learning: Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom at Brian Berliner’s Brain — December 30, 2006 @ 2:50 am
[...] כבר אין צורך לצלם תמונות כי כל דימוי שנבחר כבר קיים בפליקר, מקסימום יש פוטושופ או גימפ שיטפלו בתמונה. (via Nivi) [...]

oneab cybered » ארכיון » אסטרטגיית העצלות ברשת — December 30, 2006 @ 7:34 am
[...] Of course, you can tackle weaknesses and turn them into strengths. You can’t sit around and wait for others to do that for you. [...]

Identify Your Weaknesses Now » Instigator Blog — January 8, 2007 @ 4:30 am
Education is about grading – and that sucks…

It is no secret that I have a lot of issues with our education system. I think there are lots of things……

MasterMaq's Blog — January 12, 2007 @ 3:41 pm
[...] See more quotes from Peter Drucker in Part 1. Bookmark with del.icio.us | Trackback URL [...]

Nivi : The Essential Peter Drucker (Part 2) — January 26, 2007 @ 1:28 am
[...] Part 1 [...]

96iantSteps · Good Links: Nivi Blog — February 8, 2007 @ 9:26 pm
[...] 4) “The truly important events… are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.” – Peter Drucker. (via Nivi) [...]

5 Quick Things at Disruptive Thoughts — February 20, 2007 @ 9:12 pm
[...] Capitalism explained on The Wire: “On Getting Paid”. [...]

Dancing about Architecture » Blog Archive » Capitalism explained — March 30, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
[...] 3. Don’t emulate your competition – Too many people get way too caught up in what the competition is doing. You see this a lot in software development. People think that just because their competitor included a feature that they need to too (the dreaded “We Have to Win the Battle of the Feature Matrix” syndrome). Rather than overly focusing on your competition spend time with your customers instead. I love this quote from Nivi’s blog: [...]

Education Revolution - On Competition — June 3, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
[...] You already have or can get the connections needed for mentoring and guidance. These are people who worked with you, who you meet at a conference or some friend mentioned they know him or her. If it is none of the earlier, you can just Cold Call or Email them, Nivi actually asked people to do it on his blog. [...]

Life in Balance: Amit’s Blog » Startup Thoughts 3: Tips for starting a company later in your life — June 6, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
[...] I liked this, from Nivi, summarizing some of the points in the book Re-Creating the Corporation: Learning is the acquisition of data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. [...]

The Corner Office » Learning: Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom on BNET — June 12, 2007 @ 2:10 pm
VMO, “Viral Marketing Optimization”…

SEO, “Search Engine Optimization”, is now boring. I once reveled in the challenge of raising the PageRank of projects with which I was affiliated. I’ve stooped embarrassing low on ocassion; “Hey you, «friend I haven’…

Married Inc. — July 2, 2007 @ 6:29 pm
[...] At the very early stages of a company, it’s best to just ignore your competition. [...]

3 Tips To Startup Success : Instigator Blog — July 17, 2007 @ 6:01 am
[...] (inspired …) [...]

anlegen.in — July 28, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
[...] There is a lot that user-side scripting (DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, is another term for it) cannot do. For instance it cannot change what functions the server supports, or make it take some action it otherwise wouldn’t (unless by manipulating POST data, and in the case of sloppy server-side programming). But what it can do is cause enough for some serious thinking. Babak Nivi presents a few examples on his blog, and there is already a huge amount of comment going on about how revolutionary user-side scripting of websites could be. On his blog Phil Ringnalda talks about two battling scripts written for Amazon’s site: one which rewrites all the links, and another that tries to write them back. Nivi generally comes across in his writing as cheering on the new world of user control, despite preciently recognizing its potential impact. I understand this, and there are a lot of areas in which I would love to have this kind of control. Much of the information on the web is just that: information. I wouldn’t mind having more control over how it is presented. But as someone who has worked a long time in the transactional business side of the Internet I can’t but point out that some “websites” are interfaces to important business functions. We wouldn’t want users to have scripting control over ATMs. Some distinction is going to have to be made between sites that contain scriptable information, and sites that represent cohesive interfaces that should not be manipulated. The distinction will need to be made on the server, and enforced on the client. Otherwise what Nivi and others champion as the birth of “hypertext for the deep web” may become instead the death of eBanking and a host of other important online businesses. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

markbetz.net » Greasemonkey and the Definition of Content — April 27, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

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