Hueniverse

In Search of Talent

Nouncer is getting closer to a working platform and it is time to get more hands in the factory. I’ve wrote before about the quest and challenges of finding a co-founder for startups, in NY and in general. That search is still on-going but my main focus is on getting stuff built and used. With that in mind here are some roles I would like to add to the Nouncer team. Any of these can be done as a full time job, part time, contract-based, or internship. If you are a student and looking for a really cool internship position, these are promised to be both fun and challenging (you’ll even get paid), and a true learning experience.

Upcoming Events

Tomorrow (11/28), I will be at New York’s first MatchupCamp, an event I am helping to organize. MatchupCamp is matchmaking for startups. It is a unique networking events for those with an itch to join or start a tech startup in the New York area. Organized by nextNY, MatchupCamp is all about sharing ideas and skills in hopes to make some useful connections. There are many networking events in NY, but none focused on those ready to get their hands dirty and build something new. If you are in town, come and check it out. If you want to talk about Nouncer and the positions available, please find me there (or drop me a line).

I will be at Internet Identity Workshop next week in Mountain View, CA (12/3-5). It will OAuth’s primetime among many other great ideas and technologies. We plan to make OAuth Core 1.0 final and release it to the world. If you haven’t been keeping up, we’ve recently published OAuth Core 1.0 Draft 7 which is very stable and has a growing developer community and code libraries. Nouncer’s OAuth endpoint are due this week in the new alpha environment.

Nouncer’s First Steps

Nouncer is making its first few steps into the world this week. The first set of APIs are being released this week to the Nouncer alpha environment, and will allow developers to learn about the session management and user registration features. I expect to release enough API calls by the end of the year to allow developers to build working applications using the platform. However, Nouncer will not be fully operational until February-March 2008.

Nouncer Platform Capabilities Preview

Nouncer is a micro-content platform with strong focus on real-time content distribution. The best examples of what a Nouncer-driven website can be are existing microblogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. The idea is that many sites and developers would like to incorporate real-time content functionality into their products but lack the resources or desire to build a large scalable messaging system. What Nouncer does is provide a rich set of APIs developers can use instead of their own server side application.

OAuth: The Podcast

Larry, Chris, and I spent an interesting hour talking about OAuth to the guys at Bungee Connect for their Developer Network. The conversation gives some background on the history behind the protocol, the problems it was set to solve, and a bit of advice for getting started. We talked about what is needed to make OAuth a success, and how it is relevant to today’s web.

Playing with Numbers: What a Microblogging Service Financial Model Might Look Like

Building a business out of a microblogging service is not a trivial task. There has been a lot of chatter regarding Twitter’s eventual monetization, but so far the only people who made money off microblogging are the Jaiku founders when they sold the business to Google. I have written before about the difficulty of monetizing microblogging, but difficulty is something to overcome, not a brick wall. This model is an attempt to figure out the different options of running such a business.

You can download the Excel file or try the Google Docs version (if you want to play with it make a copy first). If you know your way around financial models, jump right into the model. Continue reading for some background and points of interest.