Attention Dandelifers - Year in Review, Our Summer Plans, and Recent Development Update  − 20 July, 2007

The Water of Life: Streams and Droplets

We recently launched streams features (much like you get at Jaiku or iStalkr/SuprGlu/et al) but in our case the service is less about showing off all of your digital identities and more about using the "droplets" from your streams as the basis for experiences you want to write and preserve. What streams come standard? The usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, Youtube, and Del.icio.us; as well as some not so usual suspects: Cluztr, Plazes, Netflix, and Amazon. If those don't satisfy, then we also allow you to record RSS streams, which I use to record local and world headlines, since it's nice to be able to see contextually what the rest of the world was doing when I was doing whatever it was I was doing. http://dandelife.com/kga245/streams

We have not limited the number of streams or droplets you can record into your Dandelife. In posterity ALL of your lifecasting data is a seed for something greater. Or as Chris Messina Twittered, "Presence is ephemeral except in the retrospective aggregate." But, really now, the reason we got into streaming is simple: our members were asking for ways of writing their stories without having to actually write their stories. More features addressing this problem are forthcoming.

Facebook App

We drank the Facebook App Kool-Aid and loved it. http://apps.facebook.com/dandelife/ We're spending 80% of our development effort at this stage to porting over Dandelife features to Facebook.

We'd much rather that they handle the social-networking aspect of our business - we just want to create a better story-telling experience. Everybody has a Facebook app, yes. But ours goes to 11. OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But we really do think that Facebook and Dandelife are ideal bedfellows - not just a trendy dance partners at the all-day disco that is the Interweb.

Timelines for All
We created an XML feed that works with MIT's SIMILE timeline. We also created a fully functional Dandelife timeline that you can paste into a blog or website for free. There's also a badge faux-timeline you can put in your gutter on your blog. Here you can see all of mine: http://dandelife.com/kga245/widget And if you want to take a peak at some interesting timeline others have been working on: http://blog.dandelife.com/tags/timelines/ Mine is show right below.
The Company's Progress
The company itself consists of the same three people as principals: Me (Co-Founder and President), Edward Shenderovich (Co-Founder and father of twin boys) and Shakhruz Ashirov (our CTO). We have built a team of 5 total developers and continue to make improvements to the site as our members ask for them. Dandelife has not taken any VC money. I do not want to entertain offers from VC's. Dandelife is a labor of love. Since taking an initial friends and family stipend, Dandelife has been supported entirely by the incomes of its founders. It's easier that way. It's also harder that way.

My advisors are also still with me. Ross Mayfield, Mike Jones, Bruce Livingstone, Jeffrey Zeldman and Reid Carr. Bless them.

A Side Note on Venture Capital
It should be mentioned that I am a terrible fundraiser (because I did try). I have no patience for it, for starters. Additionally, silicon valley scares me. I'm middle class, tragically creative, bred in Ohio, and wouldn't know the first thing about spending someone else's millions. If, on the other hand, you want to know why crops are grown in fields shaped like circles instead of rectangles...I'm your man.

In my experience, raising VC is like playing paintball on Mars: sounds fun, but it could be dangerous. If I weren't already choc-full-o-rationalizations, here's another: given that my members and my employees aren't asking for things VC funding could help with, why should I?


Future Plans

So what's in store? Our plans for the immediate future are to launch our first sister site by the end of August. It will focus on war stories. It will be launched in conjunction with Smithmag.net as a means of encouraging peaceful resolutions of conflict to have accompanied the 1500th day of the US occupation of Iraq (which was actually June 10th). We hope people feel compelled to let the world know their own experiences with war. We don't want to pass judgment - we just want to provide a safe environment for getting these stories told. Peace is something I strongly believe in. Edward is Jewish. Shakhruz is Muslim. I am an Atheist (read: non-practicing Episcopalian). We like to think we're a microcosm of a peaceful, borderless, dogma-agnostic society. Sometimes in life you have to make your own dreams come true.

That's All
Well, that's all for now, anyway. I will be posting more updates here and in the blog over time.

Thrive!
K

I almost forgot to include a link to our demos (which might explain a thing or two): http://dandelife.com/demos

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