All these social networks. It’s getting out of hand. I’m not going to analyze here, I’m simply going to attempt a listing and categorization (of social things that I have personally heard of).

This is a living document. It will never be as extensive as Crunchbase or Wikipedia’s List of Social Networking Sites.

This post started out as a bit of a mental rant in response to my confusion over what to do with all of these social network invites I get. What really matters in a social network or application? I’m building one, so I better figure it out. Here is a small piece of that:

Table of Contents

Messaging

Beluga is one of those new “group messaging” apps/platforms. Bought by Facebook, now basically relaunched as Facebook Messenger. Feels like “group SMS.” Sounds useful, but it hasn’t found its way into my life even once yet. Guess I don’t hang out with enough groups.

General

Glassboard was just released to the public a few hours ago as I write this. Its premise – to let you share photos, videos, etc. to private groups – is boring, but Sepia Labs seems to believe that they offer the missing link of private+social.

Facebook is one you already know.

Google+ is another one you already know. To me, it’s a large-scale version of a product (group of products?) trying to bridge the privacy+social chasm. I actually find that social and privacy don’t really mix all that well.

Diaspora is a Facebook clone, only distributed (who wants the hell of server management for a social network?), and possibly more “private.” I think people will flock to this like they did to Google Wave.

Location sharing

Forecast “is a fun and simple way for friends to share where they’re going.” It’s like Foursquare but with “planning ahead” baked in?

Foursquare lets me check-in to real-world places or weird “events” (Snowpocalypse, Heatwavepocalypse, Please-stop-this-pocalypse) and share this knowledge with my friends. I heard it was great for finding the most popular SXSW parties in 2009 and visualizing your life and for keeping track of where you’ve been for archival purposes, like I like to do when traveling.

Idea sharing

Percolate figures out what “people” (aka twitter follows and google reader subscriptions) are “talking about” (aka things that more than one “person” links to) and sends you a list of those things in a nice email digest format at intervals of your choosing.

Bagcheck hosts lists of gear/software/stuff that you share and compare with other people. Great execution of a limited scope project. Jerks got acquired (acq-hired?) by Twitter, so who knows where the service will go from here. They would have been (will be?) a competitor to a start-up I’m a part of, and I wish they’d have stuck it out. Lots of great ideas in there for improving “list-making” and “list-sharing,” so I’m going to miss them, even if I found the market for their service as extremely narrow and low-usefulness.

Listgeeks is a “socially-oriented platform for creating, sharing and comparing lists of things.” If I’m not mistaken, English is not the first language of this site’s developers, but wow, where is the soul of this site? Making simple text lists is super easy. Everything else? Not so much. Weird attempts at social engineering and analysis going on here.

Photo sharing

Instagram is a photo-sharing network. Sounds boring, yeah? Well these guys are huge, and even your curmudgeonly narrator likes them. They have two products: an iPhone app and an API. And so far, their iPhone app is the only thing that’s really caught on. All it does is let you post, view, and like photos. The photos can be easily adjusted with retro-ish filters and then auto-shared to your Twitter or Facebook account. In my opinion, it was all those weird http://instagr.am/ urls in my Twitter stream that got my attention and convinced me to download their app and jump on the bandwagon.

Flickr was one of the proto-social networks. Like Instagram, they’re a photo-sharing network, but it almost seems like they stumbled into the wonders of “social” rather than targeting it as a major business goal. The word “social” appears nowhere in their about page. I would say that they succeeded because they were a great tool before they were a great network. They began taking money directly from users in exchange for more storage and features early on, unlike most social startups. That’s probably helped them last as long as they have. They’re not being sunsetted like del.icio.us… at least not yet.

Color. Awesome name, awesome domain name, completely indecipherable use case. The over-hyping (fueled mostly by the news of their massive funding dollars received before they had released a product) certainly didn’t help, but even the aesthetically-pleasing design didn’t do much to explain their product. Flopped. Visionary founders leaving. Where will this company/product go next?

News and Magazines

Flipboard was named Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2010 for their social news magazine that pulls in links from your social networks (and selected RSS feeds and magazines which partner with Flipboard) to provide you with a customized magazine full of news and photos you presumably care about.

The day after my good friend Greg proposed the idea for Teacher Hub to me, I was sure we had a hit on our hands. 7 months, 1354 lines of code, and one “pivot” later, I called it quits and moved on.

Chronologically, from the beginning

Greg’s wife is an “early-stage” teacher (a few years in), and given the horrendous job-security that newly minted New Jersey teachers have currently, she’s dealt with having to teach entirely new classes year after year. All new classes => all new needs. New classroom supplies (largely teacher-purchased or teacher-subsidized), new curriculums to learn (and inevitably update), and possibly a new school to get used to.

Her itch: wouldn’t life be better if there were an online destination where all those things could be found easily and cheaply? It would be a place where teachers could trade, barter, sell, or share their wares, skills, and advice. A place where teachers could meet other teachers from their area. A place where teachers could write about their experiences — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

A “Teacher Hub,” you could call it.

I loved it. It seemed like a real need in an interesting industry. And I was desperate to step into the startup ring once more (my first startup, back in 2006, was a movie social network called Reel Critics that never launched).

Start coding, talking, coding, talking

First thing I did was start coding the boilerplate and basic multi-column layout. I had been simply writing new SQL code and the occasional unordered list for the past year, and was just excited for an excuse to build something from scratch.

We scheduled weekly meetings to keep things on track (keep on what track? we hadn’t laid any tracks at all), which one of us usually showed up late for. I was 37signals-crazy, shoving all my clients and projects into Basecamp, writing roadmaps in Writeboard, tracking life tasks in Ta-da List. So of course, our meetings were in Campfire. Text-only. So the rate of conversation-to-useful-work was diminished for us by the very nature of our communication medium.

One of our first goals was to get Greg up-to-speed on programming. We weren’t sure how much he could contribute code-wise, but I was hoping to get one more person coding. The last time I was the only coder on a large-ish project, I got tired after a few months. Nobody to talk to and pump me up creates a tough gig.

Let’s get something out of the way. If you’re starting a startup and someone wants to teach themselves programming in the process, don’t expect good results. This is not a knock on those people. My advice is to look at the priorities of the business and the priorities of the person. If either of those points away from a need or desire to be a programmer, then this could be a waste of time for everybody and for the business. There’s a school of thought that if you have a startup idea, you should teach yourself to code, or that everybody in the startup should be able to code, but the fact remains that there is a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a startup, and if someone’s motivations aren’t conducive to programming, don’t get hung up on that. Do something that you can do already, and do it now.

So those first few months, while I was still living in Venezuela (Greg was in New Jersey), we’d spend our time doing the following: coding, setting up Greg’s RoR dev setup, setting up the staging server on my Media Temple VPS, talking about doing research on the industry of teacher-oriented websites, doing some nominal research on said industry, and debating with gusto about the financial aspects to our business model.

Let’s Align our Interests

All of this meeting stuff was an attempt to align our interests to the goal of building Teacher Hub. We were trying to get on the same page so that we could work on the same thing (programming our Minimum Viable Product), but our differing skill sets kept us drifting apart throughout the week and then struggling to re-align our interests and goals during our weekly meetings:

Instead of what we were doing, we probably should have specialized in what we were each capable of already, keeping our end-goal in sight and on the same page, but not concerning ourselves with making sure we were both contributing the same things in the same amount as each other:

Next time on “Startup Gone Wrong”…

We’re only 2 months in, and Edyta and I are about to realize that Venezuela is just not going to work out. Find out what happens to Teacher Hub (and my programming life) as we start our journey back to the USA.

This post was graciously edited by Marc Ubaldi

Around my internet1, there’s been a recent meme concerning dedication to starting your own business. It’s not unique to our time, but over the past week it feels like everything I read, watch, or listen to is talking to me about the need to devote yourself fully to whatever it is that you believe your business to be, otherwise it will likely never get done.

Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann talked about it on the latest episode of their podcast Back to Work, Jim Coudal implored us to build your beer cozies today, and… those are the only two I can remember right now, but it feels like I’ve been pestered with these messages for the past week non-stop.

Listening to these smart, successful exemplars in my industry, I realized that I had essentially followed their advice. I spent all of 2010 as a full-time self-employed freelance programmer, and now, in 2011, I work a “corporate” job while relegating projects of passion to my off-hours. What happened?

Some backstory:

When I finished my Master’s degree (you don’t have to call me “Master” if you don’t want to) at the end of 2009, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to take my 2 current freelance (programming) clients, find a few more, and eventually hire employees and sit back while they make me lots of money. I was even going to expedite the “retire on a tropical beach” part of it by setting up my business in Porlamar, Venezuela. By my back-of-the-napkin calculations, between my current meager freelance income and Edyta’s doctoral scholarship, we would live quite comfortably in relative solitude and peace in the tropics, given the expat-favoring pricing in Venezuela.

The plan was to stay there for 1 year. We lasted 3 months.

Then, 6 months after we moved back to the U.S., I was looking for a “normal” job.

What happened? Why?

Well, our general reason for leaving Venezuela was that we couldn’t get a reliable internet connection — a vital tool in both of our fields of work.

But in general, I found that while many of the aspects of freelancing were empowering, other aspects were putting my brain’s anxiety receptors on high alert. You’ve heard about the empowering aspects already — no boss, working on what you want, etc. — so I’m only going to explain how the empowering aspects lost out (for the time being) to the anxiety-inducing aspects.

• I loathed searching for new clients. I would stare for hours at the 37signals gig board (defunct) and the Authentic Jobs freelance listings, thinking to myself that I couldn’t possibly sell myself as capable of doing those jobs. Or maybe the jobs had weak descriptions, making me wonder if the clients would be flaky.
• Lonely. That’s what I felt while working in my home office on sites with no designers or programmers other than me. When we moved to New York, I had no excuse not to put myself out there at hackathons or conferences, but I convinced myself that sitting at home working was time better spent.
• Once you’re locked in at an hourly rate, it’s hard to raise your rate. I had almost 30 hours per week of work to do, but I was still charging my cheap college-student rates to my most trusted clients. Not a good thing when you consider my lack of new clients.
• You still have to find time to do the things you love. Despite having the luxury of setting all my own hours, I still found that I had to make time for my projects of passion outside of client-work time. If you’re not working on your startup full-time, then you’re just not working on your startup full-time. Not much different than working a “normal” job and coming home to startup work.

Overall, these things (and other, less explainable things) contributed to my anxiety over running my own business. And this doesn’t even get into the anxiety of an exciting startup project turning sour (another post, another time).

So I suppose this is where I put in a little warning to all the would-be self-employers out there. Be as aware as you can be. Which is probably not enough. You can do it if that’s your goal. But the alternatives are not so bad, if you ask me.

This post was graciously edited by Marc Ubaldi