Some of you may have seen this already, since it has been passed around on Twitter, but I just had to point to Rick Segal’s hilarious blog post about a startup that did everything right in its business plan — right up until it sent the document without clicking the “accept changes” menu item in Word. So when Rick (who is a VC with J.L. Albright in Toronto) looked at the impressive business plan, what he saw in the margins were all the edits and comments made by the team and their advisors, including:

• “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
• “I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”
• “VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

Hysterical. I’m trying to imagine someone on the executive team at that startup — or on their advisory board — reading the post and gradually realizing with horror that it’s theirs. Priceless. For what it’s worth, Rick says he thought it was funny and wouldn’t hold it against the company. For other examples of the dangers of Word’s “track changes” function, you might want to talk to the British government, or to someone with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, or someone in the Bush administration’s environmental unit, or lawyers for the SCO Group. You can find lots more examples here.

Mark Dykeman, who writes a blog called Broadcasting Brain, did a Q&A interview with me recently as part of a series he has been doing, and you can find it here if you’re interested. Other participants in Mark’s series have included Dave “DigiDave” Cohn of NewAssignment and Tamar Weinberg, who writes for Lifehacker and Mashable.

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has the sad story of Hello, which has just been shut down (Josh Catone at Read/Write Web has already beaten me to the inevitable headline). Of course, it’s only a sad story if you have any clue what Hello was, and it seems obvious that not many people do, otherwise (presumably) the company wouldn’t be shutting it down. Certainly most of the people I’ve mentioned it to have no clue what I’m talking about — but I remember it.

The funny thing is that Hello was actually a really cool app, as a couple of people have noted in the comments on Phil’s post. It was acquired along with Picasa in 2005, but I had never heard of it either until a couple of years ago a friend mentioned it, and said that she used it all the time with her parents. This surprised me, since she wasn’t a computer type at all — but she had just had a baby, and somehow came across Hello and set her parents up with it too. She thought it was the best thing ever.

In effect, Hello merged a photo-sharing app and an instant messaging and chat tool into one thing — and the best part was that when you were looking at photos with someone else, it actually showed you which photo they were looking at, so that you could tell them about it in the chat window. When my friend wanted to show her non-techie parents photos of her baby, she just sent a chat request, they opened the window and the photos would show up — and then she could type in messages about them as they looked at them.

Yes, I know that she could have just emailed them, or uploaded them to Picasa.com and then sent her parents the URL — or she could have uploaded them and then called them on the phone to chat about them. But Hello worked really well, and it was nice to see an app designed to do one simple thing and do it well. I still think Google didn’t put enough energy into promoting it the way they could have, just as they haven’t done anything with Dodgeball, or Jaiku, or a half a dozen other apps they’ve acquired. In the case of Hello, I think it’s a real shame.

I can appreciate that there’s a good reason for all the buzz on Techmeme about MySpace hooking up with Yahoo, eBay and Twitter as part of the Data Portability project. Data portability and open standards are a great thing, and it’s nice to see some movement on that front after all of the announcements and back-slapping that went on about it last year — followed by very little movement on anyone’s part. But after all the party favours are handed out and everyone’s finished their MySpace punch, it might be worth noting that this “data portability” initiative still keeps the power very much in MySpace’s hands.

It’s true that the site has agreed to open up its API and allow other providers such as Yahoo and Twitter to extract user data with the OAuth standard. But we’re still talking about data that resides on MySpace’s servers and therefore effectively — according to the terms of use agreement that members sign when they register — belongs to the social network. It’s nice that they are letting you use it elsewhere, but as Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOm points out, they still get to choose which services can play, since they have to agree to MySpace’s terms of service in order to get access to the API. And what if something happens and your account gets deleted for some reason?

Don’t get me wrong — it’s good that MySpace is opening up. And I think it’s great that being the first one to adopt any kind of open standard or interoperability seems to be turning into a competitive advantage. But this is very much about MySpace wanting to become the central storage point for peoples’ data, and then doling out whatever information it wants to the services that it wants to play ball with. Even the praise from the Data Portability Project seems rather faint: it says that it hopes MySpace will someday “evolve toward becoming a compliant implementation” of the project’s best practices. I hope so too.

Update:

Ben Metcalfe, who acted as an advisor to MySpace and is also a co-founder of the Data Portability group, has posted a comment here in which he corrects some misunderstandings of mine about the nature of what MySpace is doing. In particular, he says that the launch partners are not getting any kind of special deal, but were only chosen in order to “have someone to test and debug the implementation with and also have the ability to demonstrate the complete value proposition end-to-end.” Thanks for clarifying things, Ben.

It seems I accidentally tripped over something new at Google Maps this morning: I happened to be looking at the houses for sale in our area — a recreational pursuit of mine — and when I mapped an address using Google Maps, all of a sudden thumbnail photos started popping up here and there. Then a little while later I saw a Twitter message from Steve Rubel about Google Maps adding photos, and it all made sense. The site is apparently integrating both Picasa and Panoramio photos, as well as videos from YouTube and user-created maps.

Adding geo-tagged or otherwise location-oriented photos to Google Maps has been an option for some time under the “My Maps” tab — which also allows you to do things like calculate distances between two points, or see the weather for a specific location. But now Google is apparently adding the photo feature as a default. It’s not clear to me whether it’s only photos that have been geo-tagged, or whether it also includes photos that have specific keywords in them.

I think this is an interesting feature (although there’s obviously lots of potential for abuse as well, which I’m sure Google is aware of). And it also seems as though this could be either a competitive issue or a potential partnership opportunity for companies like PlanetEye.com, where my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans works. If Panoramio is already integrated into Google Maps, then presumably other companies could as well. (Note: I didn’t realize that Panoramio was owned by Google until I read MG Siegler’s post; I agree that it would be good if Google Maps could integrate photos from other services as well).