bitdrift

I came home from work today to discover a package waiting for me--a package I thought I had cancelled days earlier. When I tried to cancel it a second time using Amazon's website I was told that the package had not shipped yet so I couldn't. That's when I decided to try contacting customer service...

You are now connected to Arun from Amazon.com

Me: The item purchased turned out to be a lot more expensive than was originally listed. Because I used the "one-click" payment I ended up paying $37 instead of the $25 I expected to pay. I tried to "cancel" within an hour or so of placing it, but apparently that didn't work because I received the item in the mail today anyway. Now I have to go through the hassle of contacting you guys, returning the item blah blah blah. Super annoying.

Arun: Hello, my name is Arun. I'll be happy to help you today. I am really sorry for the inconvenience and I will surely assist you with that.

Can I have the order number?

Me: sure

XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX

i have screenshots of the iphone app showing $25

for some reason it was listed as $25 in the search results but $37 on the item itself

but of course i didn't notice that until it was too late

Arun: I can understand that but you placed the order from seller DataVision Computer Video and item price was Item Price: $37.99 .

Me: but isn't it amazon's fault for showing the item for $25? you list the item at two different prices

Arun: I am sorry, item was $25 from other seller but you placed the order from other seller.

Me: nope

Arun: If you want to return the item please contact the seller,

Me: i can send you the screenshot if you want

Arun: Why didn't you contact us after placing the order on 30th?

Me: i did actually

i used your site to "cancel" the order

which it said it did

but i don't see it recorded anywhere

i did it within the hour of placing the order

Arun: No, I am sorry but you should have contacted us so we could have checked the price.

Me: hm well that's pretty lame customer service if you ask me

Arun: As the order is from third party seller so I request you to contact the seller.

Me: i shouldn't have to jump through hoops because you guys can't get your data straight

you guys should take responsibility for facilitating the transaction

Arun: I am really sorry for that and I can understand your frustration. However if the item was from Amazon I would have issued the refund but this is a seller order so I am unable to do that

The only option is to contact the seller.

Me: can't you guys do it for me?

I really don't have time for this even

Arun: Yes, I can send the email to seller on your behalf. Will that be fine with you?

Me: what will it say?

Arun: It will say that , seller charged the wrong price and refund the difference.

Me: hm is that true though?

it looks more like you guys just messed up to me

Arun: Thank you, I have sent the email.

Is there anything else I can do for you today?

Me: is there a way i can send you my screenshots?

Arun: No, if needs seller will request that and sent them and then they will issue refund,

Me: well this seems like you may have just made the situation more complicated

Arun: I am really sorry for that but what else you want me to do?

Me: just cancel the order?

i'll just go out of my way to send it back

hopefully i don't get charged?

Arun: Yes, I can send the email to cancel the order as well.

Me: yeah if it's not too late, I think i'd rather just do that

Arun: Yes, I have done that and you are not charged yet,

Is there anything else I can do for you today?

Me: do i have to pay for return shipping?

Arun: No, it will canceled before it shipped out.

Me: no no

i already have the item

it's here

that's why this is so annoying

i can't believe it got here so fast actually

Arun: Alright, seller will send the prepaid return label.

Me: especially when i thought it was cancelled

haha ok so I wait for the prepaid return label to come in the mail?

Arun: Yes, thank you.

Is there anything else I can do for you today?

Me: sigh

ok and then when the seller gets the item back i'll get a refund?

Arun: Yes, you are correct,

Me: good grief

Arun: Thank you.,

Me: ok well thanks for taking care of that anyway

Arun: You're welcome.

Thanks for visiting Amazon.com. We hope to see you again soon!

Good Bye.

Me: bye

As they say in that commercial (you know the one I'm talking about): "life comes at you fast." Less than 8 weeks ago, I had no idea what Pinterest was, let alone imagined that I'd be packing up the family and moving to California before the end of July. If you ask my friends, I'm sure they'll tell you this was no surprise; moving to the bay area is something I've been talking about for years. But still, I can't help but feel a little shocked that I'm writing this post from Palo Alto instead of Provo today.

If you're a startup guy like me, you probably have a hard time imagining yourself at a larger more established company (even if that company is as cool as Facebook or Google). The term 'startup' gets thrown around a lot these days and young companies come in all shapes and sizes. In my case, I was looking for a startup that met a few specific requirements.

Early but not without funding

I'm prepared to take a risk, but being a parent means I'm not the only one taking the risk anymore. This may not apply to everyone, but for those with families, it's a big deal. It reminds me of something Paul Graham wrote:

"Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and the bad."

The earlier you join a startup, the more impact you'll be able to have. I've only been at Pinterest for 3 weeks and I've already experienced this personally. One of my first tasks was to add a feature that makes it possible for users pin videos. We launched the feature last Monday and nearly 20,000 videos have been pinned so far. I'm quite certain that nothing I've ever done in my life has touched so many people in such a short amount of time.

Great team with a strong sense of direction

I can't overstate how important this was to me. There were several good signs that helped me feel good about joining Pinterest. One that stands out to me was how careful the founders have been about publicity. In an era where so many startups seem to be overly focused on the fundraising game, it's refreshing to meet a group of founders who haven't forgotten their users. Pinterest is under-hyped for a reason (for now anyway).

Great product with adoring customers

I knew Pinterest was something special the moment I first saw it. Now that I'm on the team I realize that even more. We get fan mail pretty much every day. And not just simple 'thank you' notes, either; these are long gushing love letters. We have the best users ever.

Exciting technical challenges

This one caught me off guard. I knew that joining an early stage startup would present new technical challenges. What I didn't realize was just how much I would learn and how quickly I would be thrust into the thick of it. I feel like I'm drinking from the firehose, but there's honestly nothing I'd rather be doing at this point in my career. Pinterest is growing so quickly right now that it's giving me opportunities to work on things I'd only ever dreamed of before.

As you can probably tell, I'm pretty excited about the opportunity to help turn Pinterest into something millions of people use and appreciate. I'll do my best to post more as the site grows.

I was a little surprised to discover that GitHub doesn't allow you to fork your own projects as simply as you can fork someone else's (if you don't believe me, check out this post). Fortunately it's pretty simple as long as you can come up with a different name for your new project.

Let's assume we have an existing project called 'foo' and we want to create a fork called 'bar'.

First, create a new project on GitHub called 'bar'.

Next, clone foo using the name 'bar':

$ git clone [email protected]:YOURNAME/foo.git bar Initialized empty Git repository in /projects/bar/.git/ remote: Counting objects: 3618, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1503/1503), done. remote: Total 3618 (delta 2629), reused 2922 (delta 2075) Receiving objects: 100% (3618/3618), 7.31 MiB | 1.23 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (2629/2629), done.

Next, edit your Git config file and replace the origin URL with your new URL:

$ cd bar $ vim .git/config [remote "origin"] fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* url = [email protected]:YOURNAME/bar.git #replace foo with bar

Optionally add your original repo as an upstream source:

$ git remote add upstream [email protected]:YOURNAME/foo.git

Finally, push your new repository up to GitHub:

$ git push -u origin master Counting objects: 3618, done. Delta compression using up to 2 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (949/949), done. Writing objects: 100% (3618/3618), 7.31 MiB | 646 KiB/s, done. Total 3618 (delta 2629), reused 3618 (delta 2629) To [email protected]:YOURNAME/bar.git * [new branch] master -> master Branch master set up to track remote branch master from origin.

Now you can push/pull from your new repo (bar) as expected. You should also be able to merge upstream changes using the following command (although I haven't tried this yet):

$ git fetch upstream $ git merge upstream/master

Launching Banterly last week was a thrill. It was unbelievably fun meeting so many new people from all over the world through my own personal creation. Everyone was so friendly and supportive and I honestly loved every minute of it (even the parts where I was frantically fixing bugs). It was an experience I won't soon forget and hope to repeat.

Not long after I launched, the guys at Embedly started a discussion suggesting that I check out their oEmbed service. The moment I saw it, I knew it was exactly what I had been looking for. The only annoying part was that I hadn't discovered it several weeks ago when I first started working on embedded media in Banterly. So, for that reason, I decided to do a little demonstration and offer a little praise in hopes that others looking for a solution to their embedding woes might not waste time trying to roll their own (like I did).

Don't DIY

Let's start with what NOT to do. Don't try to do media embedding yourself. For starters, there are simply too many different sites out there, each with slightly different methods of exposing their data (Embedly supports more than 160 providers for free or 185 for a reasonable subscription fee). Doing it myself, it took two days to get support for images, YouTube, and the most simple OpenGraph meta tags (which was extremely flimsy since no complete HTML parsers exist for Node yet).

Additionally, doing it yourself means downloading unknown content from unknown sources at the whim of your users--not exactly the kind of thing you want to expose yourself to when all you want is to embed content on your site. In fact, I almost cut the feature before launch because I was afraid malicious users might discover it and use it to abuse the system, but then I thought--'why not?' and left it in anyway.

embedly-node

You can use Embedly to embed media from both server side and client side (via jQuery). I chose to use the server side module (embedly-node) in order to reduce the number of requests I have to make to the Embedly API and to keep page load times fast for users. Using the embedly-node module on GitHub (use npm install embedly), I ended up with something similar to the following:

var Embedly = require("embedly"); var embedly = new Embedly.api({ //key: "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", // Embedly Pro Key user_agent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; myapp/1.0; [email protected])' }); // Do initial comment text processing // 1. Parse URLs from comment text // 2. Render HTML comment by replacing parsed URLs with anchor tags // 3. Save rendered comment HTML to the database // 4. Send rendered comment HTML to connected clients (via WebSocket) ... // 5. Try to get additional content from Embedly if (urls) { // Using Embedly oEmbed API embedly.oembed({ params: { urls: urls // Can send single URL also. }, complete: function(e, objs) { for (var i in objs) { // Returned if the URL content is not supported on free tier if (objs[i].type == "error") continue; // Some embed types don't contain a URL objs[i].url = objs[i].url || urls[i]; // Render and replace the previously rendered link html = html.replace(getLink(urls[i]), render(objs[i])); } // Only save and send to clients if the HTML has changed if (comment.html != html) { // Update the rendered HTML in the database comment.html = html; comment.save(function() { // Send updated comment HTML to connected clients (via WebSocket) ... }); } }); }

Sending the initial HTML to connected clients immediately (rather than waiting for Embedly) helps keep the UI fast and responsive while users are chatting. Once Embedly returns, new HTML is sent out to clients to replace the initial comment markup. In my tests, I found Embedly to be quite fast at returning embed data, but its speed will always be limited by how fast the URL host can return its own content, so it's much more reasonable to keep the updates separate.

A simplified version of my render function looks like this (would be admittedly much cooler with a template):

function render(obj) { if (obj.type == "photo") { // Just an image (only works with pro account) // image dimensions are available as obj.height and obj.width var html = "<img src='"+obj.url+"' width='500'/>"; return html; } else if (obj.type == "video") { var html = ""; // Add thumbnail if (obj.thumbnail_url) html += "<a href='"+obj.url+"' target='_blank'><img src='"+obj.thumbnail_url+"' width='100'/></a>"; // Add title link if (obj.title) html += "<a href='"+obj.url+"' target='_blank'><h6>"+obj.title+"</h6></a>"; // Add an explicit link html += "<a href='"+obj.url+"' target='_blank'>"+obj.url+"</a>"; // Add description if (obj.description) html += "<p>"+obj.description+"</p>"; // Wrap it up return "<div class='oembed'>"+html+"</div>"; } // Just a normal link return "<a href='"+obj.url+"' target='_blank'>"+obj.url+"</a>"; }

In addition to oEmbed, there are also 'preview' and 'objectify' which I have yet to explore (maybe I'll follow up if I do) but are only available for Pro Embedly users.

Thanks guys!

I've been working on Banterly ever since I caught the startup bug at Startup School 2010. It started as a simple last minute idea to apply to Y Combinator, but has since evolved into something much more (despite not being accepted). If you haven't seen Banterly yet, go ahead and take a few minutes to check it out. Here's a link even: http://banterly.com

~ Intermission ~

Either you saw the announcement from Convore (http://convore.com) the week before last, or you don't follow startups. If you're in the latter group, you should probably just skip the rest of this and go start chatting on Banterly (or I suppose...Convore). If you're in the former, you may have taken one look at Banterly and thought "meh...this is just Convore with less features." But of course, we hope you thought "Sweet! This is what Convore should have been."

Regardless, if you're an entrepreneur like me, you can probably relate to my story. While it's normal to question any idea over the course of its development, it's also often a great source of agony and stress for would-be founders. Second guessing yourself is difficult, but even more difficult after getting rejected by Y Combinator.

However, after experiencing all of the ups and downs of startup-idea self-examination, there's one thing that's even more agonizing: being beaten to the punch. When I saw the announcement from Y Combinator about Convore less than two weeks ago, I was shattered.

In researching the space over the months we had discovered many competitors, so discovering someone else was nothing new. What made Convore different was that it was actually GOOD, it had buy-in from Paul Graham & Co., and seemed to get instant respect from people in the know--all things I felt needed to be in place to make something like Banterly successful.

Discovering that your 'revolutionary' product is suddenly a 'me too' product is a bitter pill to swallow. There's nothing like having your idea validated and taken away from you at the same time.

Somehow I resisted the urge to abandon Banterly (not easy as easy as it sounds) and have been working around the clock ever since to get something presentable ready anyway. Banterly, as we're releasing it today, is not perfect and has no shortage of bugs (which I am sure will pop up once people start using the service in greater numbers). I am the sole programmer working on it and have only limited time for it (not to mention learning Node.js + MongoDB--both new platforms for me).

So my question to the community is this: What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you cut your losses and move on to a new idea (we discovered several while working on Banterly)? Would you ignore Convore and go for it? Would you open source the code?