the snagsta blog

The sun doesn’t always shine here in old London town but when it does, this city sparkles. Today is one of those days.

Spending summer in this place certainly has its advantages. The biggest problem for me is choosing where to go and what to do and with the limited amount of spare time I have right now.

Before I had Snagsta to play with, finding new things to do in London was always a bit of a hit or miss affair. I might read something in the Evening Standard or pick up Time Out Magazine but most of the time I’d rely on a recommendation from a friend or take a peak online and roll the dice.

Search engines are a great place to research things but only if you know what you are looking for.

A search for “good London restaurants” on Google for example, will return an impressive but baffling 963,000 results: that’s several hundred thousand different opinions from people you may, or may not agree with.

Review sites can also be equally frustrating to use as they often contain conflicting opinions. Trip Advisor often delivers vastly different opinions on the same hotel.

A bloke named Win Wenders once said, “The more opinions you have, the less you see”. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Now that Snagsta’s database is filling up with great lists, it’s much easier to discover new things via recommendations from friends and like-minded people.

I just searched for London pubs on Snagsta and the following list from friend and pub aficionado Andrew Rogoff magically appeared.

I now have some new places to check out on my way home tonight where I can enjoy some early evening summer sunshine and perhaps one or two beers. Oh happy day!

My favourite drinking spots in London

By Andrew Rogoff

1. The Lansdowne

This pub in Primrose Hill is laid back, unpretentious and attracts quite a cool crowd. The food’s nothing amazing but I’ll let it off.

2. The Ebury

This bar is just about the only decent place in Pimlico (where I live) so I absolutely love it for that reason.

3. The Mitre

Holland Park Avenue - if you’re sick of poky little pubs where you’re constantly jostled by other punters then this place is big enough to swing your elbows (unless it’s packed of course).

4. Builders Arms

Little pub off the King’s Road that has a good atmosphere and does pretty good food. Watch out for the toffs though.

5. Windsor Castle

Notting Hill. This is a great place to be on a hot summer’s night in London. The trouble is, too many people know that!

6. Troubadour

Earl’s Court. Very atmospheric live music venue with a great history.

7. The Engineer

Primrose Hill. Another great spot in Primrose Hill. The only thing is that the bar area is quite small. Great if you want to eat.

8. The Endurance

Probably the best pub in Soho.

9. Pigs Ear

Old Church Street, SW3. There’s something about this place that I really like - just can’t put my finger on it. Does great food too.

10. The Abingdon

Off High St Kensington. Great bar/restaurant - nice big sofa and excellent food.

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We have repeatedly been told that we have to be prepared to follow Snagsta wherever it takes us. Very often the dream founders start out with is totally different from the website they end up with. This can happen for a variety of reasons:

1. Along the wide and varied path that is web development better ideas turn up out of nowhere

2. The founders’ idea is slightly off target (I think the diplomatic wording for this is ‘ahead of their time’)

3. The investors ’suggest’ a ‘new approach’ (as an aside: we’ve been given all the latitude we’ve wanted so far)

4. The users decide they have a much better idea for how the site should be used (this was certainly the case with Twitter (according to Biz Stone) and Bebo (as Michael Birch explains).

It appears flexibility is important.

And then you’ll walk into another meeting and someone will tell you what they look for in founders is an unwavering pig-headed determination to see their idea through against all odds.

But even the best ideas occasionally have to be abandoned. So the question is: how do you know when enough is enough?

And the answer is… predictably: you don’t.

The good news is you can’t be criticised because nobody knows. It’s luck (certainly if you take Taleb’s word or the FT’s)

The bad news is that this decision could either make you or lose you A LOT OF MONEY.

At Snagsta we’ve built our solution to this problem into the management team. Alex Moore is possibly one of the most stubborn people I know and I’m extremely flexible (some people call me indecisive… but I’m not so sure).

The point is that one should have some contingencies. And I am pleased to be able to demonstrate to our readers that we are ready. In the unlikely event that Snagsta needs to shift focus we have strategically also registered the domain www.shagsta.com.

Have a great weekend!

footnotes:
* pertinacious - don’t be embarrassed, I had to look that up too.

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Alex Moore’s post 2 weeks ago resonated with me for a few reasons. One of which is the fact that I think he copied my idea - I am convinced I talked to him about this concept a little while ago

But more importantly, back to the river. There is no bigger river than the river of Twitter. Thanks to my Facebook status updates several people have asked me recently what Twitter is. In a way it’s a bit like micro-blogging - here’s a commoncraft clip that explains it a lot better than I can. And here’s another good link.

It’s great if you’ve mastered continuous partial attention but you have to pick who you follow carefully as you can be inundated with the most trivial facts about people’s lives (Sorry Chris, couldn’t resist… my dad also loves Indiana Jones).

The Twitter signal-to-noise ratio is terrible though. The highly regarded Nassim Nicholas Taleb has strong views on this. He doesn’t read newspapers for this very reason.

On the flipside, Nic Brisbourne reminded me that ‘when you are in the business of trying to predict where the hype will be in 12-24 months then [you] don’t have the luxury of ignoring the breaking news.’ And I have to admit, amongst the froth, Twitter certainly has delivered some timely nuggets that have really helped us as we strive to stay ahead of the curve. Or, in Alex’s case, just behind.

Here’s a useful list by Paul Walsh that includes some tips for new users.

Most people will only spend a few seconds reviewing your Twitter page before deciding whether to follow you or not. The more followers they have, the less time they’re likely to spend. So, these tips should help increase the chances of people following you.

1. Fill in the bio. Include a few words that describe you. Try to make it punchy.

2. Link to a Web page that’s relevant, preferably a blog or biog.

3. Don’t follow everyone you find interesting at once. Wait for some to reciprocate or you’ll look like ‘billy no mates’.

4. Using a company name as your screen name is ok for some people. Loren Feldman and Mike Arrington are amongst the ‘exception to the rule’ category. I personally prefer to follow people, not companies.

5. Be honest, open and above all, be yourself.

6. Be patient. You won’t build relationships or feel the community spirit over night. It takes a little getting used to. Use twitter to have conversations with people for at least a few weeks before forming an opinion.

7. If you’re unsure whether to publish a comment, publish it. Ok, that’s probably not the best tip, but it’s what I do all the time. Sometimes it doesn’t work in my favour but mostly it does as people know that what they see is the real me.

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I’ve seen a couple of interesting posts recently on the move towards storing your data online and thus minimizing the need to be tied down to one computer.

Matt Cutts has a dying laptop, so he’s happy that he is using a bunch of tools to keep all his important stuff online – of course they are mostly Google tools, but hey, what do you expect?

Robert Scoble (who incidentally has just agreed to let us store one of his lists in Snagsta – hooray!) posted on the subject too and as usual when I read his posts, I realize that I am nowhere near as close to the cutting edge as I think I am.

Of course, I can only hope that both of these bloggers are right in their thinking and that we do see more and more people start to move their data online.

I am, as always, very biased in my views, because we hope that Snagsta becomes one of the tools that people use in this movement!

To close, here is a short list of tools that may be useful if you do decide you want to keep more things off your desktop (and remember, I am not anywhere near as online as you can be, so there are plenty more out there):

1. del.icio.us
Such a simple concept, but a great way to store your favourite sites online.

2. MediaFire
File storage and more.

3. flickr
Never keep a picture on your computer again.

4. Zoho Writer
Online word processor - a good alternative to Google Docs.

5. Meebo
The IM aggregator, although I also use Skype.

6. Gmail
Move email off your computer and let Google keep them for you.

7. PasswordSafe
Have been recommended this, although I haven’t started using it myself yet.
 

I was chatting to Phil the other day underneath the railway arches here in Battersea over a nice cuppa tea. He was spinning a yarn about books, plays and films and was trying to convince me that there are only 13 storylines / plots that they all follow (or a very low number thereabouts). I read something similar in a marketing book once saying there is no such thing as a new idea in advertising as new ideas are just reincarnations of old ones.

What a load of old tosh!

If you want to see something truly new then you should read this article by Iain Tate of crackunit fame about a great new Facebook App called the Add to Friend Shirt application that allows you to print unique QR codes on tee shirts.

iain tait | crackunit.com via kwout

If you’re not sure what QR codes are then you’re not alone. They are strange looking bar-code type images that can be read via your camera’s mobile phones (providing you have some clever software installed).

The Facebook App allows you to print your own QR code on the back of a selection of trendy tee shirts. The QR code points to a mobile-friendly version of your profile page on Facebook where people can chose to add you as a friend – assuming they have a Facebook account that is. I don’t think this is an idea that will go mainstream anytime soon but I think it will do well out of novelty factor and creative brilliance alone.

Good to see that perhaps new ideas aren’t dead after all eh Phil?

It was Friday night and myself and Mrs. G decided to treat ourselves to a movie at the cinema (I take her on the best dates, I know). So we turn up early enough to give ourselves a bit of time to check out what is showing and choose anything that strikes our fancy.

And that’s when we hit a problem. Of the six movies on offer, three were Thai, (which I usually shy away from - there are good Thai movies, but in my experience they are rare), one was the amazingly over-hyped Cloverfield (and I was too recently burned by the Snakes on a Plane over-hype to take a risk on this one) and one was Enchanted, which looked very much like a kids film and therefore not my cup of tea.

The last option was Hitman. Apparently this is based on the video game, which was enough information for me to decide it was probably not going to be worth watching.

So we came home after eating dinner instead.

It got me thinking though. If just one of our friends had told us that any of those movies on offer were good (even the kids film), we would probably have got tickets for it last night and probably enjoyed it too.

This reminded me of a post I spotted on Bokardo (Joshua Porter’s blog), which talked about the Long Tail leading to too many choices leading in turn to social design. We only had 6 choices last night, but without a social context to help us make a decision, it was still 6 choices too many and nothing stood out.

In fact this gets to the heart of what we hope Snagsta will do for people. When you are faced with a number of different choices, Snagsta will use the opinions of your friends and like-minded people to help you make informed decisions.

I’ll close with a couple of lists that I hope might help you make a choice next time you are looking for a movie to rent (or not to rent!).

Five movies based on video games that you should on no account be tempted to watch:

1) Streetfighter – not only a Van Damme movie, but perhaps the worst Van Damme movie.
2) Mortal Kombat – there was better acting in my primary school plays.
3) House of the Dead – normally, I’m a big fan of the zombie genre, but in this one, I was rooting for the zombies.
4) Double Dragon – the game was bad, the movie worse.
5) Super Mario Brothers – I really have no idea how this even got made. This could in fact be the worst movie of all time.

Three movies based on games that are surprisingly good:

1) Tomb Raider – probably a guy thing, but this was a lot more enjoyable than I thought a game movie could be (although perhaps avoid the sequel).
2) Resident Evil – is there a pattern here? But these sequels you can watch.
3) Doom – made me jump and I like that in a movie.