Get the gadget HERE.

(Thanks to Ryan Jones for the better screenshot)

Also, we’ve submitted it to the desktop gadget list, so hopefully you can use it on your Google Desktop soon!

I’ll try explain my thoughts on the service, and why I think it will be a winner.

My main gripes with the service so far:

1) Lack of friends

This is the major issue with the service. I have lots of friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Why would I spend time migrating all my friends from each service there, just to get very similar functionality?

2) Super difficult RSS integration

I tried for a few hours to integrate custom RSS feeds. It’s so straightforward on Friendfeed, why not on Buzz?

In the end I just gave up and put my Friendfeed in Buzz. Let’s just hope Facebook doesn’t pull the plug on Friendfeed until Google fixes the issue.

3) There is no standalone page

Right now you have to keep bouncing between Gmail and your Google Profile like an idiot :)

It’d be nice to have this somewhat centralized.

4) Privacy concerns?

To be honest, I stopped worrying about privacy when I started becoming more active on Facebook.

However, I’m not thrilled about the idea of receiving spam because of Buzz.

Why do I think Buzz will be a winner then?

1) Early adopters

It’s pretty impressive that most of my Twitter contacts are already on Buzz.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Twitter is mostly early adopters, power users, whatever you wanna call them. As a result, leaving Twitter doesn’t seem so bad now.

2) More than Twitter and Friendfeed (but less than Facebook)

Unlike Twitter, it’s more than just text. Comments are threaded. You can reply in Gmail. You can post pics and videos. It can do pretty much all that Friendfeed can, or at least has the potential to do so.

I also like the more advanced features like search, the “people near you” feature.

3) Service integration

Buzz is integrated in Reader (that’s partly a down side as well), Maps, Gmail, Contacts, Profile.

Twitter is integrated in nothing.

4) Let’s be friends

At the end of the day, it’s not so difficult to add friends again. We’ve all done this in the past when we joined FB and Twitter. So let’s be friends :)

I’m going to make a series of video interview with different startups, both young and “old”, to present them to a US audience.

The idea for now is that I want to cover only -startups- (eg: young tech companies) that are international or interesting to foreign readers (maybe we can extend that later :) .

If you’ve got any requests or suggestions, feel free to contact me!

As I explained earlier, MySites has been getting considerably more traffic lately.

Many people have been asking me why the site has been so slow. The reason is that we weren’t ready to grow so fast.

We didn’t expect things to grow at that rate., and no matter the effort, traffic grew faster. Sorry about this.

We took the decision to slow down most of our Chinese traffic, so that our Western users get the same experience as before.

The last post I did about this was on January 10th. Here is what it looks like until January 31st.

Lessons learned:

- You always think “it’s a good problem to have”, until your users can’t get to the page and you’re not delivering them the service they expect.

- Internet growth can be unpredictably fast.

It’s a worldwide event, in 40 countries, where people get together in small groups, and have 48 hours to create a game from scratch.

Here is our game:

The Ultimate Showdown!

You can download the game here.

It is a mixture of:

I forwarded him a list of events to follow, and a video presentation about what I’ve learned during my trip there.

Since this advice doesn’t get old, here’s a link to the video :)

http://vimeo.com/8341355

Here is a quick overview of the hits on MySites, from August 2009 to January 2010 (though January is not over yet). As you can see, we’ve been growing substantially for 3 months now. Here’s your “hockey stick” :)

This is due to a few factors:

- MySites hosts some of the most popular Google Chrome extensions

- partnership with Xihalife

- significant increase in traffic from China

We’re hoping that with the announcement of our new design and new advisors joining us (more on that soon), the trend will accelerate.

Thing is, there’s one game you can buy for free, and then get this game for free.

Use this tip now before they fix it :)

Steps:

Go to the EA Store.

Search for Battleforge

Click buy

At the next page, it offers to get Medal of Honor Airborne

Click buy

Get the EA download manager (needs a user name etc, it’s like Steam basically).

Merry christmas!

It’s a new era of collaboration, workflow 2.0, it’s changed my life and it will make your life wonderful. *

I have 7 invites left, so send me a message with your Google Email, and first come first served!

(* none of this is true).

It’s fixed now, so if you go to this link, you can reach me by email.

I’m happy to follow up on the story from before, or whatever comes up to your mind.

Feel free to contact me on Facebook, Twitter or Skype also.

Earlier, I might have said that Finland needs more access to capital to help entrepreneurship. However, since my recent Silicon Valley trip, I’d have to say the problem does not lie there.

Finland has plenty of capital. For example, public efforts from entities such as Tekes and VeraVenture pour several millions in projects. Consider that Y-Combinator has invested in ~150 startups, for a total sum of less than $3M since its creation.

So the issue is not so much the lack of money, but how it is spent. For a fraction of the money spent in Finland, YC has been able to create Reddit, Dropbox, Disqus, Parakey (sold to Facebook), Justin.tv. You can find a list of Y-Combinator startups and successful exits here.

Why is that? I think we should blame both startups and the government.

Decisions from Tekes are often made by people who have not been entrepreneurs or CEOs themselves. Their experience is very generic, and usually only in Finland. In addition, the application process is very tedious, as it can take up to weeks to simply apply for this money. Lastly the process involves having to plan very detailed processes for several months in the future, which, in the age of lean and adaptive startups, is rather counterproductive. So this process creates a strong mismatch between the funding side and what the startups need.

Of course, Tekes is not a specialized entity, unlike YC is. While I understand the value Tekes for R&D of large projects, it is an inadequate tool for stimulating growth entrepreneurship. The Vigo program seems like a step in the right direction, though I deplore the lack of an Internet-focused accelerator.

Another large problem we have is internationalization. Not enough startups are aiming to be international from day one. Not enough have international team members, or experience dealing with foreign cultures. Alarmingly, most startups here are reluctant to look for funding in other European countries, let alone the US.

There is this underlying idea that starting in Finland is a safe way to test the market. I disagree. Finland is not a test market for growth businesses. The efforts that need to be made here, the barriers to reach the consumer, are equally high if not higher than to reach users in another Western country. To put it differently, if your business has an international scope, you should be international from day one, not just “maybe later”.

Lastly, I would like to stress that funders do not have enough access to information about the startups in the country to make decisions. There is too little public information about the business angels here and how to reach them. There are very few business angel networks, and they are too difficult to reach. There are too few international VCs scouting the market. It would be helpful to see efforts to bring more of them at regular events here, the same way VCs go to Y-Combinator to find their next Google.

I sincerely hope we can make the system here more efficient. If we don’t, it would mean that most companies will either lack proper chances to succeed, or have to move abroad. In any case, the biggest loser will be the Finnish economy.

Sorry for the video quality, it seems Youtube lowers quality a lot. I’ll see how I can improve it next time.

Let me know if that video helps!

One thing I didn’t realize was that there’s really a lot of them, and many of them are very large. People in Silicon Valley like to network! (I’ll write a post specifically about this later). Here’s a quick overview of them, hopefully it’ll give you a better idea of what to expect from there.

SF New Tech:

SF New Tech is a monthly event taking place at The Mighty and organized by Myles Weissleder, where startups can pitch to an audiance of about ~300 people.

Basically, the event is split in 2 parts: first, some ~7 minute pitches from startups, then 1 minute open mic pitches where anyone can talk about anything.

What really struck me there is that pretty much all the startups were early stage, and really open about their bootstrapping. The event is basically a great showcase for hackers who put together a new idea, and would like to meet likeminded people, potential investors and partners. There’s also plenty of bloggers! (Check out Nerdstalker and TechPulse360).

There’s plenty of free tacos to be eaten outside, and cheap drinks, so it’s a regular hangout place.

Here’s my 46 second pitch ;-)

Mobile 2.0:

This is one of the big mobile events of the year. The event was split in 2 days. First a business day, then a developer day. I was only able to attend the first one.

The event gathered many of the hot mobile companies, such as GetJar, Shozu, Funambol, Brightkite, as well as VCs and operators.

There were several talks about the state of mobile, with lots of interest towards Android 2, and talks about how everyone is going to react to the changes brought by Apple.

MySites was one of 5 companies selected for the launchpad. The panel was led by Rich Wong, from Accel Partners, who said he saw a need for us, but questionned the business model (which pushed me to do a lot of reworking on it since). I will write more about my experience with the VCs soon (it was very positive).

I also realized during that event that we (and any other startup) has a huge opportunity in mobile at the moment. There was a very palpable sense that everyone is pushing for that space, now that the desktop web has settled down and that the iPhone has changed the game.

Sheryl Sandberg interview by Charlene Li at Churchill Club:

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook (think of it as what Will Riker is to Jean-Luc Picard), and before that was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She was being interviewed by Charlene Li at the Churchill Club.

In a nutshell: objective is more people, more mobile, more payments. It was interesting to hear that Facebook keeps iterating new features and remains flexible, rather than having a strict roadmap.

Lots of videos of the talk here.

Play:

Next event was Play. This one is a big event organized by the students of Berkeley. Now when I say big, I was truly surprised by exactly -how- big.

Easily 500+ people, with 3 simulataneous panels at all times, plus significant demo pits and stands. World known speakers.

Lots of talk about the future of gaming, mobiles, media and the cloud.

There I got a chance to talk with Peter Moore (the guy who launched the Dreamcast, the Xbox 360, and now leads EA Sports), and Bradley Horowitz (Vice President of Google).

There were also important people from Zynga, Nokia, Mozilla, Joyent, Salesforce.com, YouTube, Justin.tv, Guitar Hero…

There’s a bit too much for this one for me to cover here, but if you’re curious you can check out the page.

BizTechDay:

A conference aimed at early stage people. I only attended the first day there, and got a chance to meet with Marie Domingo (PR queen) and Daniel Brusilovsky (a 16 year-old entrepreneur who also worked on Qik, runs TeensinTech and writes for Techcrunch).

The talks revolved mostly around how to start / plan / structure your business on the cheap, so it wasn’t that interesting to me, but it was a great opportunity to meet with people!

Failcon:

“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B”.

Failcon is a conference about failure. How startups, VCs, entrepreneurs deal or should deal with failure.

400+ people were attending, including ~40 Finnish people I brought from Aaltoes ;) The event took place in the “Japantown” (I didn’t know such a thing existed), which was filled with nice shops and restaurants.

Besides the very enthusiastic organizer Cassie Phillipps, there was an impressive lineup of speakers, including the founders of Meebo, Zynga (Mafiawars, Farmville), Slide, FastCompany, TheFunded, Aardvark.

Personal highlights of the day included hearing massive fails from the Meebo team (paying $60k upfront for a guy who ran away to Mexico!), a legal guy who gave a checklist of all the stuff to avoid when you start a startup (it was basically a list of things I had to pay ~$30k in legal fees to find out), and flooding the Twitter wall (made many people laugh, but I deleted them within the minute because I didn’t want to bother anyone) :)

I really loved that event, because it brought a lot of healthy discussion about failure. Everybody fails at stuff. Every successful startup had some mishaps at some point. We Europeans fail at accepting that, ironically. I would love to see more of this mentality coming to the old continent.

That was a very short event in Stanford. About 100 students listening to the words of Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga (again!), and Bing Gordon (ex Chief Creative Officer of EA). Having heard Mark speak 3 times in less than 2 weeks, this was not so interesting, but I really appreciated the fact that Stanford regularly organizes events with known speakers to inspire their students.

PACT:

This is a pitching and networking event organized by the Plug & Play Tech Center. The Plug and Play center is an incubator, which works on facilitating offices, funding, hosting and offices to startups.

Pact brings about 40 companies to pitch for 3 minutes in front of a large group of VCs.

The companies were mainly web/IT startups and Greentech. Most of them were in the early stages, and it was interesting to see “normal” people pitch their ideas. At points, it felt almost like the event was a candy store for VCs, where they’d pick the companies they’d find promising. I have to say that Europe could gain a lot from this type of networking/matchmaking.

Arctic Shakeup:

Last event in the trip was Arctic Shakeup, organized by ArcticStartup and Aaltoes. It gathered Michel Wendell (Nexit Ventures), Tanja Aitamurto (Huffington Post, Helsingin Sanomat), David Aslin, Marten Mickos (ex MySQL), Giacomo Marini (founder of Logitech) and a Finnish VC lady whose name I forgot and is not listed on the event’s info :)

The event was about the nordics and Silicon Valley. The summary of the discussion there was that Finnish companies should take the best from what’s out there, and have one competitive edge, which is the subsidies from organizations like Tekes for example. This marked a good conclusion to my long trip, and to this blog entry!

Here’s a list of the events I’ll be attending, and the ones in Europe I’ll be missing:

Events in SF:

SF New Tech http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=151471441057

Mobile 2.0 http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=138264958226&index=1

Beast Blogger Camp 2 http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167936849828&index=1

Silicon Valley Monster Mashup http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=145727951820&index=1

Missing:

Aes Cleantech Safari http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=140492448296&index=1

Helsinki Social Gaming http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154245846572&index=1

AaltoES pitching vol 2 http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=148886948567&index=1

Nordic Venture Forum http://www.e-unlimited.com/events/view.aspx?events_pages_id=26

Alternative Party http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=48802262011&index=1

Stream Tampere http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=137551713444&index=1

Arctic Evening at the end of the month (couldn’t find a link).

I’ve been waiting for this, because I’ve been hoping for realtime communication to kill email for about 14 years now :)  Here’s my thoughts.

The bad:

- It’s overwhelming

When you get to Wave, you have very little idea of what it does, or what you should be doing. There’s some help from a little annoying character, which reminded me of Clippy, but I didn’t feel a real urge to get started

- No gmail?

I was a little bit surprised that I couldn’t send emails from there. I was somewhat expecting this to allow me to monitor and send emails in real time. This was a disappointment as it won’t come as an evolution of emailing, but rather a replacement.

- Inserting videos and pictures?

I didn’t find an easy way to embed content within the messaging options. That’s a shame, I would like to put Youtube and MySites content in there, either with embed codes or hotlinking.

- Closed system

It doesn’t integrate my friends from Facebook, MSN. It’s just for Google users, and only the ones who have access yet. I find that very limiting.

The good:

- Feels lively

When you type stuff, it updates all the fields everywhere in real time. Everything feels fast and clean. Though the need is a bit limited by the amount of people you can reach at the moment, it is accessible.

- Powerful

Wave is powerful. It could kill email and instant messaging. It could replace commenting systems. It could merge all communications into one cross device realtime stream.

- Flexible

In theory, Wave can be connected to other apps and services easily. We haven’t looked into this very deeply yet, and I haven’t seen implementations so far, but you could easily have mobile clients, blog integrations, etc.

I’ll wait to see more integrations on other clients and services, and we’ll look into integrating Wave with MySites, but at the moment, it feels a bit too raw. Facebook and Gmail integration would be welcome, as well as commenting on blogs. Hopefully these will come soon :)

I’ve helped people get better social media visibility in the past, let me know if you need any tips :)

Facebook for status updates, contacts, chat, events, pictures with people in them, posting links, fan page, sharing content I post on delicious/google reader/my blog automatically.

Twitter for sharing links, status updates, posting what I read / do online automatically.

Friendfeed to update my Twitter automatically (I don’t use it to follow other people or talk, I feel like nothing happens there).

Yoono to monitor my Facebook / Twitter

Meebo to chat on Facebook / Messenger

MySites to share stuff (email attachments, music on fb/twitter)

Google reader to get all my news from every site I read, share links.

Google calendar to get my facebook events and my meetings

Delicious to bookmark my links, post them everywhere.

Pixelpipe to spread photos I take with my phone to everywhere.

Ping to send my status updates everywhere (I linked Pixelpipe to that too so that when I take a photo it goes really everywhere).

Firefox extensions for Facebook, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Delicious, Gmail, Ping, Pixelpipe.

iPhone apps for all those.

Desktop tools for all those as well.

This blog to write stuff I think about when it doesn’t fit in a status update.

Spotify to listen to Jonathan, maybe find out some tracks from an artist I hear about. Will use it to share playlists later.

Gmail to monitor all the updates I get everywhere in real time. I use a second email address, which I linked to my main email.

Prowl for iPhone, which gives me real time push notifications for Gmail, Skype, Firefox, Facebook, Twitter.

Reddit for funny links and interesting discussions when I need to breathe a little :)

These are very public media, where for the first time, unlike the phone, meeting or email, a vast amount of people have access to what you think and do.

This is scary. A large amount of people, your friends, friends of friends, ex’s, colleagues, everyone can see what you share, without you knowing it. Everyone can see your reactions, search it, copy and paste it, quote it later.

This is the grownup’s nightmare. Total liability and traceability for what you do.

It’s not so surprising then to see that most people are not eager to participate online. And don’t forget that there’s the geeky and technical aspects to overcome too.

I would recommend people to be open about what they do. Sure, it’s annoying to be judged and scrutinized by everyone, but this happens elsewhere too. At the end of the day, that’s what makes you -you-.

It was a difficult choice to make. We decided to throw away tons of work hours, some of our technology, and use another company instead.

Today I’m very happy to say that it has paid off.
During the past month, half of our user registrations came from Facebook Connect!

Users who use FB Connect to login come more often on MySites. They use our sharing to the FB wall and posting comments much more too.

We noticed that integrating Facebook more has brought more activity from users. MySites used to be most about sharing uncompressed pictures, but nowadays it’s mostly students sharing group work or music.

My advice: surrender the right stuff to the right people, and win!