Damon Cortesi's Blog

Life. It’s an interesting journey. And as my friend @JoeCascio mentioned today, “life is what happens while you’re making plans.” I’ve rarely been one to make plans. I prefer to live in the moment and enjoy life as it happens. Yes, I do make some plans but I try to remain open and accepting of the curve balls we receive on a daily basis.

I feel the best we can do is enjoy life and react to the different hands we get dealt. My father instilled this belief in me and I’ve talked about his approach to attitude before. I really cannot thank my father enough for embedding within me the right attitude necessary to tackle life.

I also believe that passion is essential to a happy life. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, then what does it matter and why do you care? Ever since high school, I’ve pledged to myself that I will always strive to work on what I’m passionate about.

Most recently, that passion is startups. That passion is the process of creation. That passion is the process of investigation and research and finding the best tool for the job. That passion is addressing a new challenge as often as I can. That passion is the simple reason that we, as humans, strive to live every single day.

In the past three years, startups have lit that passion inside me. I worked as a security consultant for ten years. I worked for other people and I was more than happy to do so. But at some point, I realized I couldn’t be happy if I wasn’t chasing the ten different dreams that were boiling to the front of my brain. I couldn’t be happy simply working my a$$ off for somebody’s else’s dream. I wanted to work that hard for myself and try to build something.

I’ve often wondered why I decided to strike out on my own. And I think the reason is that I strive to create. I strive to be unique. I strive to change the world, even if it’s a tiny little sliver. And I ultimately felt that I couldn’t do that if I were working for somebody else. I felt that I could only change the world if I could make the decision for myself what I was working on on any given day.

And can I chase that continuously? Certainly not. Part of being successful requires the ability to focus. Maybe someday…someday I’ll be able to work on each of my 10 different ideas every day of the week. But if I ever want to get to that point, I need to focus now. I need to build a business now that is so successful that I can chase every whim of passion I want to later in my life.

And I’m lucky that I can chase one specific passion right now and be supremely happy with that. Because I found that in startups, there is excitement. There’s excitement, and daily challenge, and potential reward, and certainly potential failure. But I get to make the decision of what I chase. And if that changes, or needs to change, I alone can make that decision.

It’s been a long road reaching this point. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I’ve failed a lot of people, primarily because I’m so distracted. But I needed to find my path to this point. And I truly apologize to those of you I may have … indicated interest to and never followed through. But the challenge is that I want to change so much, but there’s so little time and so few perfect storms to make that change happen. And I think I’ve finally found the perfect storm to really kick some ass in this life.

I could be wrong. But it sure as hell is going to be a good ride.

This is a picture of me, from 12 years ago, explaining to my Independent Studies Program advisor how my friend (Jasper Speicher) and I were going to build a robot that could automatically navigate it’s environment using infrared sensors. And if we were lucky, even climb stairs. The brains of this device were going to be a programmable microcontroller called the BASIC Stamp.

Fast-forward 12 years. I’m working on my new social media startup, Untitled Startup and we want to integrate a billing solution. We hash out a number of recurring billing solutions, including one by the name of Chargify.

Imagine my surprise when one of the co-founders of Chargify reaches out to me via Twitter and points me in the direction of his useful post, 9 startup steps, learned over 22 years. I’m still new to this whole startup biz, so this is a pretty helpful post. If you’re in a similar place, you should read it.

But I started reading his bio on the site. And then it hit me. This guy co-founded Parallax. The company that made the BASIC Stamp. The same microcontroller that really captured my love of automation 12 years ago. The same microcontroller that, had I not fried it, might just have pushed my entire life in a different direction (robotics). And here we were chatting on Twitter.

I could probably write a post a month on similar situations, but this one really hit home tonight given the time-span and common characters. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to be able to interact with the people that make what I do possible on a regular basis. And I really want to thank Lance for not only building products that I’ve been using for more than the past decade, but also for reaching out and saying hi to some random guy on Twitter.

This is a continuation of a tweet.

Even in the past 3 days, my reading habits have changed. Still sucking up massive amounts of information, just different types.

There’s an interesting transition I’m going through. I moved to Seattle over three years ago. One of the reasons I moved was the awesome security community, like toorcon and the great security shops here in town. But I’m staying because of the awesome startup community.

I quit my job in 2007 and started a security startup. I took three or four months at that point to explore the Seattle startup world, one I had never lived in, and I got hooked. There were lots of people along the way who offered help, but I still didn’t quite feel like I was part of the community. That’s definitely changed over the course of the past year, especially with events like Seattle Startup Weekend.

There’s one event that’s really changed that, though. And that’s the simple fact that I’m now a founder of a Seattle-based startup. I’ve joined the club, essentially. And in the past few days, I feel a need for a new type of information I previously haven’t – information from my peers in the community that have started their own companies here and have already been through the process. And very many of them are extremely open and willing to help. Whether it’s commenting on the Seattle Tech Startups email list, or grabbing a quick lunch, there’s a strong sense of community in the Seattle startup scene and I feel like I have many shoulders to lean on as I slog the process of taking a startup from nothing to what will hopefully be an awesome company.

I’m really looking forward to the next year.

I’ve been working on this for a while, but figured I should announce it here.

I’m starting a new company to continue my hobby of building Twitter tools. It’s going to be a social media startup and we’ll be building tools for social media professionals. We’ve already built one in a weekend project that we’re calling RowFeeder – a tool to stream real-time tweets into a Google spreadsheet. It’s something we needed and it’s been surprisingly helpful.

I’ll likely be blogging on Untitled Startup more often than here, so feel free to follow along and see what we’re up to. We’re being pretty open and even posting daily videos as we go through the process of starting a company.

I’m also psyched to have finally accepted the fact that my “hobby” was distracting me for the past two years and I can finally work on what I love full-time. It’s not that I didn’t love security, but I hit a point where I wasn’t able to determine what I was going to do next. Perhaps more on that later as that’s always been pretty important to me – work on what you love, because otherwise you’ll just end up hating life. And that’s no fun at all.

Well, I’m about 45 minutes late on this, but I did want to mention that two years ago on December 27, 2007, I released the first version of my Twitter Stats script.

It was a hack. It scraped the twitter.com website. It was in perl. It exported into your clipboard. And the data had to be pasted into a Numbers template. But it worked. And it was the beginning of a long journey that is culminating in something I’m going to announce tomorrow/today.

On this anniversary, I also just made an update to TweetStats that allows you to click on any month in your tweet timeline and zoom in to see your stats on that month. As an example, here are my Twitter stats for December 2007. Ah, memories. And speaking of memories, a little-known feature of the TweetCloud is that you can click on any term and it will search your tweets for that term.

Reminisce++

I’d like to bring a little personality back to my blog. I’ve been plugging away on a lot of work these past several months, the evidence of which you can see in previous posts. But here’s to more posts, even if shorter, about what I’m up to and the things I love (besides just Twitter visualization and stats ).

Back in October I was visiting friends/family in Boston. I had the opportunity to work out of the great co-working space, WorkBar Boston and was fortunate enough to be able to attend a Boston Young Entrepreneurs event. Matt Webster of Drink A Better Brew was presenting that night on craft beer. (That may have had something to do with my decision to co-work that day. ) Matt’s got the great goal of exposing more people to the wonderful world of craft beers and his passion and knowledge of the space is extremely evident. I’ve only gotten into microbrews in the past few years (living in Germany helped), but very happy that I have. Matt just sent out a newsletter with the Twelve Beers of Christmas. If you’re looking for a little something for the holidays, these all sound like great brews. Thanks Matt!

1. High & Mighty Beer Company Home for the Holidays
2. The Bruery Two Turtle Doves
3. Wychwood Brewery Bah Humbug!
4. Port Brewing Company Santa’s Little Helper
5. Delerium Noel
6. Berkshire Brewing Company Cabin Fever
7. Serafijn Christmas Angel
8. Rogue Santa’s Private Reserve
9. Ridgeway Brewing Santa’s Butt
10. St. Bernardus Christmas Ale
11. Brassiere Achouffe N’Ice Chouffe
12. Brewery Schloss Eggenberg Samichlaus Bier

Dear Twitter, I urge you to please hire a CSO. A Chief Security Officer. Somebody to lead the charge and organize a security team around what is arguably one of the biggest things to happen to social media in the past 10 years. A security team to balance the risk of being completely open with our lives, happily geo-tagging our way to a billion-dollar valuation of Twitter.com. A security team to realize that we are quickly losing any privacy we have had by opting in to the great and amazing features that you’re releasing on a daily, if not weekly, basis. A security team to protect us from our own poor choices.

There’s a story on TechCrunch that Twitter was hacked tonight by the Iranian Cyber Army. Regardless of whether this is true or not, Twitter desperately needs an individual in their organization to guide them on security as they carve the path in both social media and the openness and revealing of privacy on the web. From spam to meter-precision geo-location, you are failing in this respect.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve alerted Twitter to a number of different security incidents. From cross-site-scripting to server mis-configurations to a simple heads-up about other security issues I’ve seen randomly crop up. The problem is, the same issues continue to crop up on a regular basis. Sadly, for a company with $150 million dollars invested at a $1 billion valuation and over 100 employees, they have no Chief Security Officer. And I’m not even sure they have dedicated security engineers. Just rockstar developers.

To Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter. And Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter. I beg of you. Make the investment in security before It’s too late. Twitter needs to be aware and proactive about security if it is to continue in the way that you dream of. Security is not something that can be solved as easily as bringing in a firm to do a two-week assessment and call it good. It’s a culture that has to be built from the inside that permeates not only to those responsible for systems and code, but also those that are simply part of the company in any way shape or fashion.

While no organization is ever completely secure, it is critical at your stage that you start building security from within the organization, instead of having it beat upon you from painful experiences. This is a lesson that it took Microsoft many years and millions of dollars to learn and one that you (Twitter) should proactively attack.

Please. I understand you’re building some awesome business intelligence and some advertising that we’re just really going to love. But realize that you are changing the way we share data on the Internet. And not only do you need to be the leader in social media and openness, you need to be the leader in social media privacy and security.

After posting on 2009 airline activity on Twitter, I got a couple requests that it’d be interesting to see activity from coffee brands on Twitter. (Did I mention that I live in Seattle, home of the illustrious @Starbucks? )

A few tweaks and 77 minutes later, I was able to put together the following graph of tweets from each coffee brand’s Twitter account from January to October 10 of this year.

A few interesting observations. There were only four brands even on Twitter in January of this year. Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts dominated then, as they do now. There was an interesting peak among most brands around July and September of this year, with many having their activity taper off after that.

Dunkin Donuts has been tweeting a lot this month. If we take a closer look at their Twitter stats from October, we see that October 6th was a busy day. A little research shows that the 6th was the day they came out with their annual fall lineup and that they also had a promotion for firefighters in DC that day.

Amazing what a little visualization will show.

I’m mildly amused at the response of Pepsi and the negative response to their “AMP UP Before you Score” iPhone app that objectifies women and parodies off the typical male approach to dating in the year 2009.

Conversations flared on Twitter this weekend after the company launched their iPhone application. Interestingly enough, the response from AMP and Pepsi at the moment is to try to cram a PR response into a 140 character tweet.

Originally tweeted out from the @AMPwhatsnext account, the @Pepsi account re-tweeted the message shortly thereafter. At the time of this writing, this is the only official response I could find. Nothing on the Pepsi website or the AMP website. Just an apology crammed into 140 characters using numbers to abbreviate words.

Is this really what PR has come to in the world of Twitter? The other side of this, though, is the interesting fact that this may be all that’s needed to address this bit of PR. Where opinions can blow up in a matter of minutes and spread like wildfire, the days of delicate PR are long gone for real-time PR in the nature of the medium.

This has certainly been an interesting year for little ‘ol Twitter. Growth has exploded, celebrities have been joining in droves and Twitter continues to expand their feature set in an amazing effort to make those 140-character tidbits all the more valuable. Brands have also noticed the value in Twitter, listening in on the thoughts of millions of people in hopes of not only improving customer satisfaction, but winning customers over with a personal touch. Fellow Twitterer Dave Peck experienced this earlier this year when Southwest Airlines tried to help him out after getting stuck in Austin.

How appropriate, then, is the graph below that shows @SouthwestAir as the most active airline on Twitter, based on the number of monthly tweets from January to September of this year.

I decided to put this graph together after reading @BrianSolis‘ post on airline activity in August. Curious what the rest of the year looked like, I pulled some data from TweetStats and decided to try to represent the data in a StreamGraph, courtesy of Lee Byron’s awesome StreamGraph work. This is my first attempt and could certainly use a little tweaking, but the trends in airline activity over the course of the year are readily apparent.

In addition to simply seeing how active airlines have been over the past year, the graph also shows the overall number of tweets for each airline (font size) as well as the most active month for each airline (placement of their Twitter username). There are some airlines not marked on the graph as their activity is insubstantial.

Also of note is @FlyHawaiian, whose usage of Twitter increased tremendously in September.

Detailed stats for any of the airlines can, of course, be found on TweetStats.