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My friend Todd Lappin sent the following about his new program with the Market Street Railway:

In the comments on Chris's blog (great post today about search and social graphs) -- Sean O'Rourke mapped out some interesting points regarding Social Graphs when used for Search, and I think he's nailed the numbers:

You can estimate the first two, but the rest is highly speculative. Let's say the average social graph is The Dunbar Number, around 150 people. For a platform, let's use Twitter: the average user has 126 followers. This is probably skewed, given power law distribution. If you shaved off the top 10% of users to try to find the average user, you'd get something south of that I'm sure. In Q4 2008 about a third (35%) of Twitter users had 10 or fewer followers, with the average number of followers for all users at 70.

Previously, I wrote about how working on the right thing is more important than working hard, and a lot of people asked how you know you're working on the right thing. And the only way to gauge that is instinct, gut feeling, or the tingle in your spine that Nabokov says he feels when he encounters a great work of literature. But there are methods of arriving at the right thing, and generally that requires exposing yourself to a lot of ideas, fleshing out a few, ruminating on them, and throwing almost all of them out.

Yesterday, Rob sent me links to Ira Glass's advice on Storytelling, which are yes, about Storytelling, but also applicable to any creative endeavor, whether that be producing a movie, writing a book, or creating a piece of software. You should watch all 4 videos in the series, but the second one talks about the importance of *finding the right story* -- the equivalent of an entrepreneur finding the right idea.

Repeated "failure" and throwing things away -- even throwing away good but not great things -- can't be overemphasized, and are often forgotten when people are talking about grand successes. This, from Steve Jobs: