Rightly or wrongly, I’ve felt that, although we’re more or less drowning in an ocean of inanity and disinformation, the best way for me to help with that issue is probably not by attempting to dilute the ocean with what I hope might pass for wit or even wisdom in some circles, and hopefully appear as less than complete inanity in others.

Of course, one person’s inanity is another person’s deeply personal and touching remarks, and the debate over what qualifies as “disinformation” will probably go on forever, although arguably it’s something worth debating, and I may have a few words to say on that subject at some stage in the future.

Now, apart from having so many other things I need to do, the reason I’ve been so quiet here is that I felt if I was going to say anything new, it ought to be something important, which is why I’m a little ashamed that my only post since the Feb 22 quake that (quite literally) upended our existence, which was already in a somewhat unstable state it has to be said, was about Unthink, a start-up hoping to capitalise on the perennial outrage over the privacy problems that plague most consumer focused websites, and of late, Facebook and Google in particular, as the largest incumbent aggregators of our collective inanity and disinformation.

Now, it’s entirely possible their startup adventure began with noble intent, and I hope it ends that way, but I do not see much chance that it’s actually going to work out for them. Facebook is the world’s best example of a “network-effect” start-up. People log into social networks because their friends are there, and all the privacy and control in the world isn’t going to interest anyone unless there is a sufficiently large audience of friends and family there to treat our inanities as deeply personal and touching remarks.

Meanwhile, on the monetization front, the merchants of disinformation are really not interested in advertising to people who care so much about privacy and control that they’re willing to switch to a site that at least initially, will have almost nobody on it. The idea that being a “brand ambassador” (as opposed to another pair of eyeballs for the advertisers) will somehow be sufficiently appealing to people that they’ll switch over and bring their friends also seems a little hopeful if you ask me.

And of course, the people who really do care about such things have other alternatives they already find more appealing – such as Diaspora nodes, which add such interesting adjectives as “distributed” and “open” to the promises of privacy and (one hopes) proper personalization.

I must admit, I found Unthink initially appealing, as did, apparently, Mr Fry. But I imagine that he, like myself, eventually decided that as in the parable of New Coke, a sip test is an insufficient indicator of an audience’s underlying desire for a bold and brash new flavour of an otherwise familiar product.

My best wishes to the Unkthink crew in their attempt to prove the doubters, such as myself, absolutely wrong, and eventually rise up to replace our current over-centralised consumer-grade conversation hub(s) with something newer and shinier at their own URL, but for me at least, the shine has worn off before I even get around to logging in, which I may or may not do at some time in the near future.

As, according to comments on Techcrunch today, they are finally into limited beta, and the rush to see what US$2.5m in start-up capital and some well deserved resentment towards the status quo can buy you in terms of traction has already crashed their servers, or at least, timed them out.

So instead of joining the Unthinking masses I’d best get back to my own little start-up, which managed to raise about a fiftieth of their pre-launch investment before we lost steam trying to build an IE6 version, and had to switch to bootstrapping in order to pay our bills (want a website? Or a browser add-on? We actually build pretty good ones..), in the hope that if we hang in there we’ll finally turn our often appreciated and occasionally acclaimed free (and eventually, freemium) products, with well over 3m downloads between them now (did I mention we have the 21st most popular Safari Addon according to extensions.apple.com?), into a sustainable business, which sometimes I feel ought to be inevitable, but for some reason I keep on inventing and innovating away on new ideas in private rather than doubling down and delivering on our existing products in public, and that really does have to change.

So I hope I’ll be back to blogging more often sometime soon, and with some worthwhile changes to announce. I think know we’ve got some serious potential, and despite the moderate irony you might have detected in my use of the words “hope” and “change”, I nevertheless still have hope that we, and for that matter the much maligned Obama Administration, can deliver you up some sustainable and successful innovation in the years to come, despite the obscure, and occasionally more obvious obstacles we all too often face, often of my own making, that are usually of not much interest to anyone, but real enough for us.

Er, ok, if you’ll bear with me, before I damn them with feint praise, I feel I should point out that the Obama Administration probably have more hidden accomplishments than you might have previously imagined, but with a congress that finds some way to block almost their every move, and in a media environment where the majority of viewer attention still goes to the “news” station that is somehow still saluting, and in some cases, even employing, the has-been salespeople for arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster of all time, you know, that one with projected costs of well over 3 trillion at this point, which, of course, turned out to be cheaper than their colossal failures on the domestic policy front (you know, the ones that have led to people occupying Wall St lately) – I think you all know what “news” channel I’m referring to here – is currently casting considerable doubts on the merits of the latest implementation of the Obama doctrine, you know, that multilateral mission that cost no American lives, didn’t require torturing anyone at all, created no new reasons for masses of Middle Eastern people to turn into potential terrorists (at least, that I’m aware of), has cost well under a thousandth of the price of another Iraq style operation, and arguably delivered more hope for the Libyan people than the Iraqis ever got from Team Bush, well, you’d have to say any hope team Obama might have had for an appropriate level of appreciation in next year’s elections must now be somewhere between modest, and minuscule. Which is unfortunate, in my opinion, anyway.

They’ll keep on trying I’m sure. And so will I. Double down. Deliver. I’ll do my best.

Just finally, let me point out that, by contrast, Karl always delivers, and generally in double quick time. If you need some great HTML5 work done fast, or a brilliant browser add-on that more than lives up to your expectations, well, his time is currently available and at a very fair price – at least until I finally figure out the 500 other things you need to make a successful start-up function properly – starting with focus, focus, focus.

Well, if you’ve made it this far you deserve more than a penny for you thoughts, and although I can’t promise to pay you back immediately, I’d be very eager to hear them.

Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred.

I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated all over the place. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.

[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]