Twitter made the news today because of CEO Evan William’s disclosure to employees that the company is valued at $1 billion.

Humorously, I also came across this today from the Editor in Chief of Esquire, David Granger, in the Letter from the Editor section of the October 2009 issue:

“We live in a culture that has begun to prize the appearance of accomplishment over actual accomplishment–it continues to amaze me that private enterprise and venture capital spend so much time and energy (not to mention cash) on “innovations” like Twitter and other forms of social blathering rather than marshaling the energies and talents of our engineers to create new industries to replace the ones that enabled the American Century.”

I admire Twitter for building such a seemingly simple product that appeals to so many people, but I can’t help but agree with Mr Granger: is this the best we can do?

Update: Sara Lacy posted an article on TechCrunch with similar sentiments.

edw519 responded to her article with the following comment on HackerNews, which, like most of his stuff, is thoroughly thought-provoking:

Investor: What are you building?Entrepreneur: Artificially intelligent software that automatically builds sophisticated business applications based on the enterprise’s business rules.

This evening I was lucky enough to have dinner with Raphael Mudge, founder of the recently acquired proofreading startup After the Deadline.

This was a good week for him. On Tuesday Automattic announced they had acquired After the Deadline back and incorporated it into WordPress.  The announcement was immediately followed by a flurry of press coverage and widespread admiration of his success. As someone eloquently put it on HN, “It takes cast-iron balls the size of cantaloupes to make a product that competes against companies with six orders of magnitude more funding… and succeed.“

Raffi, as he is known on HackerNews, is easily one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. His optimism is contagious and his passion for his work is second to none. Smart too: did you know that After the Deadline uses a neural networks to identify errors? Yeah, wow.

Well done sir. Congrats again.

Frustrated with the growing length of the navigation bar on the right, I made some changes.

Before:

After:

This was largely inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, which was designed by Nathan Bowers.

I postponed writing the little bio snippet for a long time mostly because I had no idea what to say. Those 35 words, believe it or not, took about two hours to get right and knowing me, they’ll probably change completely within a week. I think the extra color adds a nice touch too.

The second Philly Build Guild meetup was tonight and like the first, we all had a great time.

One notable difference from the Philly.rb meetups is the higher number of entrepreneur-programmers who attend. There was a guy there tonight who talked at length about a Series A round his company was supposed to get, only to fall through at the last minute. Most of my knowledge of that realm is through Paul Graham’s essays and accounts on HackerNews; it was nice to meet someone who has actually gone through it.

One amusing stat which I forgot to mention last time was that someone asked “Is there anyone here who doesn’t have an iPhone?” and only 1 out of the 12 of us had that dubious distinction.

Oh and how in the world do you pronounce Django?  Duh-jango? Deh-jango? Jango? What a name.