It's great fun. 37signals issued a fake "press release" on the company's influential and freewheeling blog yesterday mocking Twitter's reportedly imminent $1 billion valuation by way of a $100 million investment. "37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT," read the headline. The post began:

37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

It later declared that 37signals would cease taking in actual money, so investors could fantasize about the company's potential instead of thinking about reality. It's a salient point, and one we've made ourselves. The satire also nails how the adulation and money lavished on Twitter invite disturbing comparisons to the 2000 dot-com bubble.

But as much as we enjoy and heartily encourage this sort of bitchery, we'd be remiss not to point out that Fried seems to have a chip on shoulder. Just look at the context: a series of high-profile public pronouncements in which Fried and his tight-knight crew at 37signals have set themselves up as the marked antithesis of Twitter.

To hear Fried's people tell it, Silicon Valley is filled with flaky startup dreams like Twitter; 37Signals is the level-headed Midwestern outfit. Valley companies conjure imaginary business models; 37signals actually sells things. The message 37signals pushes most energetically is that it charges users for its product, while companies like San Francisco-based Twitter give them away and hope for the best.

"The days of the traditional San Francisco startup approach are numbered," wrote 37signals' David Heinemeier Hansson, in an essay in which he relished the thought that Valley startups who fail to "charge for stuff" would be "flushed down the drain." Hansson cited earlier comments by Fried, who has said "free is not the future of business" and that the idea of dropping "an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while" is "toxic."

Fried also this month lacerated the founders of Mint.com, saying they "bent over" in selling their company to Intuit for $170 million. Presumably they should have stayed in the notoriously breakneck, personal-life-destroying world of tech startups until they reached Fried's serene plateau of self-evident emotional tranquility and nirvana. Oh, and did we mention that Twitter CEO Evan Williams himself sold a series of startups before co-founding Twitter, which is widely expected to be likewise flipped someday? Just like those sumissive Mint.com guys, hmmm.

We'll readily concede that Twitter is a 37signals customer, and Hansson to his credit wrote a post called "Hail to Twitter" a year and a half ago, albeit to make up, we presume, for the one he did a week earlier, "Bitching is the killer app for Twitter." But we still detect in Fried something of a grudging obsession with Twitter which, crazy talk aside, has accumulated an impressive 40 million or so estimated users, a massive ecosystem of related startups and the highest profile roster of users the tech world has ever known. Hey, look, we know from grudging obsessions with the microblogging service and its founders. But even a jaded observer like Valleywag can see that Twitter wasn't valued at $1 billion in a throwaway $1 investment. It took $100 million from serious-as-hell investors who very much expect to get that money back, and then some. Deep down, we bet Fried knows the difference too — even if he can't admit it.

(Pic by Sean O'Shaughnessy)

37signals recommends the Hollywood Launch. Release a few hints until the big day, when people flood your site, sent by blog coverage. What happens: They bring the site down. They discover some big bug. You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error. Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. They all think it's stupid. The traffic is gone. Hardly any of those users come back.

What you should have done all along: the Gmail Launch. Have users from day one. Give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback. Let them invite their friends. Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. Codes protect against a premature slashdotting. Iterate. Take off the code requirement. People will come across it and become real users. Then build buzz. Have some kind of news hook. With Reddit, we switched from Lisp to Python. Start marketing.

(Photo by ioerror)

The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire's trick of formatting a message as "code" if it contains literal newline characters.

We're going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They're supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We'll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience. While our systems are engineered to chug through major failure, this "perfect storm" chain of events beat both our set-up and our data center's sophisticated back-up systems. We will work hard to further diversify our systems in order to make an future downtime event like this even more rare.

Threadless

As you noticed Threadless took a little nap this evening. Apparently a truck jumped a railing and attacked our data center. I think their may have even been an explosion. I hope so.

This is the first time we have had power outage like this in the 9 years that we have been in hosting (8 of which at Rackspace).

*crickets*

Like 365 Main, Rackspace was hit by a utility power outage on Sunday. Unlike 365 Main, Rackspace saw its generators kick in, and all was well. This evening, however, a truck drove into a power transformer, causing it to explode. Rackspace techs described this in an email to customers, with admirable sangfroid, as leading to "additional power issues." Further word from Rackspace is that the chillers that keep the servers cool lost power when the transformer blew. An unknown number of servers were taken offline to prevent damage from excessive heat. Currently, the chillers are back online and Rackspace techs are in the process of bringing all the affected customers back online.

Interestingly, as Scott Beale of Laughing Squid points out, "Rackspace does not have a status page or blog." Beale, who's using a status blog to keep his customers informed, later noted that Rackspace does have a "customer portal" — I guess that counts as a blog — which they eventually updated late tonight.

Update 7:54pm: Laughing Squid is back online once again. So is 37signals.

Followup:

• Rackspace was "most reliable" webhost in September 2007
  
• Rackspace outage affects Texas ISP
  
• Rackspace outage was third in two days
  
• Rackspace customers apologize for the downtime
  
• Rackspace's latest datacenter update
  
• CEO of Rackspace apologizes to customers
  
• EXCLUSIVE: Low blood sugar brought down Rackspace websites

The fact that you require me to contact support to close my profile is a disgrace. Why on earth would you want to invite more costly support requests? And why does this have to feel like a big drama break up?

Can't we talk about this first? [37signals]

There's a new betting pool going on in our office: who will 37signals compare themselves to this week?

Two weeks ago it was: Project Runway, the Jitterbug Phone, Tufte, Gandhi, Einstein, Martin Luther King, 50 Cent, Hugo Chavez, Steve Jobs, Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive, and Michael Gondry, all of whom apparently "got real."

This week was Tony Bennett, the Japanese, Linus Torvalds, Google, and Bill Ford.

My prediction for this week: Oprah, hotcakes, roller skates, Dean Martin.

My bet's on Bono, Skype, cardboard baby books, and Cirque de Soleil. What's yours?

It feels good to get someone a job. And in tech, where everyone's on their way in, their way out, or their way up, it's no wonder that every tech blog launched its own job board to capitalize on its Valley audience. So far, there are job boards at 37signals, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and paidContent, four of leading tech-pundit sites, each led by a big ego.

While happy-go-lucky papers like the Red Herring like to present this as a happy cottage industry, we hear it's a lot more rough-and-tumble behind the scenes.

TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington (pictured standing) invited both 37signals and GigaOM to join his "CrunchBoard" jobs board, but he's said that both turned him down. But word is, GigaOM's Om Malik (pictured genuflecting) was willing to talk — he just had to consult his investors.

But Mike's been telling folks that Om just can't say no, so all this investor talk was just stalling while Om launched his own thing.

Meanwhile, Jason "Let's Get Small" Fried, owner of 37signals, seems loath to hook up with Mike at all. He feels like Mike's offers of partnership are really attempts to take over the whole tech-job-posting scene.

Of course, even if these guys realize that each of them may die off unless they team up, none of them will admit the real way to fill a job in the Valley: hang out at all the monthly meetups and parties and casually ask who's looking. (For example, Mike Arrington, rather than hire through his own job board, chats up journalists and bloggers at his parties and hints that they should join him.)

Blogs start job boards [Red Herring via CrunchNotes]
37signals Jobs [37s]
GigaOM Jobs [GigaOM]
CrunchBoard [TechCrunch]
paidContent Jobs [pC]
Photo by Laughing Squid's Scott Beale [Flickr, CC]

In which he says that many service-oriented businesses like his should fund themselves...

Then why did his company, 37signals, pick this moment to take funding from Amazon's founder?

Seriously. Jason says in the magazine: "I don't have anything against big business. It's just not for me."

On his blog, days later: "We hope this boost of ambition, and Jeff's personal vote of confidence, will help us achieve our big plans."

[Update: link removed; it was obtained by inadvertantly using private information] My Business Magazine: The Next Small Thing [PDF]
Bezos Expeditions invests in 37signals [37signals]

• Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher is leaving the RSS reader and diving into the conference scene. You'll probably — ugh — see him on a panel soon. [Personal blog]
• Brent Woodward is headed to prison. The exec from San Jose hardware company Lightwave Microsystems got two years for selling a backup tape full of his employer's trade secrets, joining the throngs of guys throughout history who got in trouble for indiscreet mix tapes. [Mercury News]
• Chicago-based superstar dev house 37signals is getting shot for an Apple Pro profile video (part of a series about sexy people using Apple stuff). [IM tip]
• And according to a Time Inc. press release, one of Wired's senior editors is moving to Fortune. Everybody else getting booted in the Wired staff shuffle had best get their game plans straight. [E-mail]

• Board-member-about-town Esther Dyson reminds you — personally — how much cooler her life is than yours. [EDyson on Flickr]
• Avocent to acquire Landesk. After a $415 million deal, both will still have stupid names. [CNET]
• Productivity firm 37 Signals opens a job board for companies scouting out "designers, programmers, or executives who 'get it.'" Executives who don't "get it" may apply directly to Microsoft. [37 Signals]
• Apple can sail through the loss of any exec — except Steve. Then they're fucked. [PC Magazine]
• MediaNews Group snaps up the San Jose Mercury News, with help from Hearst. No word on whether Hearst will order the masthead to read: "Why read this when you could read Hearst's SF Chronicle?" [TODAYonline]

37 Signals software zen mastah Jason Fried is shutting down a blog thread somewhere. Last spotted turning this comment thread into a ghost town. Last comment before the thread got wiped: "I am betting that in 10 minutes this post will be closed to comments." Just keepin' it real.

Chris Messina is packing up and shipping out of Flock. The designer will leave the social-browser startup as soon as he's done making flight metaphors. From Chris's "I'm heading out" entry:

I ve been in constant motion, bouncing along in the cockpit, weathering turbulent times

And:

The past nine months have been getting us down the runway, and now that we ve taken to flight

And he's:

ready...to surface the next horizon

Bon voyage, dude.

Mega-tech-blogger Doc Searls (a man who wants to stay atop a Technorati list, please Technorati, please) is chilling at home in Santa Barbara. As Paul Boutin (left) says, "Look, he's not working —- right now now now! Take the picture quick honey!"

Ben Brown: i just got an email from Jason Fried
saying that his book
is "a book of ideas"
Wow!
he's right.
simplicity is golden.
who should read it?
EVERYONE!
do you like ideas?
this book has them!

Ben Brown: "Visit the Getting Real site to get more info on who should read the book"
SERIOUSLY?
jesus.
oh wait
it's not a REAL book
its like, vanity publishing gone digital
I am going to write my "Book" today

Valleywag: so, ok, his 1 real success story is Ruby on Rails, right?

Ben Brown: it's not a success story, nick
it's a way of life.

Valleywag: "Over 400,000 people around the world use these applications to get things done."

Ben Brown: Almost ONE HALF OF ONE MILLION
that pretty much gives him license to REVOLUTIONIZE the web
37SIGNALUTIONIZE

"Getting Real" by 37signals [37signals]