Happy Anniversary to Me!

I've been awfully silent for the past little while, and for no good reason, really. But today is my 1-month anniversary at my new company, Clickable, and I thought I'd take this chance to share a little about this transition.

Clickable is an exciting place; we are building a software-as-a-service offering for people who want to manage their online advertising in a single, simple interface. So if you are advertising with Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you can learn all of those products and spend time in all three of them managing and optimizing your accounts, or you can just log in to Clickable and do all your work in one spot. The team at Clickable is immensely talented, and the product has real customers who find our product to be a big advantage over the services offered from the ad networks.

I'm proud to say I have definitely found what I was looking for by leaving Google for a startup: tons of responsibility, the opportunity to have a major impact on a company, and the chance to learn a lot of new skills. It's given me an enthusiasm for my work that was sorely lacking towards the end of my time at Google.

I'm working as a semi-specialized engineering jack-of-all-trades. My main focus is our optimization engine, which tells customers how to tweak their accounts for the best advertising results. But I'm also working on a broad swath of other tasks, such as setting product direction, production firefighting, integration testing, customer analytics, and even a dash of business development. Most importantly of all, I am hiring for talented engineers. If you think the startup life is worth a try, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

What am I doing wrong with Reader off-line mode?

I'm temporarily commuting with a laptop that has no WLAN device, so I've been using Google Reader's off-line mode for the last couple days, and I've noticed the following oddness.

I start out with a giant backlog of unread feeds, a la:


(Sorry for the quality of the screenshots in this post; if you click through to the original image on any of these, you should be able to see the folder counts clearly).


I synchronize to go off-line:



Once that's complete, all my folders show fewer unread items than before, such that my total unread drops from "1000+" to 580:



Such rapid progress! Until I go back on-line again:



And now I'm back to "1000+".

Anyone on the Reader team care to comment on this one?