Social Graph Paper

Prediction Data as an API in 2012

2012-01-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

A good post by Tristan Walker from FourSquare, got me thinking about the 'data space'. In his post, he mentions a company, Palantir (BusinessWeek article); from what I gather, they emphasize development of prediction models as applied to terror prevention, and consumed by non-technical field analysts. Their founder provides a good overview in this video (it's $10) from the O'Reilly Strata conference last year. As an aside, Palantir sounds like it has an interesting corporate culture (has a limit to salary, and is really driving home a 'solving real problems' message).

Reading the BusinessWeek article, begged the question; how is Palantir's approach different than that of Recorded Future's? Recorded Future seems to have a similar vision, but their approach is framed somewhat differently; they're creating a 'temporal index', a big data/ semantic analysis problem, as a basis to predict future events. Again, check out the O'Reilly video - it features a panel of Recorded Future, Palantir, and Twitter (the Twitter speaker, Rion Snow, mentions a lot of really interesting research that has been done against Twitter).

A few more companies that seem to be circling this big data/ prediction modeling space:

Sense Networks - I've been following Sense for a while due to the Sandy Pentland/ Nathan Eagle connection (both have done extensive Reality Mining in mobile that I find interesting). They do similar big data prediction analysis, but the domain seems to be mobile-centric.
Digital Reasoning - mentioned here
BlueKai - I'm not sure most people would put BlueKai in the same boat as Palantir and Recorded Future, but I'm starting to frame this space as a value chain, and BlueKai seems to have found a way to aggregate, improve, and repackage data for use in digital marketing.
Primal - a Waterloo-based company, it's not entirely clear to me at this point their angle, but the appear to sit between BlueKai and Recorded Future/ Palantir and emphasize "filling out the sparseness of information in social networks".

Finally, "Follow the Data" seems to be a good source of information on what's happening in the industry. Look forward to spending some time reading through the content.

It seems to me that the near future of this space will be reminiscent to what happened in mobile in the last few years; API-ization of 'state' data (eg. what Skyhook did in wifi location). There will be data-domain experts (the ability to make meaning out of phone transcript calls between terrorists is a different domain than, say, making meaning out of online shopping behaviors); spanning the ability to make sense of unstructured data, aggregate from multiple sources, run prediction models on it, and make it available to various "application" providers. What we're seeing today are very purpose-built algorithms/ applications, and I suspect the long term value here is in making and interpreting meaning in the unstructured data (rather than storing the data).

Facebook Social Network Research

2011-12-04T14:36:00.001-08:00

This awesome reading - two embedded, detailed, research papers from the Facebook data team.

Zuck Interview

2011-10-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

Start at 43:30: - http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298692604

Thought this was a really transparent and authentic interview with Zuckerberg @ YCombinator. The main take-aways:

If you don't do what you love, solve a problem that you think genuinely exists, you'll never maintain the tenacity to succeed.
If you only do something a bit better than someone else is doing it, how much can you win?
As a manager, you'll have a tension between centralizing vs decentralizing functions (eg. marketing). Creating 'growth groups' has allowed FB to avoid pitfalls of environmentalism. (sounds like the Strategic Product Management function)
You don't need to be in the Valley to succeed - it helps if you know nothing. (Waterloo + communitech?)

----
My notes:
Most companies mess up by moving too slowly, and trying to be too precise.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. (100% of putts left short don't go in)

Old skool: Index and content served to a lot of people -> caching, scale systems
Social: different fundamental experience. memcache (open source project)

Having the poeple who make product decisions, also understanding the technical issues is fundamentally important.

Everything is better with social: Emotional and informational efficiency - matchedup with better stuff.

Doing this because it's awesome and should exist.

Thing about engineering, you never do the same thing twice, you just abstract it.

3-4-5 is the unit of a team- 50 is too big

growth groups - first insights: main features of FB is your friends are there. two levels: strategically - grow scale company, and better experience. Didn't Just leave it to chance - wanted to build a competence in growing, scaling, AND finding friends most easily. key things that drive engagement - drop box started one, many other companies did. eg discovery; didn't have great analystics around engagement. Needed 10 friends.

acquisitions- saw true colors of poeople around me. Saw that some just wanted the money.

dropio - ceo lead timeline project at FB. Decided he'd have a bigger impact at facebook than in his old company.

FB at it's essence are the products we build.

Theil: advice as founder, not money manager. Don Graham: had washington post in his company for generations -> build companies for long term.

most inspiring, surprising thing: can be so bad at so many things, but if you stay focused on providing value to your customers, and you're do so unique, then you'll get through it.

Self selection bias; do stuff that you're passionate about -> leads to company. Companies that work are those where the founders are passionate about what they're doing.

The last 5 of social networking has been about getting peeople connected. the next 5 will be: what are those things that now that people are connected? We're at, or close to that tippinging (you can or can't build on a social graph, can or can't ship CDROMs eg aol).

Things build outside of the valley seem to be on a longer term cadence.

Need to do something totally different, because if you do somehting a little bit better than someone else, how much can you really win?

Social Network Analysis of Twitter... you had to know it was coming

2011-10-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

You had to know this was coming - after a mobile and Facebook post, what was left? This is probably the most interesting/ counter-intuitive of the 3.

What is Twitter, a Social Network or a New Media? [Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moo] mined ~42mm profiles, tweets, and trends to better understand the nature of Twtter. The broke it into 3 parts:

Network Analysis - understanding the structure of the Twitter network.
Popularity Analysis - based on # of followers, pagerank, and retrweets
Information Diffusion - how (re)tweeting diffuses through the network.

Here are the major outcomes:

There is basically (basically) a 1-1 correlation with # of tweets, and # of followers/ followings. Tweet more, get more followers.
Low reciprocity. Due to the asymmetrical nature of twitter (ie I can follow you without you following me back), only 78% of links are one way.
Degree of separation: on twitter, there are 4 degrees of separation. This is really unintuitive at first due to the directedness of the network, but if you consider the "super nodes" on twitter (eg Oprah), this makes sense. Conversely, on facebook, most poeple can't be friends with Oprah.
Homophily: People who have a lot of followers tend to be friends with people who have a lot of followers. The more followers you have, the more likely your friends are in other timezones.
User Popularity: Ranking by followers is interesting, but they're actually not generating the most retweets (this is a better measure of influence).
Trending items vs google: items stay trending on Twitter longer than Google due to the retweeting phenomenon.Most active periods are less than a week, but 31% are 1 day long.
Retweet impact: (this is weird) regardless of how many followers you have, if your tweet is retweeted, 1000 people will see it. Of course, if you have more followers, your tweet is more likely to be retweeted, but a retweet view remains constant at 1000 incremental people.
On average, if they happen, first retweets occur ~1 hour after the tweet, 2nd - 6th occur within 10 minutes. Crazy diffusion rate.

Basic Social Network Analysis Criterion

2011-10-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

Just finished two interesting papers which analyze social networks: Planetary-Scale Views on a Large

Instant-Messaging Network (Leskovec, Horvitz) and Statistical Analysis of Real Large-Scale Mobile Social Network (Zhengbin Dong, Guojie Song, KunqingXie, Ke Tang, JingyaoWang).

The former was an a an analysis of a month's worth of MSN Messenger traffic and network structure. The latter, an analysis of chinese phone log and corresponding network structure.

Though the results were interesting (I won't share them here), I was actually looking for the criterion they analyzed:

Degree: simply put, the number of connections a user (node) has.
Shortest Path: the fewest number of users between two users.
Diameter: the largest shortest path in a network.
Clustering Coefficient: the ratio of actual connections a user has to potential connections. Measures the transitivity of a network (ie the propensity for your friends to also be friends themselves).
Betweenness Centrality: the ratio of the count of shortest paths (between user A and user B) that pass through a user (user C) to all shortest paths (between user A and user B).
K-Core Distribution of Component Size: gives us an idea of how quickly the network shrinks as we move towards the core. Or, how large (number of users/ nodes) is the core component when a constraint of the minimum degree (k) is applied. (ie for a network where nodes have degree, k >20, how many total nodes in the component?)

Most of these characteristics are represented as a distribution (ie what is the degree distribution of all nodes in a network?) and tend to provide insight into the stability and density of a network. For example, a network with a higher-than-average skewed degree distribution (ie people have a lot of friends), will tend to be more stable (ie be more resilient to the k-core test), have shorter paths (on average) and therefore a smaller diameter, will be clustered more, and have higher betweenness centrality.

This is really nerdy stuff...

Facebook's Research: Leveraging Friendship for Determining Location

2011-10-09T11:29:00.001-07:00

A chapter in Networks, Crowds, and Markets on small-world phenomenon describes a generalized relationship between rank-based distance and friendship probability. In research leveraging data from the site LiveJournal, the relationship is approximately: Probability of friendship is = 1/r. So, co-present people are basically 100% likely to have a tie, and the 100th person closest to you, your probability of friendship is 1/100. A quick note on using rank instead of geographic distance - numerically this approach is more meaningful because geographic distance is non-uniformly distributed (eg. in the US, the major of people are on the coasts, not spread uniformly over the area of the country).

Researchers at Facebook, Lars Backstrom; Eric Sun; Cameron Marlow, leveraged this research to further investigate using this relationship between friendship and 'distance' and to develop reasonable algorithms to use this relationship to predict friend location.

As an aside, the typical approach used by smart phone application developers to determine geographic location is to leverage the handset's IP address. For example, Skyhook allows developers to submit handset IP address and Skyhook will return a geograph lat-long. This approach provides a reasonable estimation of location, however due to the 'reassignment' nature of IP addresses, this approach is error-prone and, according to Backstrom, Sun, Marlow, is only accurate 57.2% of the time.

Amazingly, in Find me if you can: Improving geographical prediction with social and spatial proximity, Backstrom, Sun, Marlow leveraged the location of one's friends to determine your location to accuracy greater than that of IP geolocation. With 16 friends sharing location, they were able to determine your location within 25miles ~67.5% of the time!

The obvious implication of this research is that the historical approach of lat-long:IP relationships could technically be augmented with friendship only data to improve results. More interested, potentially controversial, is where many users may opt to not explicitly share their location with vendors such as Skyhook, approaches exist, more accurately, to determine YOUR location if your friends share theirs (ie your friends are indirectly providing services such as Facebook your locations when they 'check in').

Balanced Signed Networks in Social Media

2011-04-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

In previous posts, something that sat uncomfortably with me in social networking theory is the lack of description and weight of edges (ties). I should have kept reading because, of course, the related concept exists in the research; ties between individuals can be positive (friends) or negative (enemies).

An interesting analysis is a paper "The slashdot zoo: mining a social network with negative edges" [Kunegis, Lommatzsc, Bauckhage] is interesting because Slashdot, a popular 'geek culture' site allows members to tag each other as friends or foes.

Further research discusses the concept of balancing these graphs. For example, a network of 3 people, A, B, C is only balanced if all are friends, or only A-B are friends (C is a common enemy). Imbalance occurs when A-B and A-C are friends, but B-C are enemies - this creates a sort of structural instability.

What continues to sit uncomfortably is that the reading seems to overly simplify nuances in real social dynamics and the way that these dynamics are represented online:

This representation of friend/ foe ignores the context of the measurement. For example, the signs of a graph may reverse if the context is "I agree with what you have to say" vs. "I respect what you have to say".
The ties themselves are really an aggregate of 'types' and 'weights' of ties. Consider a political corporate environment where allegiances (friend/foe lines) are formed on power dynamics and corporate structure as well as on personal similarity/friendships. The model doesn't take the mix into account.
In online social networks, there seems to be little explicit definition of 'foe'. For example, you 'friend' people on Facebook, you don't have the concept of 'foe'. An interesting research area might be to determine implicit foes based on friend data (ie if A-B are friends on Facebook and A-C are friends, then you'd think B-C should be friends. If they're not, does that mean they're real-life enemies?).

A related talk on the topic by Jure Leskovec at Microsoft Research (video).

Social Influence vs. Selection

2011-02-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

First, a couple of definitions:
* Selection is a person's characteristics (mutable or immutable) that drive link (friendship) creation.
* Social Influence is the propensity of a person's friendships to drive characteristics.

The first, for example, would be an ethnic group finding a neighborhood where members of the same group live. The second would be how the discovery of a new music act by one friend drives the adoption of the same act by their friends.

I came across some research that looks at selection vs social influence in the context of page editors of wikipedia. The question posed is, how does friendship influence the pages editors work on? How Crandall et al approached this was to look at the similarity (ie the number of common articles they edited) between two editors pre- and post- meeting.

The following graph is an aggregate/ average of many pairs of editors, but the surprising conclusion is the positive-linear nature of similarity and the ramp up/down surrounding when the meet. Of course, there's a level of historical retrospective going on here (looking at behaviors of people that met in the past), but it's interesting to see the build up pre-meeting (selection) and the continued ramp post-meeting (social influence).

Here's the full presentation from "Proceeding of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining":

Feedback Effects Between Similarity And Social Influence In Online Communities

View more presentations from Paolo Massa.

Representations of Social Networks

2011-02-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

In my study of social networks, I keep asking myself why they are commonly represented so simply? The concept of a "graph" is simple enough, and many of the natural extensions I'd like to see never seem to come up.

An artificial graph, below, contains 3 nodes (people), 2 edges (friendships), and 1 "non friendship).

Let's assume you're trying to assess triadic closure (the propensity for B-C to become friends if A-B and A-C are friends). What would be helpful for this graph would be:
1. The nature of the edge between A-B and A-C.
- Are the edges representing true friendships?
- Are the edges actually a blend of two types of edges (professional/ affiliate and personal)? "A" may be great personal friends with "B", but belong to the same club as "C". This is unlikely to drive triadic closure.
2. The weight of the edge between A-B and A-C. Something that has always made me uncomfortable is the qualitative nature of how edges are described. Perhaps because this is, historically, difficult to quantify. Even so, a 1= acquaintence, 2=best friend would add a more comfortable quantitative layer.
3. The nature of the edges between pairs are unidirectional, when stated/ perceived relationships by the individuals within the pairs may not be reciprocal. I'd like to see every edge actually be made up of 2 edges: one for the nature perceived by each node.

Lastly, flying in the face of the triadic closure concept, I'd like to see ties with a weight ranging from -1 (avoidance) to +1 (closeness); 0 would represent non-friendship/ non-tie. If A-B are friends and B-C are friends, and A is a drug dealer, and C is a recovering addict, triadic closure likely won't result here.

I'd think adding these details would provide a more nuanced analysis. Perhaps as I dig a bit deeper, these practices will surface.

More on contagions...

2011-02-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

Just summarizing a great paper that combines social network data and co-location data: "Distinguishing between Drivers of Social Contagion: Insights from Combining Social Network and Co-location Data".

The field now seems ready to move from investigating whether contagion is really at work to why it occurs (Aral 2011; Godes 2011; Iyengar et al. 2011b).

Social contagion may occur for at least five reasons:
1. The process may operate through spreading awareness and interest,
2. Through social learning about the new product’s risks and benefits,
3. Through social-normative influence increasing the legitimacy of the new product,
4. Through concerns that not adopting may result in a competitive or status disadvantage, or
5. Through direct and indirect “network” or installed base effects (Van den Bulte and Lilien 2001).

Who is prone to influence: "Physicians who perceive themselves to be opinion leaders are less sensitive to peer behavior whereas true sociometric leaders are not. This finding indicates that self-confidence rather than true expertise moderates sensitivity to contagion, which is consistent with risk reduction as well as status maintenance mechanisms but not with awareness (e.g., Berger and Heath 2008; Van den Bulte and Stremersch 2004)."

Product-type-specific influence: "what drives contagion is to consider characteristics of the product, and possibly also the influencers. For instance, for products that do not benefit from standard marketing communication and present little perceived risk, contagion may foster adoption by operating at the awareness stage. In such cases, occasional users may be more effective in creating additional awareness than regular users. This is because the latter are more likely to be connected to other regular users and others who are already aware of the product, as noted in a study by Godes and Mayzlin (2009) of stimulated word of mouth for a restaurant chain"

Paper conclusion: "spatial structure overlaps little with network structure, which is why contagion from co-located peers can provide information over and above what can be gleaned from contagion from network peers"

Information-type-specific influence: "Some information and knowledge is quite complex and possibly even tacit. It is hard to convey through “lean” channels such as written documents and presentations at conferences by high-profile speakers, and typically requires “richer” channels, esp. face-to-face interaction (Daft and Lengel 1986)"

Social Contagions and Social Media Marketing Effectiveness

2011-01-21T04:20:00.001-08:00

A little background terminology here: things that transmit between nodes in a social network are known as contagions. The most simple real-life contagion example is, of course, diseases, but intuitively we also know that attitudes (eg. product preference) are influenced by who our friends are.

Further, as with disease, in order for contagions to effectively spread, they must be in an appropriate environment. In the case of diseases, not only must the shape of the network be appropriate, but varying degrees of physical contact (it might be as simple as a handshake, or intimate as sexual contact, and genetic predisposition) may be a factor. For product preference, as an example, the degree of susceptibility to a contagion is similarly nuanced. Of course, centrality and number of connections may be large factors, but there are others.

Companies are spending a lot of money promoting their products on Facebook. Estimates have Facebook's advertising revenue at ~$1.86B dollars for 2010 (not inconsequential vs. competitive "portals"). Much of the advertiser interest in advertising on Facebook stems from the belief that "social ads" are more effective than are non-social standard banner ads due to the influence our contacts have over us.

Much of the research by mainstream analysts (1, 2) frame the impact of social media in the form of "influence". This has an implication of a sort of cognitive awareness and formality by consumers; that they make their purchase decisions rationally based on friend's behaviors (eg. "ah, I see Jim has bought , so I will also get one.". Though there may be some contribution by rational decision making processes, I hypothesize that modeling influence as a contagion (eg disease) is a more effective way to measure impact. In other words, you can't control your desire for a product anymore so than you can control your ability to catch a cold.

Google is often criticized for the lack of transparency in their advertising marketplace. Advertisers don't know the publishers, targeting and ad rotation is opaque, and the true price is unclear. Facebook has a similar problem, but it's not as direct or obvious as Google's.

Here's the scenario: An advertiser creates a facebook page and buys ads to promote it. Nested in the ad is a "like" button that, when pressed, acts like other like buttons on the site: for some of your contacts, it inserts an item into their newsfeed. Here's the key problem: Facebook doesn't permit the advertiser visibility into who and where they surface these "likes". For brand advertisers, not all impressions are created equal.
* People are not monolithic influences or non-influencers. My mom might influence cold remedies, but not music taste, for example.

While tastes do signal social identity, what others infer from one’s choice depends upon group membership (Berger and Heath 2007; McCracken 1988; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). For example, Berger and Heath (2007) find that people
may converge or diverge in their tastes based on how much their choice in a given context signals their social identity. [Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network? Raghuram Iyengar]

* People that I have strong ties with, for some types of products, have already influenced me offline resulting in a wasted cost of an impression. For example, don't bother showing my closest friends that I liked "Against Me's" latest album, we all already have it. That said, if I liked a car brand, it's probably worth showing them my "Like".

With Facebook, as with google, this targeting is done algorithmically. You may get a lot of impressions, and people may say that they're influenced by social media, but are they actually being influenced?

Some further, research from Harvard Business School talks about how relative social standing may paradoxically reduce influence:

Our results show that there are three distinct groups of users with very different behavior.
The low-status group (48% of users) are not well connected, show limited interaction with other members and are unaffected by social pressure. The middle-status group (40% users) is moderately connected, show reasonable non-purchase activity on the site and have a strong and positive effect due to friends’ purchases. In other words, this group exhibits “keeping up with the Joneses” behavior. On average, their revenue increases by 5% due to this social influence. The high-status group (12% users) is well connected and very active on the site, and shows a significant negative effect due to friends’ purchases. In other words, this group differentiates itself from others by lowering their purchase and strongly pursuing non-purchase related activities. This social influence leads to almost 14% drop in the revenue of this group. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our results.

This is consistent with what's known as the middle status conformity thesis. Detailed here (Philips and Zuckerman 2001). Not to put to fine a point on this implication, but if 48% of the population is a "low-class", and these people are not influenced socially, then social advertising to them is ineffective.

Other background reading:
* Impact of Social Influence in E-Commerce Decision Making
* Distinguishing between Drivers of Social Contagion: Insights from Combining Social Network and Co-location Data

"Giant Components" Implies WInner-Takes-All in the Social Network Race

2011-01-15T04:03:00.000-08:00

In graph theoretic social networking analysis, there's a concept known as "Giant Components". As the name implies, in any given human social network, there exists one main, extremely large, set of connected "nodes" (people) surrounded by significantly smaller, disconnected from the giant component, peripheral clusters of social networks.

This is illustrated qualitatively in "Networks, Crowds, and Markets" (free version here) by given the example: consider your current friend group, and who they're connected to, and so on. Ultimately, you'll find you're indirected connected to people from other countries. Another way to put it, if everyone has 100 (unique) friends, you very quickly get to large numbers of connected nodes (100 of your friends x (have) 100 friends x (who have) 100 friends x (who have) 100 friends x (who have) 100 friends = 10B people. However, there will be people, isolated on an island somewhere, that is not connected to the giant component.

Random Example (from here). You can see that a high proportion of nodes below to one connected cluster.

If any one person, in any one of the smaller clusters, becomes connected to the "Giant Component", the entire cluster is then considered part of the "Giant Component". So, it's reasonable to assume that, at some point, the desert island person will eventually meet one person in the giant component. It seems, in this connected world, we're almost fatalistically destined to be part of the giant component.

It is inevitable then, that we become part of the Facebook giant component, right? They're nearing 600 millions users, and check out this giant component.

In reality, things aren't as inevitable. It's not obvious initially, but a few things to consider:

The definition of the edges (connections between people) are a little more nuanced than simply "knowing" someone. What if you, instead of drawing a social graph based on Facebook-stated friendships, you drew it based on spending greater than 10 hours a day together? The graph would become much more fragmented.
Graphs can be used to represent different classes of social graphs. For example, and Facebook even does this, my family, and my coworkers could be represented as separate graphs. In other words, people are capable of belonging to multiple networks.

Both of these facts create an opportunity for emerging or niche social networks to evolve and grow -- and not necessarily at the expense of Facebook either! In retrospect, Livemocha, an interest-based social network, benefited from this.

Another example (or maybe a 3rd bullet is required above stating "cultural norms") is Mixi, a Japanese social network. Recently featured in the NYTimes, Facebook has been relatively unsuccessful in Japan. Some speculate it is cultural in nature; that the Japanese are more private and that Facebook's religious-like fervor towards unfettered openness doesn't resonate there. Allegedly, on Mixi only 5% of users use their real picture as an avatar.

The "giant component" question seems to simply be one of definition. Existentially, or environmentally, aren't we all connected?

As an aside, I'm taking a Social Media Analysis reading course this semester (similar to this one at Carnegie Melon). I have a weekly blog-writing assignment - this is the first post of many.

Making Ideas Happen (book)

2010-11-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the book "Making Ideas Happen" by Scott Belsky. I describe it as a "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" for creative people. MIH is broken into 3 sections:

Organization and Execution - avoid getting bored, persevere, and prioritize.
Forces of Community - tell people what you're going to do, and find collaborators.
Leadership Capability - share your ideas, be flexible on how work is done.

The big lessons:

When making notes, working on tasks, organize your thoughts into: action steps, reference, and back burner. You'll probably never use reference, you need a system for coming back to back burners, but the key is to always think about how to move forward. I've been doing this for the last few days. Usually these type of books don't stick, but the action step principle has changed my passivity in meetings and priorities.
Recognize the tendency of the project plateau. It's easy to come up with ideas, difficult to do them - don't get distracted with new ideas.
Create a Support Circle - set up a group, 10-15 people, who share common goals/ interests to support each other in meeting your goal.
3 types of people: 1. Dreamers - come up with ideas quickly, suck at execution. 2. Doers - focus on execution. 3. Incrementalists - can iterate between doing and dreaming. The key lesson though is that many dreamers consciously 'hire' doers as partners.
Hire initiators (people that will voluntarily pick up and run with a project). I saw a survey for Google's recruiting that asked, "have you ever turned a profit at your own non-tech business" "won a world record" "started a non profit" - clearly they're looking for this too.
Cynics vs skeptics - cynics are unmovable.
In a project, identify the "sacred" aspects and comprise on everything else.

Good quotes:

Justice prevails over time in any good organization, but justice does not prevail at any given point in time.
Make yourself become who you are - Friedrich Nietzsche
All I want to be is someone who creates truly meaningful things.

2010-02-27T13:23:00.001-08:00

Testing seesmic for blackberry.

2010-02-16T17:15:00.001-08:00

Status updates gone wild. Sorry I had ping.fm syncing issues with tumblr, myspace, friendfeed.

2010-02-16T15:29:00.001-08:00

Just as I was giving rogers props...

If I Worked at Yelp

2010-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

I've actively been using Yelp (I even attended an event) and Foursquare for the last several months (much to the dismay of my Facebook friends who have to see my Foursquare check-ins in Facebook). Actually using these services, you realize that they're fundamentally different products, independently addressing a piece of a larger opportunity. I keep asking myself why Yelp hasn't really aggressively responded to Foursquare.

This quote from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says it all, "Yelp has the chance to become one of the great Internet brands...That for me is the chance of a lifetime." They allegedly recently turned down a $700mm offer from MSFT and a $550mm offer from GOOG. AND they recently took $50mm in funding.

With that $50mm burning a hole in my pocket, I would focus on 5 things to make good on Jeremey's goal:

1. Leverage user segmentation

When I was in Quebec City on holidays, I tried using Yelp to get some recommendations. The problem is that one person's 5 stars could potentially be my 3 stars. The example I give is that I unapologetically like local dives. I want to give a venue 5 stars, but I don't want my Mom to misconstrue that as a recommendation for her.

The solve: Sense Networks. These guys do some interesting work -- they segment users into "tribes" based on the locations they frequent. For example, there could be two "tribes": 'fancy mama's' and '30-y-o wanna be hipsters'. So, when I do a search for restaurants in Quebec city, I would be effectively asking "for all the '30 yo wanna be hipsters' what are the top venues?"

2. Focus on micro-engagement

I know Yelp just launched the idea of checking in (the Foursquare idea) on their iphone app, but there's really 2 sides to this: checking in and getting recommendations. I want to ask, in an Urbanspoon-kind-of-way, for a restaurant nearby. I don't want to read any reviews, I just want it to be near me, and leverage the technology I mentioned in point #1.

3. Neutralize other networks

If you've used SocialScope on BlackBerry, or Ping.fm , you get it. Post an update once, and it finds it's way to all your "social accounts". I want to be able to check-in once, and it shows up in Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, and Yelp. An aggregator app like this, authored by Yelp, puts Yelp in control. Otherwise, some 3rd party (or a competitor) will do this and guide their users to a competitive site.

4. Double-down on mobile

I heard anecdotally that the number 1 status update source on Twitter is still SMS. Also, the cost of writing a good iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry app is much less than the $50mm in funding Yelp took. Seriously, aggressively develop these apps, leverage the platform-strengths of each, and make sure they have at least feature parity. People will engage much more.

5. Let me make reservations
I'm sure the Yelp Eliters don't like this idea, but from a 'user needs' perspective, think about the process of 'finding a place to eat'. I go to Yelp, search for a recommendation, then I need to call to make a reservation (and Yelp doesn't get paid). I don't want to talk to someone, I just want to click "make reservation", select day/time, add it to my calendar, invite my friends, and be done. A partnership with OpenTable would solve this problem, and if it turns out to be lucrative, at least Yelp would own the end user.

Rogers Redeeming Themselves

2010-01-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

Well I have to say, I'm impressed with Rogers. Months of complaining (I've written about it in tedious detail here), calls, and defection; they've (partially) redeemed themselves with a (newly) implemented social media program -- they're listening. @RogersRob replied (well actually he was on vacation, @RogersMary took care of me). I followed her, she direct messaged me, took my contact info.

Literally days later, I received a voicemail from 'Steven L' from "the office of the president" at Rogers. We played some phone tag, but we spoke yesterday, and I have to say again that I'm impressed.

Steven listened to my story, conceded that it wasn't particularly well-handled (either the sales or support process) and offered up 50% of the early cancellation fee (~$250). He also made sure to mention that he was willing to provide the rebate even if I don't come back to Rogers.

I offered to volunteer for a customer advisory board related to early cancellation feeds and Steven said he'd look into it. He conceded that there's a chance that the ECF wasn't properly communicated originally. I told him that that could have been solved by putting a letter in my first bill clearly (simply) stating the policy, the cost, and a phone number to call w/ any questions (or to address my buyers remorse).

A couple of weeks later, the check showed up, but they haven't taken me up on my advisory board participation.

Goodbye Rogers! - Is a class-action appropriate?

2009-09-28T14:00:00.001-07:00

Updated - 20091231

I can't believe these Rogers guys -- they can't keep their hand out of my pocket. I was trying to let it go, but it's really a comedy of errors that has played out over 4 months:

Sept 2009 - See the post below. Basically, they slap me with a $360 early cancellation fee on my cell plan.
Oct 2009 - They reversed my VIP savings and charged me back. I cancelled all of my other services with Rogers.
Nov 2009 - They slapped me with another set of early cancellation fees (despite their assurance there wouldn't be) for my TV and Internet (God Bless TekSavvy).
Dec 2009 - This is the best part. I get a card from Rogers saying "Something's Been Missing You" and "We've missed you and want you back" - the envelope was addressed to "RESIDENT". Yes, that's right, they miss yours truly, Resident. Incredible. The best part, they offered a "free" digital cable box, valued at $550. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to retain me by showing a bit of empathy and flexibility with their ECF policy?

Rumor has it that Rogers has engaged in some kind of social media presence. Search Twitter for #rogersfail, and you'll see @rogersrob diligently blocking and tackling (I'd imagine, not an easy job). I'm going to drop Rob a note, or maybe Mr. Phil Hartling, the VP that misses "resident" so much.

-----

Not that it will make a difference, but the story needs to be told -- if only for my personal sanity. I'll make it short here, I promise:

Becky and I move back to Canada last year, she brings a BlackBerry (she had her own hardware, this is important) and I sign her up for no-contract service.
Becky starts school at Ryerson - and they up sell her, over the phone, to a "student plan". Cool - good deal.
Turns out we don't need Becky's line anymore, so we go to cancel it. Rogers dutifully cancelled the service.

Here's where it goes pear-shaped I get a bill in the mail, and I'm actually excited. Will be nice to not have that re-occurring expense. Turns out there was an early cancellation fee of $400 on the student plan.

This is BS for so many reasons:

We didn't even need their stupid student plan.
We didn't even get a "phone" out of the deal. If they had subsidized the phone, this is fair, but for an under-used wireless line, $400 is a little heavy handed.
I've been a subscriber of rogers services as long as I've been buying phone-internet-cable.
They screwed me last time I moved from Waterloo->Seattle with an early termination fee.
We don't remember, but at no time were we told that there was an early-cancellation clause.

Anyway, I digress - so:

I call rogers last week and say "come on guys, this is crazy. I've been a rogers subscriber for years. I still have internet and cable with you. Cut me a break." The woman on the phone was arrogant and antagonistic and didn't budge.
I tweet my discontent and several people write back saying "check out teksavvy". I call them up, and they're rad - nicest people on the phone (the one guy said sarcastically about their $0.25/GB overage charge, "yeah, we rape our customers" (!awesome), great price, no contracts, they're in Chatham. Great except I needed to confirm that my building supports their service.
Confirmed today.
I called Rogers to cancel, one last chance to be a good corporate steward. Nope. I told him to cancel the remainder of my services, didn't ask for anything, didn't really mention the wireless issue until he asked, "yes, I'm a little frustrated with the wireless guys." His retort, "what?! you expect that you're going to threaten to cancel over a $400 ecf from a contract that YOU signed?" Fair enough, but still.

Technically, that is legally-technically, it's probably my fault -- I should have inquired about early-cancelation-fees, though I don't remember signing a contract. The spirit of the situation here makes me think we need more consumer protection around this sort of thing:

Here are the clinchers:

When I left Seattle for Toronto, TMobile hit me with an early cancellation fee. I called an explained - THEY WAIVED IT!
I recently got an annual fee for a TD visa card that we don't use anymore. I called and cancelled the card after-the-fact, and TD (a bank for christ's-sake!) waived the fee and closed the card.

When the banks are the good guys in a story, you know we have problems with wireless providers in Canada.

2009-09-14T09:47:00.001-07:00

To all the Americans looking forward to the 'public option' imagine renewing your healthcard at the dmv. I am doing so in Ontario right now.

2009-08-31T17:43:00.001-07:00

Ask Phil Asmundson what his duties are at Deloitte & Touche and be ready for an earful. As the vice chairman and national managing partner of Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications (TMT), Asmundson helps set the overall TMT strategy for the firm, advises clients directly, and serves as a member of the TMT Deloitte Editorial Committee. He is a regular speaker at industry events and is regularly quoted on emerging trends in the space.

Asmundson has spent 28 years at Deloitte & Touche and will speak at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09. In the edited interview below, he discusses the impact of ever-increasing traffic on mobile networks and some of the ways carriers can avoid becoming dumb pipes.

Colin Gibbs: We’ve seen a dramatic surge in mobile data usage in North America in the last year or so as smartphones move into the mainstream and on-the-go computing gets legs. How are carriers' attitudes toward mobile VoIP and other non-cellular technologies evolving due to the increasing traffic?

Phil Asmundson: I think we’re at an early stage of wireless transformation that will ultimately require collaboration across various networks. Carriers have traditionally been reluctant to circumvent their cellular networks, but the shift to data from voice will ultimately force them to offload traffic. I think we’ll get to the point where carriers don’t care whether a call is being carried on their network or on another network, and I think all-you-can-eat plans are going to help drive that.

Gibbs: It still seems like some network operators are having a hard time accepting that, though. How far have they come in changing their thinking regarding non-cellular use?

Asmundson: I think they’re all in the early stages at this point. The carriers have always been the main point of contact, the control point for the customer, and it’s tough to relinquish some of that.

Gibbs: Earlier this year we read headlines detailing how mobile networks in Japan were struggling to deliver content to users. Are we seeing those kinds of network strains in the U.S. yet? If not, when should we expect them?

Asmundson: It really depends on how pricing goes. One of the things about smartphones is that they’re going to increase my usage so much that metering me, billing me on minutes, isn’t going to make any sense.

Carriers are quite reluctant to give up control, and I understand why if I had invested billions of dollars to build out my network, I would want to see a return on that investment, too. But I will also say that carriers are extraordinarily concerned about the experience of the customer out there. The real impetus that will push this over the edge will be when you start to have failure of access. That may not be just around the corner; that may be here already. But to me this is a good problem. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in math to conclude that voice ARPU is declining. If this is the case, the future of wireless must be focused on data traffic, not voice. That’s a big conversion to be done, which is why carriers are anxious to build out 4G networks.

Gibbs: I'm reading a lot about things like off-peak content delivery and the use of femtocells to minimize network traffic, but other than Wi-Fi, I have yet to see much real progress. How important will those kinds of solutions be in the next few years? What other kinds of potential solutions have you seen?

Asmundson: Ultimately, what we’re facing is that the interface between various wireless technologies will become very important. I personally believe that as you start to get into ultraband, ultimately we’re going to see a world where my device will communicate with networks in real time. It will look at many different attributes including signal strength, device type, congestion it will look at that in real time, and it will determine which technology is best suited to deliver that to me.

Gibbs: It seems that’s beginning to happen on very high-end, enterprise-focused mobile computers. But how close are we to seeing that with more consumer-targeted phones?

Asmundson: I think we’re years from seeing it because it requires a whole new revenue model. Media is really interesting if you get a dollar of media revenue you can watch how it’s sliced and diced up (among multiple partners). That’s how it would have to happen in telecom. This would be something that would be handing off in real time, and that would require new revenue agreements.

Gibbs: When will we see mobile broadband consumer services being deployed in any real way?

Asmundson: We have to get LTE and WiMAX first, so in any meaningful way we’re looking at four to six years. I think the economic downturn sure put a downturn on that, the availability of funds, because let’s face it: It’s expensive.

Gibbs: What tools can carriers leverage as they fight the war against becoming dump pipes?

Asmundson: I think there are a lot of revenue opportunities that go beyond the pipe, and maybe that’s the next generation of telcos. As you start to move more and more things that are personal to you into the cloud, there is the question of who’s going to store it for you. Who’s going to back it up? Who’s going to secure your privacy? I think there is a lot of opportunity for carriers who have huge data centers. They haven’t done an awful lot in that area I have one case I can’t talk about but there are some movements from carriers who are trying to get more aggressive.

Yelp: When Community Management Reinforces Real-Life Weak Ties

2009-07-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, some family, friends, and I ventured from Waterloo to Toronto to participate in theYelp CMYE: Toronto Cupcake Crawl. It was a gluttonous, sugar-coma-inducing day wherein we sampled cupcakes from a dozen local and independent downtown vendors.

I was most impressed by the level of sophisication inYelp's community management. Kat, the Toronto-area Community Manager fit the role perfectly: outgoing, engaging, welcoming, and knows her food. Kat is actually employed by Yelp and, that got me thinking, how does Yelp-corporate justify paying her?

Seeding Content

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm betting that some quant-jock-analyst at Yelp recognized that they were seeing a disproportionate number of searches for 'cupcakes' in toronto. Google Trends is showing that 'muffin' search volumes have been steady-to-decling, whereas 'cupcakes' have been steadily increasing to the point where 'cupcake' search volumes are at par with 'muffin' searches.

Ultimately, Yelp wants to drive users to their site and get them engaged to drive page views and, therefore, ad revenue. Having high-quality, trust-worthy, recent, relevant content is an engagement-driver. At time of writing, the cupcake crawl has 10 reviews totalling ~350

0 words.

As an aside, I was amazed at the role of mobile computing played in creating this content. Several people were Tweeting, but more interesting, people were shooting and posting images of their cupcakes in real-time using their iPhones. A lesson-learned for UGC-reliant sites -mobility lowers the barrier-to-contribution for your site.

Converting Weak Ties to Strong Ties

When I was at Livemocha, no tangible benefit occurred to me to introduce our community members at face-to-face events. After observing the Yelp community in action, it's clear:

Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)

Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).

In conclusion, for those that care, Babycakes was the best-of-show (but, truthfully, I'm more of a cookie-man).

2009-05-02T07:15:00.001-07:00

I'm at SFO way too early. Awesome week in the valley-coming back in 3 weeks hopefully.

2009-04-19T16:41:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/i035X - Tired of hard drive failures. Raidin' it now.

2009-04-14T15:11:00.001-07:00

Think of mapping applications as spatial browsers. How does maps as a platform intersect with web?
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

Note to Coffee Culture in Fort Erie: an Americano is not a drip. Wow - did that sound pretentious?

2009-04-07T04:45:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/OHhUc - A touch of authenticity at the Harmony Lunch in waterloo, on.
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-06T16:45:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/B3VNF - Testing ping still. What will happen with this image?
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-06T15:53:00.001-07:00

Testing out ping.fm - multi-service status updating - is the future here now? http://ping.fm

Why Advertising is (NOT) Failing on the 'Net

2009-03-22T15:41:00.001-07:00

Really interesting and controversial Techcrunch-guest-piece by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He makes the basic argument that users will ignore and/or disintermediate advertising online and therefore advertising will ultimatly fail.

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.

I think he's wrong. Here's why:

Performance vs Brand: He totally ignores brand advertising. Online, performance based ads are high-profile, and has dominated over brand advertising. This is due to the medium - the Internet is data rich and user-interactive (unlike TV that is passively consumed)
Brand advertising isn't about conversions exclusively, it's about moving people through the purchase decision process and increasingly brand familiarity/ favorability with the goal of increasing the probability that someone will buy your product vs a competitor's. The point: an ad on a screen doesn't need to be clicked on to be impactful (from the point of view of a brand advertiser). Eg. If the Watchmen movie is launching this weekend, the studio would prefer that you click on the banner ad and explore the content THEN go watch the movie, but if you just decide to watch the movie (because the ad made the movie top of mind), they're also happy.
Everything he said about the Internet is true about meatspace TV advertising: people do not trust, want, or need advertising. He then argues that synchronicity of TV makes those ads more impactful, but has he never made a bag of popcorn during commercial breaks on TV?
He narrowly defines "advertising" as the banner ad: corporate/ product sites are a form of advertising, and research shows that though this isn't the most trustworthy source, it's a primary source used by consumers to help make a purchase decision.

Advertising on the internet suffers for a couple reasons:

Supply: Unlike TV where the advertising is "hardcoded" into the content, and there's a limited # of impressions possible, the Internet's has billions-billions-trillions of impressions everyday. At AdTech, interactive folks complained that the price of a broadcast impression is higher than an online impression. My arguement back: increase the quality of your content to have parity with TV and reduce the number of available of impressions/ user to the same as TV (say 5/ hour), and you have an arguement.
Relevance/ Trust: Relevance is really just a response to the supply problem. Mobile advertising,behavioral targeting capabilities, really rich niche content, social advertising really just allow advertisers to increase the probability of conversion (or a high-quality impression) and efficiency of spend. They're willing to pay more for inventory that "works" better.

In other words, I sense online people have high expectations for both the performance of ads and how they expect people will interact with ads. In general, people do not want to interact with ads, but they don't mind high-quality content sponsored by high-quality, relevant advertisers.

The problem from the publisher perspective - it's a race to the bottom, the market is too efficient:

Any high-quality content they make, is competing with "good enough" or "more relevant" content from another publisher. Eg I don't read CNN's political coverage, I go to huffingtonpost - I don't read their tech news, I go to Techcrunch.
The Internet evens the playing field to attract ad dollars (not quite, but it's moving this way). Programmatic ad buying/ placement/ measurement means a big brand can just as easily advertise on a niche site as on a large publisher's site and if it performs, there's no reason to buy elsewhere.

Both of these factors result in an ever-reducing ad rates: good for advertisers because it provides the opportunity for huge reach, bad for publishers because they have to actually provide good content.

Typealyzer.com - Analyzes Your Blog for Personality Disposition

2009-03-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

Found typealyzer at thoughtgadgets.com. It's an interesting tool that scans the contents of your blog to determine your meyers-briggs personality bias.

Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money

2009-03-17T14:43:00.001-07:00

Location Location Location: The Future of Mobile Advertising

2009-03-17T13:15:00.001-07:00

SXSW2009 - Tuesday Keynote: Chris Anderson / Guy Kawasaki Conversation

2009-03-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Beyond Apple TV: Next-Generation Systems for Acquiring Content

2009-03-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable

2009-03-17T07:54:00.001-07:00

Trying out ScribbleLive.com - they're a Canadian live blogging company out of Toronto.

Bruce Sterling Sessions

2009-03-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

Social networking bigger than email.

These artifacts are what we call books... Let me explain how these devices work.

Publishing, in my lifetime, has never been in such a perilious state.

Kindle is like a cassette plug-in for an atari.

Less conerned about "death of author" more concerned with "death of audience"

Connectivity will be a signifier of poverty.

Canadians are like back bacon, great white north.

Ultra-right bookstore in Austin: Brave New Books

A year ago, video game conference, with ike refugees in the next room, who looked more futuristic? The greying game programmers?

The elderly will be the backbone of the social web.

Old Man Nielsen vs. New Market Research

2009-03-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Daniel Neely   Founder/CEO,   Networked Insights
Dave McClure   Troublemaker,   Founders Fund
Jim Schroer   Founder,   EngageNextGen LLC
Michael J Lambie   Digital Research Dir-,   Nielsen Company

Neely (Networked Insights):

Social media has made access to data easy/ cheap.
The same, companies are still selling things, need to stay relevant.
How to take customer message and put into my message
"Engagement" and "impression" are over-used words.
Old way: lots of data -> new way: actionable insights (free -> insight -> valuable insight -> actionable)
2 by 2: high/low engagement, negative/positive sentiment. high/neg = pr, high/high = marketing
Tools: networked insights, visible tech, quantcast, radian, kissmetrics, trackur, scountlabs, comscore, nielsen, whostalking.com, google alerts/search, twitter.
New way: actionable insights: adding anthropological perspective to the numbers

Measurement

Nielsen (Lambie)

Tools: Ethnolgraphy, neuro science, cams

Jim (Engage next gen)

Thesis: actionable/buzz means more than exposure. Eg Teleflora - winner on superbowl (1400% inrease in "buzz"). Coke "buzz' went down post superbowl.
Is social media a good proxy for word of mouth? If so, then it should impact spending.

Agencies hide behind metrics (according to a brand). Not just sentiment, but interactions -> impacts marketing spend.

Promoter score (McClure) don't promote until sentiment is positive.

User voice, get satisfaction

Other tools (neely): truecast (invisible technologies), trackr, biz360

Mcclure: compete, hitwise

Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins

2009-03-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Arun Ranganathan  Mozilla
Chris Wilson   Web Platform Architect,   Microsoft
Brendan Eich   CTO,   Mozilla Foundation
Charles McCathieNevile   Chief Standards Officer,   Opera Software
Darin Fisher   Software Engineer,   Google

What's in it for Google in the browser game (to Google). You chose webkit.

Initially, focus was "how to make Firefox more successful"
2006, looking at other opps to radically improve browsers (multi-process, rending engines, make it faster).
Gecko vs webkit - webkit was fast (surprisingly, fast). Code base was simpler and was adopted by mobile. Smaller footprint.
Gecko is a full platform for app dev, webkit is only a rending engine.

With the declining marketshare of IE6 (cheers), potential adoption of IE8 - there is no real majority rendering engine. Where to collab, where to compete? Chris (MSFT) Standards in the context of silverlight - you're the chair of the HTML working-group.

Doesn't work, or evangelize siverlight, but there are scenarios where it makes sense.

Standardization of web APIs - opera has a lot of skin in the game.

There are some scenarios, but limits reach. If you want broad reach, you'll need to rely on standards.

People still have to pull hair out to dev for web. What gives? (Mozilla)

Silverlight isn't taking over the web. A lot less worried this year, than last.

How standards are actually made. HTML5 discussions: APIs, video, 2/3d graphics. Modifying the spec license.

(MSFT) Distiguish between open source licenses: do whatever vs do and contribute back.

Javascript performance wars:

IE8 seriously by MSFT? Yes. Performance, though, not just focused on JS (holistic approach).

Battery dying...

Shift happens: moving from words to picture

2009-03-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Sunni Brown   Owner,   BrightSpot Info Design
Tom Crawford   CEO,   VizThink
Dave Gray   Chairman,   XPLANE
Lee LeFever   Principal,   Common Craft
Dan Roam   President,   Digital Roam Inc

I caught the tail end of this session - I know Lee LeFever from my days in Seattle. His work rocks.

Dan Roam (I think) showed some really interesting visualizations of the stimulus package. You can see some of them here.

Beyond Aggregation - Finding the Web's Best Content

2009-03-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Marshall Kirkpatrick   VP Content Dev,   ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray   Author/Publisher,   louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera   Founder/CEO,   Techmeme
Melanie Baker   Community Mgr,   AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin   VP Business Dev,   Lijit Networks Inc

Postrank leverages "engagement metrics" to determine hot stories.

Postrank , yahoo!pipes

Layers necessary for aggregation:

Layer 1: enough data
Layer 2: enough meta-data and linking

2 More Days at SXSW

2009-03-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

Some post-Salt Lick recovery was required today and I'm refusing to carry around my lenovo T61p. Not only is my laptop huge, but I'm a dork among dorks - at least everyone else has sweet MacBooks.

The Seven Rules for Great Application Design

In this lively and interactive session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., the author of 'Designing the Obvious' and 'Designing the Moment', uses the audience to reveal the 7 essential design principles for achieving great application design and the psychology behind them. And he does it all without a single bullet point (gasp!).
Panelist(s): Robert Hoekman Jr (CEO/Principal Experience Designer, Miskeeto LLC)

People are bad at predicting their own behavior - ask users what they want, then ignore them.
7 Factors:

Understand users, then ignore them. Understand how users actually behave.
Build only what's necessary.
Support user's mental model. Eg. Squidoo calls pages "lenses" - users don't know what that is.
Turn beginner users into intermediate users ASAP. Eg. Get users registered and contributing ASAP.
Prevent errors. Eg. Don't throw random, unintelligible error messages at users. Just prevent it altogether and fail gracefully.
Design for uniformity, consistency, meaning. Make navigation/ layout, as consistent as possible
Reduce, reduce, reduce (refine).

Emerging Trends in Mobile

Panelist(s): Rob Gonda (Dir of Mktg Strategy & Analysis, Sapient), Juan-Carlos Morales (Creative Dir, Sapient Interactive)

Nothing too insightful - some really amazing video footage of augmented reality.
Some rehasing of Apple Appstore app download stats: 15k apps, 500m downloads, $1bn in revenue, 93% have apps, $25bn in mobile content downloads.
Monkeyball is taking $15k/ mo
Allegedly, there's some announcement from MIT where they charge batteries in less than 7 seconds
Update (3/16): Good live stream here

Zappos - Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos

I have to say, I'm not big on "corporate culture" but this guy really has it down to a science. Zappos has some pretty radical practices: pays new hires $2000 to walk away (to test commitment) and they publish an annual employee contributed "culture of Zappos". If you're ever in Vegas, they'll pick you up from the airport and will give you a company tour - these guys are serious about culture.

His basic premise: brand identity comes when you get the culture right. 6 criteria for developing a healthy culture.

Decide if you want to build a long term brand
Figure out your values and culture
Vision, what you're thinking, and think bigger. Chase vision, not money.
Build relationships, not networks.
Build your team: hire slowly, fire quickly
Think long term. How people remain happy/ engaged: perceived happiness, progress, connectedness, vision.

He got a little philosophical - models of happiness:

Please -> engagement -> meaning
Job -> career -> calling

SXSW (Twitter) Tools

2009-03-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

Twitterati indeed - it's almost comical. People are Twitter-crazy here here at SXSW. There's so much data, I'm having difficult making something meaningful from the stream. That said, lot's of really interesting tools people are using.

Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/): A Twitter Air client for your desktop. Looking around at people on their laptops, this seems to be the client of choice. The first question from the first session was "what's the hash for this session?". Twhirl allows you to "search" for hashes (eg. #swsw) and it automatially feeds the stream - really great during the sessions.

Peoplebrowsr (http://www.peoplebrowsr.com). A very feature-rich web-based twitter client. What I really like about it is that you can "search" for and watch multiple streams concurrenting (eg I was watching #sxsw, #austin, #sxswi all at once today - it was pretty crazy).

Outside.in (http://outside.in) This came up during Steve Johnson's (co-creator of outside.in) panel. It's actually primarily to be a crowd-sourced local-news site, but they have a clever mashup that overlays tweets, "story maps", containing geo-data on a map (ie. if you tweet "sxswguide: Heading of to Six Lounge for the Social Media Group party. sxswi (@hametner) MARCH 13" it will put "Six Lounge" on the map).

Other tools people seem to be using:

Sched.org - The SXSW schedule site sucks really bad. Even the printed schedule is unusable this year (I think last year it showed the sessions in order, with a brief summary - this year, not so much). Sched.org is a really usable web-based, SXSW-dedicated, calendar that lets you filter by show (interactive, film, etc) as well provide high-level summary of the sessions. It let's you find free booze and food, and let's you merge calendars with your fellow-attendees.

happyhour.org - SXSW-dedicated party schedules. The sanctioned-sxsw schedule is better this year (it actually shows some of the parties), but this online tool is definitely more complete.

Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody

2009-03-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

Brian Brushwood Host, Revision3/Scam School

Interesting, albeit comedic, session by Brian. He's the host of an InternetTV show hosted by Revision3. His session was basically a summary of his show: using influence concepts for magicshow-like entertainment (eg pick a card, choose a word and he guesses it). It was definitely entertaining.

Check out the most recent show - he does a bar trick where he charges a straw and pretends he possesses telekenisis.

That said, and he even referrenced it later in his session, a lot of the concepts are captured in the book Influence by Robert Cialdini (which I highly recommend). It was also somewhat similar to the concepts contained in Josh Porter's "Designing for the Social Web".

The Ecosystem of News

2009-03-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

Steve Johnson from outside.in is the author of "everything bad is good for you" and "the invention of air".

News = "old growth media"

Back story:

going to the magazine store 3-4x / day to get new issue of mac world in the 80's.
Moved to nyc, joined compuserve for mac week.
'93 - wired magazine launched.
macintouch '
salon - scott rosenberg

Now: engadget, 'technica, gruber, norman, pogue, mossberg, macrumors.

Mcclewan vs wilson (now).

Blogging is inherently "parasitic" (bloggers link to traditoinal news articles)

New growth: depth and surface

Outsidein - geo-twitter

Jeff jarvis - "do what you do best, and link to the rest".

Newspapers "paper" readership has gone down, but online has increased. There's still a market for "authoritative"/ "editorialized" content that newspapers bring.

Ecosystem: professional, prof bloggers, non-profit journalists, amateur bloggers, diret events (eg obama race speech), public data/ apis -> commentary: pundits, bloggers, scholars ->curation: social media, professional/editors, aggregations, group filters -> Distribution: traditional, aggregators, viral world of mouth

Q's: someone needs to get paid to do this effectively. Business model?

A's: no answers

Lots of interesting techs:

sched.org

peoplebrowsr.com

outside.in

User Generated Content: State of the Union

2009-03-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

In general - this panel wasn't so great. They didn't mention monetization models.

Moderator: Chris Tolles Ceo, TopixDean Mccall Founder, IdeaGin

Stephen Newman   Chief Exec Officer,   Mouth Watering Media
Todd Morrey  Mosso: The Rackspace Cloud
Wes Wilson   Pres,   IncSpring (crowd souced brands/ logo)
Chris Tolles   Ceo,   Topix

Incredible - the first question asked was "what's the twitter hash for this panel?" It was #UGC.

Why UCG matters: In 1998 only geocities was UGC, now, 3 of top 10 (fox, wiki, facebook)

Good examples now:

Wes: YouTube (based on ads),
Todd:Twitter (tho no money!). Seems like an auction-like model seems to work - eg. Ebay.
Newman: TV - think reality tv, america's funniest home videos. Etsy
Wilson: Linkedin ($4M in ad revenue), Threadless (people can upload content, and people can buy the crowd-created designs).

?Gracenote - part of itunes for track listing.

We cheered to beat the room next door.

Money off the back of the masses? How fair is that?

As a user, when you're not paying for a service - it's expected.
But future models will allow users and company to profit.
There's more to it than $ - derivative products?
Facebook Ts&Cs - eg crowdsourcing terms.

How to prevent the riff-raff from destroying site?

No programatic way.

Other descriptions for UGC - "community curated works"? No one knows what CCW is!

Slashdot (karma).

Hierarchical - moderators can nominate other moderators. Wikipedia can see everything that's going. The more transparent, the less easy to game system.

Craigslist - $100m/ year. $8M on digg in 3 quarters last year.

Monetization is easier when closer to "the sale". Ie further down the purchase decision cycle.

Granovetter thresholds mentioned on twitter - on wikipedia

Blog catelogue - bloggers unite - ralley around a topic.

Not sure what any of this had to do with monetization of UGC.

SXSWi 2009 - Party Time, Don't Tell the Guys at RIM

2009-03-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

First things first - I haven't written on this blog since Oct 2008. It's interesting how getting sucked into the corporate machine prevents that. I'll be at SXSW today to next Friday - hopefully I'll catch some interesting sessions and some cool music (J Tillman on Thursday night!).

The lines are looking crazy for registration. I'd read that the "economic conditions" will result in reduced attendance. I'm sure the poeple waiting in the mile-long lines aren't feeling that way right now. I got here early, registered, and ate BBQ.

Today's agenda:

Not sure there's any party-time tonight, but everyone is talking about happyhour.org - a party listing iphone app, from what i can see. I'll check it out now.

The Psychology of Waiting in Lines

2008-09-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

I was poking around the Experientia blog, they had an interesting reference to Don Norman's forthcoming book. One of the chapters on "They Psychology of Waiting Lines" is available for preview - it's awesome (albeit poorly edited). Ironically, coming back from Ottawa a few weekends ago with my family, I was furious about the "line design" and actually said out loud "this would be interesting to study" (they were using a multi-line, multi-cashier model - it was awful).

Here's the Cole's notes: Eight Design Principles for (Designing) Waiting Lines:

Emotions Dominate - People believe "Attractive Things Work Better"
Eliminate Confusion: Provide a Conceptual Model, Feedback and Explanation - Ever wait in a long line, just to find out it's the wrong one?
The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People accept waits, but it needs to be perceived as appropriate. Tell your workers that customers take priority over counter cleaning!
Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Tell people how long the line is.
Keep People Occupied: Filled Time Passes More Quickly Than Unfilled Time - The idea of a "double buffer" for lines: have a staging area to entertain people before they wait in line.
Be Fair - The optimal "fairness" line is a single line, with multiple cashiers. Interesting note re: multi-line, multi-cashier scenarios: people tend to notice when their lines move slower more than they notice when it's moving faster.
End Strong, Start Strong - People will even perceive longer lines "better" than shorter ones if the longer line has a "positive" period.
Memory of an Event Is More Important Than the Experience - Eg. Giving pictures after a roller-coaster.

Many of these "waiting line" design principles apply to "designing experiences in general", but specifically to mobile (for the first 4 anyway):

Emotions Dominate - Think iPhone, Apple Store experience.
Eliminate Confusion: Tivo and Ikea have awesome "out of box experiences" with fold out maps.
The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People expect some work to get their phone up and running, just make it match their expectations.
Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Apple's getting hammered due to their over-promise of 3G network speeds.

Mobile Needs to Learn What Fashion Has Always Known

2008-08-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

First blog in months - quite a bit has changed. I'll spare you the details, but I've moved back to Canada, I'm living in Toronto, and I've taken a new role at a Waterloo-based mobile handset and services company. I'm just getting settled and so haven't had a lot of time to think about blogging, but I do have an hour and 15 minute commute both ways everyday to pontificate on the world's events.

Branding's Migration from Product Quality Expectations to Personal "Quality" Persona

Everyday during my commute, I pass a factory-turned-luxury loft called "Tip Top Lofts". Bear with me here, but this is an interesting example of the commercialization of personal space. Why would people pay a million dollars for a condo to be branded 'Tip Top Tailors'? Home-owners don't do this, so why is this ok for high-end condo owners?

Having grown up near Buffalo, NY, home-owners actually do "brand" their homes; the classic Buffalo-area example, is the xmas-time Buffalo Bills animated lawn ornament.

If one considers the historical purpose of the brand, it was to consistently represent a product or company, thereby imparting a certain consistent consumer expectation for the quality of a product. For example, you had an expectation, before buying Quaker Oats, of the quality of Quaker Oaks based on past purchases of that brand. The Buffalo Bills example is a departure from this it seems to indicate something in the evolution of brand use from the perspective of the consumer:

Branding is no longer used solely by companies to reflect the quality of a product for MY consumption, it's used by ME to reflect MY "quality" to others.

Put another way, brands have been co-opted by consumers to reflect the persona they wish others to see in them. What I'm saying here isn't new: the hip-hoppers with their baggy Fubu pants certainly know a skater when they see someone wearing Dickie's pants.

An Aside: Social Proof
Not to get too academic, but the concept of "personal branding" seems to make sense in a society with information overload. Human beings are naturally programmed to generalize the environment around us to facilitate processing of information.

I've mentioned social proof previously, but for review, according to wikipedia, social proof is:

"...a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed."

In other words,

We're using the brands we wear to fast-track the decision-making process other's use to judge us.

The Cellphone as a "Personal Device" is Exactly Wrong
I hear it often that the mobile phone is the most personal of consumer electronics - it seems rationale but consider this:

The mobile phone is probably the most public piece of consumer electronics we own - we have it with us, and use it in front of everyone, all the time.
The #1 way people "share" camera phone pictures is by physically showing people the pictures on their phone.

Do we think that "personalization features" such as ring tones and wallpapers are for the owner of the device because they get some intrinsic maternal-like satisfaction from customizing their phone?

Personalization features are the tools people use to extend the brand of "self".

The iPhone is a "Me Brand"
As technologists, we look at the incredible success Apple has had in gaining mind share of the iPhone and we jump straight to features: touch screen, big screen, multimedia, gigabytes, apple store. The iPhone, however, isn't particularly impressive technologically - most smart phones compare from a retail collateral "checkbox" perspective.

I suspect that Apple has transcended the technology argument by making the iPhone a fashion accessory to accompany Fubu or Dickie's demin. It's a beautifully aesthetically designed, well-positioned and marketed, device that allows it's trendy owners to fast-track the decision-making process other's use to judge them.

Will other handset vendors follow Apple with features, follow Apple's "brand", or embrace a differentiated "handset as a brand" strategy? The smart phone market, with it's still low penetration, can certainly accommodate other personas. My question: is Nokia Fubu or Dickie's?

The (Mobile) "Atomization of Conversation"

2008-05-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

Half.com founder Alexand First Round Capital VC Josh Kopelman wrote an interesting post about the "Atomization of Conversation". Essentially, he's referring to the trend that "geek tools" such as Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr have replaced synchronous "conversations" historically serviced by tools such as email, IM, voice (or, imagine, in person).

I find this personally interesting because of my past life at RIM where we were obsessed with "push" (Corey, what *is* push?! -- sorry, inside joke). "Push" meant that you send me an email, and it's essentially delivered immediately *and* I'm notified as soon as it arrives. We prioritized push above anything -- synchronization of deletes and message status. The rationale is best explained by Alex, a designer friend of mine (to paraphrase):

BlackBerry is basically the human equivalent of Pavlov's dogs. The email arrives, you get notified, and the "treat" you receive is the information.

It's worth noting that employees, competitors and partners of RIM still don't really understand why "push" is so compelling, and so they create standalone apps like Gmail and Yahoo!Go that are really just a pseudo-browser experience.

The real question is, how do these tools like Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook make the migration to mobile in a compelling way? Sure, they're browser-based apps to begin with but, then again, so was email in many cases.

Maybe I'm not geeky enough, but I've been using Digsby for the last few weeks and have my Facebook and Twitter accounts set up. It's tedious and disruptive getting all of the alerts from these services. We'll need to come up with some way of making these alerts valuable and relevant - the future of these tools certainly necessitates a xobni-equivalent.

Why Product Managers Need to be Involved in Implementation

2008-04-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

Ok, it needs to be said - every Product Manager that has ever said to a developer "hey, I'm just the marketing guy." or "hey, I'm not responsible for the implementation." (which, btw, are my 2 favorite lines to say to a developer) is not doing their job.

I can show you why...

TD Bank has my money in Canada, but I'm wondering if I should trust them when they have UX design like this:
Why does their search look like the cockpit of a plane?

Are they purposefully making it difficult to find them to hedge against a bank run?

Are bank addresses more difficult to find than restaurant addresses?

Why are Yelp and Google Maps able to have search boxes like this? (just enter what you're "near")

I suspect, that doing a query across all these fields, or the "join" was deemed "too expensive" by TD's development team.

That's it - I'm taking my lifesavings and buying Google stock.

Ignoring the Buyer Purchase Decision Process Online

2008-04-06T13:12:00.000-07:00

It has been an incredibly busy time over the last couple of weeks: SXSW, the post-SXSW SARS, board meetings, hiring, massive system failure on my Lenovo laptop. Despite all this, one of the talks at SXSW, "Peas in a Pod: Advertising, Monetization and Social Media" continues to bounce around in my head. The talk featured Kent Nichols (Ask a Ninja) and Tim Kendall (Facebook), Ellen McGirt (Fast Company) and Seth Goldstein (Socialmedia Networks). The talk was timely because Livemocha is thinking a lot about monetization these days, and advertising is certainly a candidate.

The premise of the talk was to address the well-publicized disappointment of social advertising. Essentially, advertisers are disappointed with the click through rates they've seen in advertisements surfacing on social networks. I actually experimented very briefly with Facebook ads, and I can verify that the performance wasn't nearly as good as what we're seeing on Google.

Depending on what you're selling, how you sell it is highly contextual.

The talk contained what seemed to be 2 un-spoken themes:
1. The success of your advertising is dictated by your goals (and your goals are dictated by where you're playing in the user's purchase decision-making process).

Anyone that has taken marketing 101 knows the purchase decision process, but in tech we're obsessed with advertising as a means of moving a user from evaluation of alternative->purchase. As a social advertiser, if purchase is your criteria for success, you'll be disappointed. The pop culture's current wisdom says, CTRs on Google are much better than social advertising because when I'm searching, I'm looking to buy. When I'm on a social networking site, my focus is on interacting with my friends.

The point is, sometimes advertisers aren't looking to sell something RIGHT NOW, their goal may be to stay top-of-mind, or be perceived as a premium brand.

Kent Nichols (ask a ninja) made a good point: Tech people's obsessions with automation and scale have made them myopic about advertising. Unless it's measurable, and repeatable tasks can be done in an automated way, we tend to shy away. Ask a ninja has been successful in acquiring sponsorships because he worked the old-fashioned-way: "networking/ having dinner with people who sweat" (those were his words). In other words, he recognized that his "Phoenix University" ads weren't performing well, so he sought sponsorship partners (Yes, there are more advertising options out there than just banner ads) who were looking for creative ways to promote their products further back in the decision making process.

2. There are 2 types of brands: aspirational and functional (or, NO I don't want to play a video game about soap)

With the launch of the Facebook Platform, we heard a lot about how Facebook Apps are a great way for brands to engage their users. Further, Facebook Pages allow me to express my support for a specific brand so my friends know I love Mac computers or Nike shoes, or whatever the case may be. The idea here is to extend the school yard "cool kid" influencer to the online world - my friend Andy is cool, and he likes Nike shoes, so I should get a pair too.

The problem is: not all brands lend themselves to aspiration. Maybe I think my Mac computer says something about me, but I don't personally identify with my soap, and certainly my friends don't care. The table here provides a break down of advertising options based on the advertiser's context.

I can understand the appeal of online games by clueless big brands, with stats like these being thrown around:

Predictions for the size of the market for in-game advertising by 2010 range from $1.5bn, according to Citigroup, up to $1.8bn, according to Forrester. With the videogame industry being worth some $25bn in 2005, according to analysts PwC, it's clear that there is enormous scope for advertisers to work with the gaming industry.

But seriously, what was aquafresh thinking?

When Metrics are Distracting

2008-03-17T21:33:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about my post yesterday because I'm spending a lot of time thinking about metrics, KPIs, analytics in general these days. In fact, I'm spending a disproportionate amount of my time thinking about metrics. Related to this is A-B and multivariate testing: relentlessly tweaking copy, imagery, and click paths to eek out a percent here and there. I hear stories "you won't believe how big a difference just changing one word makes!", but at the stage we're in, is this really the best use of our resources?

When I say "resources", I'm referring to the 10's of thousands of dollars on an analytics package, management's time scouring reports, my time taking the derivative of reports for management, the developers time parsing log files to get me the data and "tweaking" a word or image here or there. I'll be the first to admit these numbers, and this analysis is valuable, but if I were to represent it like this.

A Hypothetical Retention Graph:

Where I spend my time between week 1 and week 8 making tweaks. Of course, I can paint this hypothetical scenario in a way to prove my point, but what if each variant costs me and the rest of the team 10 units of effort per week? Then. between weeks 1 and 8, I spent 70 units of effort.

Now, what if the reason my hypothetical retention is low isn't because my copy is bad, or my hero image sucks, but because I have a core product issue?

Not to pick on Dogster (from my last post), but their issue wasn't copy, it was that their feature mix wasn't right. It took looking at their metrics to uncover the issue, but they didn't use their metrics to SOLVE the issue.

If you assume the effort to re-architect the site between weeks 8 and 9 also cost me 10 units, then there's a clear ROI given the results (my retention # significantly improved). But, even if the re-architecture cost me 100 units, I would argue it's the right thing to do:

If you have a core product issue, then the product isn't healthy, and probably isn't a sustainable/ viable/ optimized business in it's current state. You'll need to take the plunge eventually.
There's an opportunity cost to delaying the "hard decision" for 8 weeks. In those 8 weeks, retained users could be adding content, buying subscriptions, and clicking on ads!

When Sociality Takes a Back Seat

2008-03-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

At SXSW last week, one of the best panels was "Start Up Metrics for Pirates": Dave McClure - 500 Hats (moderator), Ted Rheingold - Dogster, Todd Vernon - Lijit Hiten Shah - CrazyEgg Lance Tokuda - RockYou. I'd seen Dave McClure's presentation previously at Ignite Seattle, but having the other folks on the panel to provide applied examples of the metrics made the topic more relevant.

Ted Rheingold from Dogster provided his account of Dogster's loyalty issues. To quickly summarize:

They were spending a tonne of money on Google Adwords
The drove a tonne of traffic, and they were pumped.
When they later looked at the loyalty numbers (the number of newly registered users that were returning) they were disturbed to find that most weren't returning.
They did an audit of their Google Adwords keywords, and they noticed that the highest converting keywords were informational NOT social in nature. (no real surprise, people were searching for "boston terrier breed information" not "dog friends").
Dogster redesigned their site to accommodate the information searcher. They de-emphasized their social networking component, and emphasized breed and animal ailment information.
The result: they stopped spending money on Google Adwords and were driving traffic because the site was SEO-friendly (relevant-information-dense).

What Dogster and Livemocha have in common:

Niche Social Networks: That is, unlike Facebook and Myspace which address a non-specific target audience, Dogster is a social network for dogs (and their humans), and Livemocha is a social network for language learning.
Social Graph Comprised of Common Interests, not "Real World" Relationships: To put another way, just because I'm learning French, doesn't mean my friends are AND just because I have a boston terrier, doesn't mean my friends do.

Are common interests sufficient to drive strong online social ties? Clearly in the case of Dogster, it wasn't. It dawned on me during the talk that this was a perfect example of Josh Porter's Del.icio.us Lesson: Personal Value Precedes Network Value.

At Livemocha, we dodged this bullet because we built the social network as a feature to support our underlying value proposition. We looked at our goal (to help people to become communicative in a new language) in terms of a "language acquisition curve" that started with self-study (not particularly social) lessons, but gradually worked the user into the community as it benefits them.

... and, yes, in case you're wondering, here's Sousa's profile.

Livemocha Mention in New York Times

2008-02-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

Can't ask for better press than this. The print edition goes out tomorrow.

From an academic perspective, this is an interesting case study in the effectiveness of online vs offline promotion AND mainstream vs "long tail of the blog-o-sphere" promotion because this press is so isolated (ie we don't currently have any other promotion happening right now other than this NYTimes article). Using analytics, I'll be able to see the # of visitors that have been referred from the NYTimes.com site, as well, I can see the increase in visitors (increase from to our typical visitor count independent of the NYTimes.com). So, Increase in visitors - Increase in visitors being referred by the NYTimes.com = Increase in visitors associated to NYTimes print edition. I wonder how online vs offline conversions will differ?

Also, this could help us make future ROI-based decisions wrt PR investment. Purely for example, if our current Google Advertising conversions cost $2.00, and we get 10k conversions as part of this press, then we break even if our firm costs us $20k.

That said, our "free" blog-press has resulted in almost 1300 blogs. It's hard to beat free.

Silicon Valley North(West)

2008-02-08T18:01:00.000-08:00

For my entire academic and most of my professional career, I grew up in Canada's Tech Triangle, bordered by Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge; an area dominated by RIM and the University of Waterloo. This area didn't receive the label "Silicon Valley North" which was given to Ottawa; dominated by Nortel, Alcatel, Corel back in the day. Seattle, which has always been known as a "tech-ish center" thanks to MSFT and Boeing, got props from NYT's John Markoff today: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley.

When I lived here to work for RIM, I didn't see much of the entrepreneur culture. At Livemocha, I've really enjoyed participating/ attending/ witnessing the action:

Ignite Seattle: This is great. Put on my O'Reilly, a dozen folks get 5 minutes to hammer through a presentation on something geeky. I liked Dave McClure's Product Marketing Metrics for StartUps and Shawn Murphy's Hacking Chocolate.
Refresh Seattle: Typically a speaker on something design related, then drinks in Ballard. I saw CommonCraft Lee Lefever give this talk on Community is Like Hosting a Party.
StartPad: Pretty cool concept - basically it's an organization that offers shared space allowing startups to share costs and collaborate. They put on a session on OpenSocial a while back - no we're not building an app... yet.
StartUp Weekend: I'm not this hardcore, but I like the idea. Teams of 8 compete over the course of a weekend to kick off their start up.

On related news, the Seattle 2.0 list came out today - Livemocha is #35!

Google's Elephant Named "Privacy"

2008-01-27T15:45:00.000-08:00

I attended a talk on privacy at Google's Kirkland office on Thursday. It wasn't nearly as attended as I had expected, maybe 30 people, but that's probably because they scared people off by saying you could only attend one of the 3 sessions they have scheduled.

Wendy Seltzer, of Northeastern U, was the speaker and did a good job of providing a sort of "history of privacy" crash course. To summarize:

Katz vs the US - basically, a man is charged because the FBI was snooping on a call from a public phone. The FBI position, "there was not physical intrusion" and his position, "yeah, but I (and society) have an expectation of privacy" in that context. The supreme court ultimately sided with Katz, but Seltzer raised the question, "How does the 'expectation of privacy' apply when we're posting all of our information on Facebook?"
Netflix had a $1M contest asking someone to come up with an improved movie recommendation algorithm. Here's the scary question: can your movie recommendations be traced back to you? Does it matter? The answer is 'yes' (researchers reverse-engineered it) and 'yes' (because this teacher didn't get her teaching certificate due to the contents of her MySpace page).
AOL's mishap over a year ago reads like a dark comedy. The example that Selzer gave was the discovering of the identity of a 62 year old woman "No. 4417749" that searched for : “numb fingers”, “60 single men”, “dog that urinates on everything.” I thought this was 'funny':

User 311045, possibly a Florida resident, is preoccupied with another topic as well:
how to change brake pads on scion xb
2005 us open cup florida state champions
how to get revenge on a ex
how to get revenge on a ex girlfriend
how to get revenge on a friend who fucked you over
replacement bumper for scion xb
florida department of law enforcement
crime stoppers florida

The net of it, according to Seltzer, was that future legislation needs to take into account the "context" of privacy violations. In other words, if I post a drunk picture of myself on Facebook, that's not intended for employers or the electorate, but for my friends only.

I'm not sure I agree.

Ubiquity makes information "contextless": The availability of the information makes the "context" of this information indeterminable. It would be like painting my social security number on the side of a building and trying to claim that it's intended only for my wife.
Legislation shouldn't replace personal responsibility: If I post my social security number publicly in Facebook, I'm sorry, it's my fault if my identity is stolen. This also assumes adequate public education, which may not be a fair assumption at this point. It never occurred to me that my searches and netflix activities paint such a clear picture of my identity.
Legislation should protect from consolidation and broken promises: If two companies (say Google and Blogger) merge, both of whom I've consented to having my information, that doesn't mean I consent to my data being merged. If a company promises a level of privacy protection, and fails to do so, I should have recourse. Though, this just seems like standard contract law.
Existing notions of privacy are antiquated: Society should fundamentally rethink personal privacy instead of trying to find technology and legislation to maintain our current notions. The genie's out of the bottle.

The silver lining in all this may be more transparent and authentic society where we accept that people get drunk on the weekend and not consider this a negative reflection of individual professionalism. :)

Choosing a Web Design Agency, Choosing Blue Flavor

2008-01-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

When I started at Livemocha back in April, we knew from the get-go that we weren't going to even try to design the UI design ourselves. We're a talented group, that's for sure, but sexy and usable graphic design isn't one of those talents. Our original design was ripped from Facebook and comprised of pages and pages of dense copy and functional elements, and Blue Flavor did an amazing job, albeit not without frustration, mostly on their part with us (me, the messenger), at distilling our imprecise and evolving requirements into something that we're proud of.

I spent over 2 weeks "interviewing" potential freelancers and agencies. A couple observations that came out of this exercise:

Freelancers are good graphic designers, and good web designers, but it's hard to find a freelancer with good application-type information architecture experience; particularly when you're developing a social app.
Big agencies such as Zaaz (do a lot of cool work with Converse) and Happy Cog (legendary Jeffrey Zeldman is founder) want you to spend a lot of money up front on "planning" (target customer analysis, branding guidelines), "optimization" (keyword optimized content for SEO), "validation" (user experience and usability testing).

So, what you end up with are freelancer proposals that seem like a lot of money given their experience (they ARE artists after all), and big-agency proposals that will literally take 10x as long as you have and will cost 10x the size of your budget.

The Blue Flavor team were great to work with; though their frustration with us was apparent (and justified, I should emphasize). I had to laugh when Matt (one of the Livemocha devs) forwarded me a Joel on Software blog post that echo'd a similar experience.

Agency to Joel: "but wait, look here, it's right in Basecamp, you said that this design was 'excellent work' and you were 'elated' to have the 'best web design ever in the history of the universe.'"

Joel's post made me feel a lot better since I wasn't the only idiot client in the history of web agency relationships - actually, sounds like I'm a stereotype. Though, I wasn't the only one playing a part: Blue Flavor also uses Basecamp, their offices are across the street from Adobe and the walls are covered with silk-screened music and "web 2.0" posters, and their boardroom table is a ping pong table (an idea which we shamelessly stole for our own office).

Anyway, these guys are rock stars and they were definitely a perfect fit for us. I'm sure we'll use them again once we outgrow our current design. Check out their case study on us - I have some pretty sweet quotes in there (and yes, I'm being sincere and the figures are true).

Find Me a Cuter Dog

2007-12-18T20:33:00.000-08:00

Becky got her "holiday present" early this year, and no it's not a chewed up ball on the end of a cat toy. She got a Nikon D50 DSLR and a pretty kick-ass lens to take pictures at shows.

Community Building in the Age of Facebook - Day 1

2007-12-05T21:48:00.001-08:00

Today I attended the Web Community Forum's "Community Building in the Age of Facebook" conference here in Seattle. It featured panels and presentations by the rock stars of Facebook thought-leadership - it was well worth the $500 admission.

What struck me though was what I perceived as an myopic love of all things Facebook:
* The beacon feature recently was just poorly executed.
* There is no short term competition for Facebook.
* The worst thing about Facebook is their messaging features.

From my perspective, Facebook has done a lot of things right, and they potentially represent a good opportunity to raise awareness for Livemocha, but I approach their enthusiasm with a bit more skepticism.

When you're a hammer, everything's a nail...
... I've heard RIM CEO Jim Balsillie say this a couple of times and it seems to apply. It was a foregone conclusion that start ups should make Facebook a huge part of their product strategy (ie don't have a stand-alone destination site) and that advertising seemed to be the obvious place to monetize. I suppose it's unrealistic to expect people who have seen success on Facebook to talk you out of working with Facebook.

.... but what if Google makes good on their promise?
Google's Open Social announcement allows developers to write an application "once" and potentially share data between different "container sites" (Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, MySpace, and more). Of course this is currently an empty promise because OpenSocial won't be ready, I hear, until early next year.

If they execute well, OpenSocial:
* Has more users
* Inherently allows application developers to hedge their bets by developing simultaneously for multiple sites (rather than just Facebook).
* Allows "niche" social networks to better target and address user needs.

The Fragmentation of Social Networks
The last point is important because the Facebook folks seem to think that you'll only ever need one social network and everything that an application developer could ever need to do, can be done within Facebook; a sort of technology manifest destiny. However, fragmentation historically seen in other "applications" seems to refute this (unless you think, for whatever reason, the "social networking application" is unique). You see the creation of niche's along (at least) 2 vectors: features and demographics.
* Features: Webmail providers offer features and look-n-feel attractive to their specific segment. Think about the differences between Gmail (message threads) and Hotmail (traditional folders).
* Demographics: Take dating sites as an example. Sure, you can slice people's profile data any way you like, but niche's such as Jdate.com and Gay.com formed around incumbent Match.com.

What's my point?

My hypothesis is:
* Facebook *is* a great opportunity for developers to raise awareness of their brands and maybe monetize a little. A walled-garden like Facebook is attractive when technology and markets are immature because it provides a stable "pseudo-standard" for developers and business to work with.
* Over time, though, with openness, you'll see a fragmentation in social networks to address niches that address either feature-specific (eg language-learning specific features :) or demographic-specific user needs.

Applying Social Design Concepts

2007-09-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

I have so many pent up topics for blogs - waiting for Livemocha to launch was killing me.

Shirish wrote a good market opportunity and vision statement for Livemocha but, where I've taken an interest, are in many of the social design philosophies underlying "web 2.0" applications.

1. A social network is a feature NOT a business. Unless there is a very well-defined "niche" being served, a Facebook-clone social network seems only doomed to fail and, even when a niche is identified, the gravity that the strong incumbents have, coupled with the low cost of entry and "open nature" of the Facebook API, it seems that any niche could quickly be addressed on existing networks.

Philosophically, we built a social network because it reinforces the value proposition rather than BEING the value proposition. Afterall, what's a more social activity than having conversations (regardless of language)?

2. Make it useful for me first. Josh Porter over at Bokardo says, "Personal Value Precedes Network Value" and I believe it. Livemocha provides very tangible value to beginner language learners by providing initial seed content in the form of self-study exercises. This is something that "competitive" services are lacking. This was a great move - we've seen a tonne of traction with our courses.

Ironically, we've received a bit of flack (being accused of trolling for users) because our registration page contains a language that we don't (yet) have courses for. Our competition, who simply offer language exchanges (ie chat tools + social network) don't have courses but have a similar drop down. It's interesting how offering courses changed the frame of reference.

3. Invert the participation pyramid. I first saw this pyramid in the Globe and Mail on my way to Vancouver, BC. I never cut anything out of the paper, but thought this research by Forrester summed up our (every site that relies on user generated content) problem nicely. Basically, it says that the majority of people on social networks just consume the content that the minority make (think wikipedia).

Lee LeFever over at CommonCraft had some great advice in his blog "Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen":

Your party needs multiple ways to participate...Consider how small modes of participation can be a gateway to deeper contributions.

Livemocha recognized early that users will have two forms of anxiety: 1. People have the social computing participation anxiety as described by Lee and Forrester, and 2. In the context of language learning, there's plenty of research to show that a learner's second language acquisition success is sometimes limited by the learner's embarrassment in speaking their new language.

To minimize this anxiety, we offered numerous ways for community participation. From least participation to most: rating submissions and tips, leaving submissions and tips in native language, completing asynchronous exercises in your new language, full-on conversations (aided), full on conversations (un-aided).

At our launch last week at DEMOFall, we had strong interest and people seemed to get past the "just another social network" that we feared they might get stuck on. Our growth has been steady - the first 1000 users came a lot faster than I expected :). Having done our research up front, applying some of these principles seems to have paid off.

It's alive - Livemocha has launched!

2007-09-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

As you know, we’ve been operating Livemocha under a “cloak of secrecy” since the Spring. We’ve all been working like crazy and, for me personally, it has been an incredible experience.

Well, the time has come and we’ve finally launched Livemocha, and the reception thus far has been incredible. We’ve had mentions in: Mashable, Cnet/ Webware, the Seattle P-I, and VentureBeat. … over 300 blog entries on blogsearch.google.com and we were the #1 "upcoming" on del.icio.us.

The main event was Monday when Shirish and I gave our demo at the DemoFall conference in San Diego. Here’s the video – don’t laugh at my accent.

Please sign up – would love everyone’s feedback. Go here to sign up: www.livemocha.com.

Social Design - What I've Learned So Far (Part 1)

2007-08-12T11:22:00.001-07:00

In the move to the "Internet space" at LiveMocha, it became clear, almost immediately, that many of the rules of Product Management at RIM don't apply. The most notable differences: we have no customers, we're building a product from scratch, and we have little budget for promotion. The core product, though not solely a social network, will be successful only if the social networking feature (yes, I consider it a feature) is successful; we're up against strong incumbents in the industry who have brand strength, are dominant in traditional channels, and are delivering products that mesh well with customer expectations. If we're going to be disruptive, our implementation of the idea of web 2.0 has to be rock-solid: an engaged and passionate community participating only because of their free-will interest in the subject matter.

Coming from mobile, especially coming from a service provider that's intermediated by the carrier, you often lose site of your end user. You prioritize bugs and build features based on the squeakiest of wheels and forget that, at the end of the day, there's a real user eventually putting down $300 and $30/ mo for your product. So, I had to invest quite a bit of time researching community and relearn how to build products for users, not channels.

There are 4 stand-out thought-leaders that have really shaped my perspective on social design:

Josh Porter @ bokardo.com. His series of blog-posts, Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them, is incredible - I won't rehash it all here - you need to read it. Here are the key "common pitfalls (he had 11, these are the 5 I've focused on):

Underestimating the "cold start problem" - A site that derives value from the community, needs a community to have any value - obvious, yes. The question from the beginning for LiveMocha is: how will we initially seed the site so new members find LiveMocha.com valuable? We have several strategies - I'll discuss this in future posts - but suffice it to say, there's irony in going from Anti-SPAM Product Manager at RIM to SPAM Product Manager at LiveMocha. I'm being somewhat spurious, but one technique we're employing is targeting "mavens" on similar social sites ("mavens" is a term from "The Tipping Point" and was a tactic used, unsuccessfully, by AOL/Netscape to compete with Digg).
Focusing on too many things. This is really just Product Management 101, but it's important to note (1) As Product Managers we have a "vision", but often it may be too complex to clearly articulate to users all at once. (2) That many social sites are being built at the direction of the developers themselves so, when left to their own devices, the UI, particularly the navigation, ends up looking like an airplane cockpit rather than something simple like Apple's FrontRow
An over-focus on social value. Social networking is a "feature", not a product. If you're only building a social network, then you're competing with MySpace (bought for $770M) or Facebook (being self-valued at $10B). Good luck to you. You better have a really passionate niche.
No business plan other than to grow. Fortunately, very early on, we know the path we want go down. The reason LiveMocha is a such a great business, is because we have a plan for monetization. Of course, we may find it's more difficult than we think, but at least we have a plan.
Not appointing a full time community manager. What's a Community Manager? That was my question, so I spent a bit more time researching "Community Management". Anyone who has done Product Management knows that Product Managers have historically had difficulty articulating their value; especially in large, non-technical, companies. I think for the most part, Product Management is now a well understood practice. Community Managers are the new Product Managers insofar as the discipline is new and the value is often misunderstood.

I'll discuss Community Management in my next post - stay tuned!

Your friends are making you fat (and good tennis players)

2007-08-11T13:01:00.001-07:00

People that know me, know that when I'm losing a debate, I often just falsely quote the New England Journal of Medicine. This was a technique that my father told me about that a friend of his in college used and I thought it was great. So, I assure you, my reference to the NEJoM in this post is legitimate.

There has been plenty of press these days on the so-called real-life phenomenon of the "social network". The New England Journal of Medicine published a report, The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years which found:

Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval.

I'm not a doctor or researcher, but does this report not surprise anyone but me? Replace obesity with anything: Star Trek fan, tennis player, alcoholic - isn't it an obvious conclusion that people with certain interests/ hobbies/ habits surround themselves with people like them? It's not much of a tennis game without other players, afterall. In defense of the research (admittedly, not that it needs my defense), and despite what the mainstream press has reported, the report does say that social ties aren't "solely attributable" to people's obesity.

I do find 2 things interesting about this research: (1) It reinforces the concept of "social proof", (2) It reinforces the concept of personal "self interest".

Social Proof
According to wikipedia, social proof is:

"...a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed."

I recently finished reading a a book, "Influence: Science and Practice" by Ray Cialdini, in which Cialdini describes such observations as a man in a business suit being more likely to be followed jaywalking than a person in informal clothes. Again, it seems obvious to me that the NEJoM's results could have been predicted by this well-known principle.

This principle can be applied to social design to ensure people inherently/ unconsciously behave in your community in the way you desire:

Establishment of a Community Manager to police misbehavior, and encourage positive behavior. Ensuring "positive" behavior occurs more often than "negative" means other users will observe, and emulate, the positive behavior.
Design features and UI such that positive behavior (or, to generalize, the behavior you wan to reinforce) is demonstrated to all users.

Self Interest
Bokardo.com had a post entitled, The Del.icio.us Lesson, in which he describes that social sites still need to adhere to the principle that: Personal Value Precedes Network Value. In other words, a social site must first offer individuals personal value (however it is measured) before we ask them to contribute to the site. YouTube, as another example, offered free video storage before it was entertaining for 3rd parties.

On my way to work last week, on the Seattle Transit, a woman handed me a Seattle PI newspaper (I had originally only asked for the Fry's flier, but I guess she took my original request as a request for her entire paper) in which Guest Columnist John Barnett wrote an article, on the heals of the NEJoM report, entitled Use your friends for weight loss. His closing paragraph was the most interesting:

Don't expect help [to lose weight] from family and friends. They don't want to lose their image of you, just the way they have known you.

Implicit in this statement, and not touched on in the NEJoM report, is that your family and friends passively prevent your weight loss. Further, your weight loss is your battle and so your motivation has to come from within.

In the context of social design, even if you, as a Product Manager, understand that you need to offer users personal value, you need to further find those intrinsic motivators that will spur your community to go on to contribute as if they were the only ones using your site. The question I'm asking myself: "What problem do I need solved that requires me to contribute to a site that, either partially, or in it's entirety, would be valuable to others?"