Monday, June 09, 2008
Telegraph Digging well
I wonder if they pay someone full time for this or if they have other stuff to do? It's probably marginally worth the cash based on back of beer mat calculations.
AFTER NOT WRITING FOR A WHILE I MIGHT TAKE THIS A BIT MORE SERIOUSLY AND HAVE MOVED TO WWW.INSERTKEYWORDHERE.COM
Politics & the Internet
Obama works with a Facebook early stage employee:
- raises a shit load of cash by going for the long tail of contributors
- engages with Twitter, Facebook et al
- owns the Digg front page
So, what influence will the Internet have on the next UK election. Please tell me someone in the incumbent parties has been watching and knows that the hell they are doing (and this doesn't count).
BView offers £10 Amazon voucher for every 20 reviews
Trouble was we could only have 1 winner so the people that missed out by a couple of reviews lost out a wee bit. So we've decided to trial rewarding every reviewer for every 20 reviews with a £10 voucher. You can roll them up and can earn up to £50/month.
Anyway, read more here.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Twitter: would you pay for it...no but they should (depending on who you are)
My point was that the eventual end cost of most messaging utilities is zero and that if a charge was introduced then this would merely force a competitor with no uptime or scaling issues to enter and allow easy transfer of contacts.
A friend started me down a different track. His thinking is: Twitter needs it's top Users more than they need it:
In the last 7 days www.calacanis.com received about 5,000 visits/day. The site does not give feedburner stats and I am not sure if he is part of a RSS package which boosts subscribers. He has 27,000 followers on Twitter. What's hard to gauge is the traffic driving between the two.
My point here is: who needs who more? If you remove the top 50 Users from Twitter does Twitter not actually collapse? How many people joined/maintain their existence on the site because of a web personality (Calacanis/Scoble/Arrington)?
So, should Twitter be charging heavy Users for a clean cluster to support them or should Twitter be moving these Twittstars already and write it off as a marketing cost?
Friday, May 30, 2008
Geek Dinner
(Craig Murhpy's Flickr page)
Moo.com (hey - I didn't know they were based in London) gave a talk on their history which is a nice little story. They're now doing ~30,000,000 cards printed per year which, at £10/100, is a turnover of £3m on cards alone before other products are taken into consideration. They also state their gross margin is 70% so I guess they are approaching (if not already at) profitability.
The one thing that struck me about them as bunch was the team dynamic where everyone could answer a question and there seemed to be no strict hierarchy which is the way it should be.
I also bumped into Alex from SmallBizPod.
Review of Thaismile Restaurant where the event was held.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Twitter and and micro blogging eats itself
Friday, May 23, 2008
Google kicks in
We produced a XML site map for launch which was frowned upon by a couple of of SEOs I know. The argument here is that SEO activities are harder to monitor because there is no direct correlation between a page being in the index and effort applied to get it there via internal links while the traffic boost is non-existent.
I think this is subjective as we have been able to monitor how Google is crawling pretty accurately. Now that we have some examples of content hubs and crawl pathways we will try to be a bot more selective in what is returned in results because some of our pages provide a better User experience than others and we want to provide great search results every time via Google as it can only help us.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Product priority
1. Everything should have a number one priority
(it's clearly part of our core proposition)
2. Everything should be done in the next release
(it's because you are not planning and coding properly)
3. The planned release can always be disrupted for the latest big idea
(we just can't wait another 20 days to properly plan, build, test and deliver it)
4. Everyone else's ideas are ridiculous
(i.e. let's not build them)
Basics of post-release analysis:
1. That was my idea first
(it's not my problem you can't remember me suggesting it)
2. What idiot thought of this?
(I hope they've forgotten it was me)
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Website that should use RSS but never will
What is interesting and how much of it to display
An example of this is local people. It's nice to show local people but it is nicer is to show people that do things the same as me (based on some kind of relevance rating). Local reviews is good but I want more than that...I want latest reviews in the area, I want who wrote them, I want edits, comments, essentially anything that might spark my interest.
I love what Brightkite has done in this area and I am working on making something better.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Reputation management: the right way and the wrong way
It transpires that:
i) people are genuine and should be trusted (which is an area we are building the app out in)
ii) reviews tend to be well written balanced and fair.
That does not mean we haven't had people use the review system in a manner we don't agree with.
Vindictive reviews have featured (you rated my friends business badly therefore I am going to review you badly) while well written reviews of poor experiences get requests for removal. These have been frustrating as we offer the means to address all issues and take the conversation into the open.
My advice to people creating platforms of this ilk: trust the people.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Google update rates
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Marc Andreessen on Facebook board
I was pissed that I missed thechance to meet him when he was in our officesa few years ago as his blog is great and ning has been ultra bold in taking it's time and burning though a lot of cash to get tothe point it is an it's current value.
Fun to see what Ning (Open Social clan member) does with Facebook (already pretty well integrated actually) in the future?
Good move by Facebook. Marc, there always a place on our board for you.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Yelp allows businesses to "fight back"
Allowing the business to join the discussion:
- businesses can respond to reviews
- reviewers and businesses can engage in a conversation around a review
- businesses and reviewers can subscribe to each other to track activity
It's not a fight - it's a conversation.
Backpack is great
I guess the appeal of backpack is how basic it is. I know two people (inc. myself) who have used it to find, select & buy a house for example.
The RSS feed of changes is useless due to its over granularity but aside from that it gets my vote.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Calacanis is a brilliant marketeer
What the hell...Calacanis & Andresen make their blogs work for them.
Is Yahoo's recent innovation result of Microsoft threat or change in leadership?
A lot of the products are very early stage and would appear not to be quite the finished article while also quite obvious and "cool" without much practical application.
I lean towards the former forcing the pace of the latter.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Sometimes Google rankings still confuse me
The above Google result desperately needs reviews against each service. Watch that skew click thru...We'll gere there slowly but surely (insurance on BView).
Friday, April 25, 2008
Facebook definitely slow
- Systems will block Gmail (and every other mail client)
- Systems will block IM clients
- Facebook has both of the above
- Systems do not block Facebook
- That's because they use it themselves too much
Another attendee is working on the BBBC/ITV/C4 web VoD platform called Kangaroo. Sounds interesting but of course he couldn't talk about it on the record...
Thursday, April 24, 2008
BView comments are cool
I love this feature.
Facebook instant messenger
- it told me people were online who clearly were not
- new messages took an age to "load" (or so I was being told) so not very instant
I might actually use it once it works. It got me wondering though how much this will antagonise corp IT departments who block IM clients already. Will it cause FB to be blocked by more businesses or can the functionality be separated from the rest of the site? Is it any different to playing scrabble? Will anyone care.
I also tried to pull in some Yelp news from my profile there. Oh dear - started getting someone else's activity (and yes I checked the email address).
EDIT: and FB is getting very, very, very low just now. I had to stop using it for a while as it just ground to a halt.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Retreading a path already trodden (even by myself)
- allow a User to experience the functionality and then present them with the quid pro quo (i.e. the form)
- never ask for data you won't use for the User's direct benefit
- never provide optional inputs
Very simple. But what happens? You look at your form and you think "what can it hurt it I add..." and before you know it you are collecting data "because it will allow us to make our demographic data rich" which is rubbish.
I promise I will never do it again until next time.
Monday, March 17, 2008
BView new business owners
My thanks to these business owners.
Tracking inbound links and monitoring Google
I have been recommended SEOMoz tools that track inbound links and allow monitoring and impact of off line efforts (press etc.) on the inbound concentration.
I think we'll track the domain using this tool rather than the old skool manual process I used to have to employ back in the day.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Going for dinner
Thursday, March 13, 2008
4 searches where Google is 2nd best
Google is a brilliant search engine and it’s now very infrequent I have to go outside the top 3 links when I am searching for a specific topic or product. There are notable exceptions:
Forum Search
I found BoardReader a few days ago and I have been very impressed by the results. Chat forum search is something I’ve been looking at for ages and wishing for a better way to search them.
Blog Search
OK, Google’s own blog search is useful (principally because the spam is minimised which Technorati is shocking for) but Technorati is still my first choice when searching for blogs due to tag & authority scores. Unfortunately I feel time may soon be up for Technorati.
Yahoo and Google have local engines but Yelp have built a great platform. My business, BView, has taken business search in a different direction by i)going for results across the entire spectrum of businesses (not just the 40% that service consumers) and layering in proprietary & public access data.
Google has reviews but BView and Yelp actually allow personal relevance by layering in your personal social fabric while BView has also added the businesses themselves to the social graph.
A search on Linkedin & Facebook produce results for “normal” people and allow me to get a feel for their friend set. 192.com searches across the electoral register producing a match for me and my wife (indeed, I used this to research the owners of my house prior to buying it). I have seen some nice aggregators emerging and I expect some big things in this area.
I guess these are niche areas which Google may eventually get round to but it highlights some niche areas where I would ignore Google. The same applies to auctions/classifieds where Ebay can get killed in niche areas because of it’s structure and lack of flexibility.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Mashup Events - Techcrunch coverage
Anyway, I was more annoyed by the Techcrunch UK coverage where we, the audience, were accused of not understanding widgets. Most of the people in the audience actually wanted a better discussion on APIs and better ways to open these up as offering even wider scope for widgets.
Still annoys me.
On another note, having had a look on Techcrunch to get the link (and having been emailed it by a friend) I see that Adjug has just received another round of capital. I worked with Satish when he was @ Espotting and it was clear then that he had a bigger plan...
Technorati problems
Startup working hours
Having just spent the weekend with a development team and a business team I'd like to offer this contribution on his point #11 (now edited):
1. Business and development are different skills and tasks. Guys on the business side can do around 4 tasks at the one time (UAT, reading blogs, listening to the football and updating a paper) while a developer must focus.
2. The quality of work from different people suffers over time to the point where a front end developer may introduce more bugs than productive work i.e. beyond a certain point you are doing negative work.
3. The younger the business guy the more likely he is to do silly hours. The older he gets the more productive he gets. With appropriate focus & efficiency and under normal working situations, you should need to have to do such long hours. (There are obvious exceptions such as launch and pushing bigger projects out the door.)
Aside from this I agree with all of the advice apart from walking to Starbucks. Some of my most productive discussions involve walking to Neros (Starbucks doesn't sell real coffee, it sells coffee flavored milk).
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Front end design
As ever, the things that are left to last are front end as:
- everyone has an opinion
- you see something in HTML form, play with it, and you don't like it
- you completely underestimate how long it takes to code the front end
- the front end is always full of regression errors
- Microsoft browsers always screw you somehow
functional bugs: ~30
front end bugs: ~250
My advice to anyone still thinking on the front end:
- keep it simple
- always UAT the front end for the lowest common denominator (of browser/OS not User intelligence)
- keep it simple