Update on Site Statistics

Some interesting news in the ongoing study of site statistics.

Fact: 42% of spankers have been active in the last 30 days. This number was about 91% in August. Did something go wrong? I don't think so. I think it's part of the business of building out the network. Your friends are what pull you to the site, and most people on the site still have only 0 or 1 or 2 friends. As the network builds, the average frequency of visit should build.

Fact: the average (mean) duration of a session on the site is 3.7 hours.

Wow! I have to go now so I'll be brief on this one. As you'd expect, the number is skewed by a very small percentage of very long visits. Also, it includes visits that may involve plenty of open browser windows.

On the other hand, this figure is calculated as the time between the first page load and the last page load of a session. So, if you visit your Inbox, spend 15-20 minutes viewing links, and then jet without any other page load, that was counted in the 3.7 figure as a 0 minute visit, not a 15 minute visit. In other words, there is some slop on both sides, but the figure is real.

Linkspank is sticky! Yay. That's a good Christmas present.

New Concept for Landing Page for new spankers.

Should Entrepreneurs go to Business School?

I’m an entrepreneur who attended business school. I was an entrepreneur before business school (I had an unsuccessful startup on the side) and I went to business school with the plan of starting a business – which ended up being Linkspank. Many entrepreneurs are vocally against attending business school, citing it as a “waste of time” or worse. Today I’ll share some of my thoughts on the issue, and provide a little test for whether you or an entrepreneur you know should attend business school.

Reasons to Attend Business School for Entrepreneurs

I attended business school (the University of Chicago GSB) for three reasons – to get education, to have the life of a student, and to meet people who I could work with as entrepreneurs, investors, or advisors.

1. Get education: this exceeded my expectations. Here’s what I think I learned in business school: strategy, marketing, and some “business sense” in other fields, like investments, accounting, and finance. But I also felt that I got a broader education, like the kind of education that you get in college. Because of this latter point, I felt that whether “it was worth the money” to go to business school is a no-brainer “yes”. What would you think of someone who challenged whether it was worth the money to go to college? That feeling is (probably, depending on what it is for you) my first reaction when I hear people say that business school is a waste of time or money.

2. Have the life of a student: This one is two-pronged. First, I was sick of corporate life and psyched about being a student. I ended up being much busier than I thought I would be but I still think that being a business school student (even at Chicago GSB, which is tame relative to other “Tier 1” schools) is just hands-on way more fun than working. People who are working seem to forget about that – they have forgotten about having fun and they’re thinking about their 360 degree evaluations, salaries, and promotions.

Additionally, I wanted to start a business while I was in school. I think this is an underdiscussed opportunity for entrepreneurs. It’s hard as hell to start a business on the side while you’re working. It’s much easier (though not necessarily easy) to start one while you’re in school. Also your resume and finances are basically taken care of in one way or another.

3. Meet entrepreneurs, investors, advisors: I got lots of GREAT advice from my fellow students. They are sub-average contributors as spankers, but far above average as advisors on product and strategy. Not many of them were entrepreneurs. Many of them have offered to stay in touch about investment.

Reasons Not to Attend Business School for Entrepreneurs

(If you are taking a loan,) You’ll be saddled with debt after school, and as an entrepreneur, you may find it difficult to pay it.

The professors and students around you are likely to bash good ideas.

You won’t learn “real-world” stuff – you still have to learn that by doing.

Business school will not help you decide whether you want to be an entrepreneur. In fact, if you’re on the fence, it may even push you away from being an entrepreneur. (Arguably that’s a pro if it’s the right path for you.)

The Test: You’re an Entrepreneur. Should you go to Business School?

Answer the questions and add up the points. (Sorry it's a little ugly, the formatting on Blogger sucks.)

1. I know what kind of business I want to start, or I am already running a business that I will keep running.

Exactly (-5 points)

Vaguely (+2 points)

No (0 points)

2. How willing are you to forgo income and feel poor after school? (If you are financially independent give yourself 0 points for this question)

Willing (+5 points)

Maybe not (-5 points, 0 points if you would pay for school with a loan)

I’m willing to be poor, it’s the time that is the issue (-10 points)

3. I plan

To start a business during school, even if it means slightly worse grades, and a hectic life (+5 points)

To start a business after I graduate (-5 points)

I have no plan (+0 points)

4. Picture this – you go to business school, but you don’t end up with the real-world knowledge you need to start your business. Your professors seem to doubt that you have the necessary experience too. You:

Go into consulting for two years (0 points)

Just wasted my time (-5 points)

Start your business anyway (+5 points)

Scoring:

5 points or higher -Go to business school, and start something.

0 points-ish -You may want to go to business school – but are you sure you want to start a business?

-5 points or lower -Don’t go to business school. Start something now.

FYI, I would have scored a 10 on this test two years ago. I’m not sure if this test actually makes any sense but hopefully it was thought-provoking.

Reflections on the Hawaii Contest.

Let's win some sh*t

I will say that the Hawaii Contest has turned out nicely. Even when only a minority of spankers are trying hard to win, the contests do a good job of feeding the community with a constant diet of tasty spanks.

Our Holiday Contest (beginning next week!) will feature some changes, as usual. We'll have two divisions, with separate standings and separate winners. We'll have a new set of prizes...probably less expensive prizes, since a Hawaii trip is not really 3x or 4x as effective as a Wii or a Bose SoundDock. We'll have slight adjustments to the point system to keep the contests competitive. We will also continue to feature sports analysis of the contest as in Linkspank TV this week.

Many other Great Things are forthcoming on Linkspank this month... stay tuned.

Notebook: Homepage Evolution

Today, some semi-intelligible notes:

Time for a new homepage design for logged-in users. The current design has the following faults. The Top 6 is a nice reminder about the contest, but the Top 6 don't change often enough for it to be interesting. Second, the content tabs (Video / News / etc) are lost behind the contest tab, and they are a little boring to look at.

The new homepage will feature content a little more, and will probably feature some of our experimentation with recommending links to people. Top 6 will still be present, but pushed down.

The new design will probably push down the Spank News (news feed) off the screen. Trying to keep the Spank News on the screen was part of what inspired the current design. And some people will disagree with this. I think it's a case of thinking inside the box, since the news feed is so prominent on facebook. But what Linkspank offers is primo content, and connections with friends through the content. We'll be integrating all that into the top box.

Win 30 Points, Be on Linkspank TV

Do you like sports commentary? Do you like Linkspank? Do you want 30 points for that Hawaii contest?

Join us at Linkspank TV for the Sports Corner (or something) to discuss the Hawaii Contest. We'll draw some X's and O's, talk about who's winning and who's going to win, and try to make as little sense as John Madden.

let's do this

Any spanker is welcome to participate. Just contact us to state your interest - first to respond can reserve the spot. We'll record Sports Corner today, tomorrow, or Friday, at some hour.

We'll conduct the interview online (probably over Skype) and rip the sound (we'll add visuals to it afterwards).

So sign up.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do Lists (Entrepreneurial Lifehacking)

Two cliches of entrepreneurship are managing yourself and wearing many hats. At the heart of all this is To-Do List Management. A boring subject, but one which holds the key to our productivity and happiness.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do's:

1. Noting them in a daily work journal (a document)
2. Listing, scoring, tracking them in a spreadsheet
3. Storing them in folders in my email
4. Keeping them in online "sticky note" applications
5. Using Jott to send them to myself via phone.
6. Writing lists on pieces of paper

I have experimented with these for a long time (except Jott, that is recent).

My findings: -- summarized from lots of testing :-)

Since I have a very high volume of items (feature requests, little notes, micro-bugs) the spreadsheet method is required. I need a method that is simple enough that I'll use it, but which can organize and prioritize hundreds of to-do items.

Email, Jott, and paper lists are all useful ways of recording items to make sure they get into the spreadsheet. If the to-do item is very small then it might be dealt with before it makes it to the spreadsheet.

Paper is good also to take items out of the spreadsheet as the Daily To-Do List.

Smaller notes:

I tried the email method during a campaign to keep my emai inbox clean. That campaign worked and I rarely have more than 20 messages in my inbox now. But the email folder method wasn't working for me because I was wasting time by sending myself emails and it was difficult to get myself to visit the folders.

I think the folder method works for less pressing items, and maybe for lists that are only 20 or 30 items usually.

Jott is pretty cool. I think it's more cool as an on-the-fly communication system. But it's good for a quick reminder of a micro-feature that you can send to email and copy into a spreadsheet later. If you could jot to a spreadsheet that would be cool, but the internal mechanism for managing your Jotts is primitive.

I think paper is a really really good method... but it's easy to lose paper and hard to organize it. Sometimes I write notes and they end up useless in a pile. I think written notes have an expiration of 24-72 hours. I think paper is good for copying a list of what to do and then thinking out on paper exactly how you are going to do those things that day.

Journaling your work is important I believe. But it's a big jumble. The journal has two purposes. One is like writing on paper - temporary thinking and quick access - but it's tied to the clipboard on your computer. The other is the emergency haystack - if you're looking for something and you don't know where it is, you can always dive into the haystack.

Many people comment on the soothing aspect of creating lists. Write a list and you feel control over your life. I think it's even more true for a spreadsheet. You have to put some work into the spreadsheet. I have a dorky model where I rate todo items on how important they are to the business. It takes a lot of time to do that... but hey, how can you march without a strategy? Plus having a strategy is much more comforting :-).

four lessons from our facebook experiment

Here are Four Lessons from our facebook app experiment:

1. Lots of facebook users are willing to install apps... but many of them will hide the profile box and all the other stuff.

2. Lots of facebook users have never installed an app. (I believe this segment is largely college students actually.)

3. People often install an app and that's it - they don't know what to do or what it does.

4. People want to be able to spank their facebook friends. They don't care much about the features of our baby app (sharing recent spanks on your facebook profile, or promoting your spankathon pledge).

I'm glad we did this test. More to come...

Entrepreneurial Lifehacking

I've been meaning to post for a while on "Entrepreneurial Lifehacking" - tricks and strategies for being organized, happy, productive as an entrepreneur.

Today I'll just warm up by listing some of the topics I've been thinking about and working on:

+ Daily routines
+ Which to-do's to delete entirely and avoid
+ How to organize and prioritize to-do's
+ Use of phone, email, and meetings
+ How to digest maximum news in minimum time
+ Experiments with Jott.com
+ Phone gadgetry, including the N95 and the Jawbone

Hmn... that sounds like a pretty boring list now that I write it out. But doesn't everyone like to be more productive? :-)

Our Toolbar = Excalibur.

Our Linkspank toolbar is turning out to be the greatest and baddest weapon since King Arthur's Excalibur. It's going to be completely nasty. Get ready. Prepare for your life to be changed. Coming soon for testing in FF during November, with IE to follow in December.

Turning Email into a Social Network

The New York Times, TechCrunch and others report on Yahoo and Google turning Email into a social network. Email is a way that people connect, so why not use it to build a network?

I agree that this idea has potential (and in fact think they're a bit slow to realize this!). Here are two concerns I'd share.

1.) Will people want this stuff in their inbox environment?
2.) Might this lead to bloat and the MySpace effect?

I think they could do something very nice if they can navigate around these issues. Do you agree?

Various Schemes

I have been neglectful to my blog, so here's a shoddy run-down of some happenings:

We're looking for a contest sponsor / partner company for our next contest (to begin in December). If you have a forward-thinking marketing operation and you're looking for new ways to connect with people on the web, then Contact Us.

Creating a Linkspank Toolbar has been interesting. I think the importance of toolbars is overrated, but I consider this is a worthy project. Related subject for the future: my experiences with oDesk.

Linkspank TV (www.linkspank.com/tv) launched with Episode 2 into people's inboxes this week. So far that project has gone great. We seem to be getting approval that we have the right basic concept, so the next step will be to make it even better.

We added a little feature: you can attach spanks to each other now. Like much of linkspank, it's a new spin on a classic idea of the web. To play around with this feature, click "Add..." in the menu of options under a link, then "Add Attachment".

Our PR genius search is going well. I've met some great people, learned a bit about what PR is, and tackled new issues around compensating people from a bootstrapped perspective. More to come.

Just a couple investors have gotten in touch with me. In those conversations and with the help of some folks at Chicago GSB (where I'm heading next week), I'm starting to develop my philosophy on whether/how/when/what Linkspank wants investment. Most people would never dare write about this... but ah, Linkspank is all about being daring. :-) (Don't worry investors, your identities are private!)

That's all that springs to mind at the moment. The contest is going well. Get your ass on there and get yourself to Hawaii! :-)

WebInno15 Debrief

WebInno15 happened yesterday in Cambridge at the Royal Sonesta. Linkspank made a showing with the Linkspank TV squad. Part of our mission was to determine what people thought of the startups, and whether they seriously believed any of them was better than Linkspank.

Findings: There was a high level of enthusiasm for these startups. When asked to name a favorite, most people listed numerous sites. Some extremely serious people who do no procrastination and are very rich were interested in companies like iProperty and Lemonade.

iProperty: Preferred by People too Rich and Serious to Procrastinate

Generally, however, people came around to admitting that Linkspank sounded cooler than the other sites. They could not help but be captivated by the idea of procrastinating online and winning a trip to Hawaii as a result.

How's this for a property.

Thanks to David Venrock for hosting the event, and to all the great startups for sharing their ideas.

Footage from the event will be available on the next episode of Linkspank TV, which will be hurled violently into your Linkspank Inbox in a couple days.

facebook focus, open social aperture

I've been pondering the OpenSocial thing, which I babbled about before.

Take these two techcrunch posts. One: facebook no longer caters to college students. Two: you can "do anything with friends" on Open Social.

This reminds me of an old strategy saw: strategy is about trade-offs, as much about what you don't do as what you do.

Facebook apps and opensocial are all about trying to do "everything" - a hint that there is no strategy. It's still cool, in the way that the Web is cool. ("We invented the Internet - you can do anything on it!") But it's up to every app to define its strategy.

Maybe I'm a weird strategy purist, but I thought that facebook should have stuck to students, and sought its growth through more depth in that area, not breadth. Of course, I'm fairly alone on that opinion and may as well be shouting it off a cliff in Antarctica on that one.

the Pyramid Principle in the User Interface

The Pyramid Principle is a great concept in writing, which ought to be more widespread than it is. (The book is out of print and the creator, Barbara Minto, works it as a consulting business rather than spreading the word.) The gist is that your writing should have one main point, supported by a couple supporting points, each of which is supported. It's a simple idea, but deceptively difficult to stick to and deceptively powerful.

A great idea (as usual, from someone else) was, "How bout you organize your home page according to the Pyramid Principle?"

A step in this direction is a new right navigation:

I think it's way clearer than "Tools" and "Departments", the previous categories.

Linkspank is the greatest bestest way to share links because:

• Friends - You do it with your friends
• Spanks - There is a lot of good stuff to send and receive
  
• Winning - You can win stuff and achieve your way to glory.

Just a tidbit.

Google's Open Social: A Prediction

The social web - still like the Wild West

Google launched Open Social - a technology that is basically allows techies to write little things like facebook "applications" but make them accessible to a whole bunch of sites, not just facebook.

This is relevant to Linkspank (at least) because our facebook application is coming out soon. (It got slightly delayed - it looked too slight we added a little feature.)

There is no revolution here, just big companies and small companies playing the angles: big companies trying to lock in "network effects" of their user base by getting additional stickiness on their networks, and small companies trying to tap into the growing pie of big companies. Also big companies (Google) competing with other big companies (facebook) in trying to attract the attention of small companies and create richer networks.

My opinion on Open Social is the same as my opinion on facebook apps - Wild West-style openness is not such a good thing. It leads to lots of crap. Users want simplicity, and they want the good stuff and experiences. They don't want to sort through a bunch of crap.

I think cool stuff will come out of the Open Social platform - just like there are some cool facebook apps. But probably nothing all that great - just as none of the facebook apps have changed our lives. I also predict that the dust will settle in the future, and it will be a closed network, not an open network. The big players know this and they are rushing to be the one. :-)

Just Do It. (The Day after First Filming of Linkspank TV)

My favorite mantra for entrepreneurship these days: Just Do It.

There, I did it.

All so often, 50% good is good enough.

How would you rate this blog post? Would you have written it? :-)

Toolbar

Today's a crappy post but I'm keeping the flame alive... :-)

A linkspank toolbar is in the works - something you install in Internet Explorer or Firefox with nice buttons to help you spank and do other stuff across the web. We already have a QuickSpank button for your browser - the toolbar will have additional functions.

The design is not quite finalized. A toolbar is a pretty obvious idea. It was central to our original conception of linkspank, but we jettisoned it after research showed that most people don't know what toolbars are, and a mighty percentage of the other people are unwilling to install toolbars. (Basically any service that requires the installation of a toolbar is either willing to settle for a very small community, or they are clueless.)

On the other hand, the people who DO install toolbars are very important spankers so they deserve all the spanking equipment they want. Plus, this toolbar is going to be bitchin. So it's on the way.

What do YOU want in the toolbar? Let us know.

Spank Statistic

As of now, 19% of spankers have actually sent a linkspank. This percentage includes those individuals who merely sent a spank as part of a tutorial.

I had been estimating the figure to people as 10%, so it was nice to find that the truth was shinier than my expectation. But the most important question might be whether 19% is a great figure or one indicative of some failure.

I believe it's a good figure. It's much higher than the percentage of users of other user-generated contest sites that actually are generating the content. (The comparisons are difficult because not everything is obviously comparable but I still believe that statement is true.) And the number will go up, by virtue of user experience improvements and consumer awareness of the spank.

Of course, 19% is much smaller than the % of people who have ever shared a link by email or IM (north of 90%). We have a long way to go toward being as used as email and IM :-).

Linkspank TV: Planning the Pilot

Our Linkspank TV team had its kickoff meeting today. I think we have an awesome team and I feel lucky to be working with such skilled, creative, chill dudes and dudettes.

The goal: create a pilot (or some pilot segments) by end of October or early November. It will be a bit experimental and we have no need to be perfectionists about this so we can move fast.

Before I described some of the segments we were thinking about. For now, we're going with a "video montage" (summarizing the week of spanks), a "superlatives" section (again, regarding the week of spanks), and a "street report" (a variation on the oh so so classic theme).

How to Create the Greatest Site Demo Ever.

We've created a Video Introduction for linkspank (a "site demo").

A little part of our Video Introduction to Linkspank

Ok, so may it's not the greatest site demo EVER. But I'd put it in the top 95th percentile.

How to make one the way we made this one:

1. Explain what your site is to dozens, hundreds of people, verbally. In doing so, your pitch and explanation will evolve naturally to becoming increasingly effective - and you'll learn what people need to be explicitly told about your idea. Everyone helps you in this step, because you want your idea to be clear to anyone.

2. Create a positioning for your site. This is marketing mumbo-jumbo. People who actually know marketing and don't pooh-pooh the 3C-4P framework are useful for this step.

The reason you need to do this step is that it helps you figure out how to convey your message. Should your demo be slick or goofy? Is having a caveman in it a really dumb idea? Once your positioning is set, it provides the answers magically to all of these questions.

3. Storyboard the demo/video introduction. Pretend you are a cartoonist (even if your demo won't involve animation, as ours does). Long before anyone draws cartoons, they create "storyboards" describing, in excruciating detail, what happens in each "scene" of your demo. If this process sounds too creative to you, remember that you can always do it in Powerpoint.

4. Get a Flash artist/animator to executive your demo. Once you have the storyboard, you can show it to candidates and discuss whether they are the right person for it. In our case, we needed someone who knew flash and who could draw, but e.g. javascript skills were not required.

Notes:

+ This process has creative components - how do you make sure it goes well? The answer is to put as much of the creative work into step #3 by storyboarding everything in exquisite detail. You should let your Flash artist help you improve the idea in step #4, but any gaps in your description are areas of risk going forward.

+ Despite doing our homework, we have no way of being sure at this point how our audience will react to our site demo. But I will say confidently that if your site demo appeals to everyone, and everyone thinks it's unqualifiedly great, then you may have failed to stick to step #3 and maybe you created something too generic.

Just sharing my experiences! Don't forget to share your wisdom back with me ;-).

Seeking PR rep, plus a secret tip

We're seeking a PR rep! Someone who can get us on the cover of Wired, etc. Please pass along the word to any PR ninjas / divas. Inquires can be sent to prdiva [@] linkspank.com.

One of the PR-worthy things we are doing is launching a new contest, possibly on Monday. This contest is going to be crazy. The bling factor will be magnified. Stay tuned and strengthen your spank hand.

A Formula to (actually!) Use LinkedIn... and an Answer to the Classic Puzzle

This post will be rough but I wanted to share a formula for using LinkedIn.

Background: I want to start having some conversations on the Linkspank contest sponsorship program. To get various industry perspectives and advice, I need to make some connections.

The Formula:

1. Have a purpose. Most people on LinkedIn don't have a purpose for networking. Which is fine (unless you ask the Never Eat Alone guy). But you need a purpose to do this - getting a job, hiring someone, or in my case, setting up chats with people to get advice.

2. Search for the people you want to contact. E.g., I want to speak to someone from Orbitz, so I search LinkedIn for "Orbitz."

3. Sort your search by degrees of separation from you and throw out everyone higher than degree 3. They are too far away. InMail, referrals, all that stuff on the site - not going to help you with these guys (or anyone).

4. For each person you'd like to contact... (we'll call that person the "match")
a. Visit their profile and confirm you want to contact them.
b. See on their profile page which of your contacts connects you DIRECTLY to that person. We'll call that person the "connector."
c. Contact "the connector" and ask if that person is willing to send you the "match"'s contact info, and also to send an email to the "match" mentioning as much.

5. Contact the "match" by phone and email... and do whatever it was that you were setting out to do.

Notes

(i) Referrals on the site don't seem to work too well.

(ii) Anyone further way than 2 is not really reachable. Who gives a fuck if the CEO is your mailman's chiropractor's husband?

(iii) Observation (ii) gives us our answer to the Classic Puzzle - "who is worth adding as a contact on LinkedIn? Is it worth it? Why am I always logging in just to approve requests and then leave immediately?"

"What is the point of this crap?" Answered!

Answer: connect with someone if you know them enough to ask them the favor in #4. Which is not really all that well - you don't have to have worked with the person. But it's a good reason to build your network with acquaintances who you respect and know a bit about.

More on the TV Show

As I mentioned we're going to have a Linkspank TV Show.

The team is almost formed - we're working out the details. This is slated to be a weekly, low-budget show viewable via YouTube or another source. It will highlight some of the best spanks of the preceding week.

Here are some of the segment concepts we've tossed around (how's that for openness!):

1. Commentary on Recent Linkspanks.

• Example: let’s replay this video, “Snake coughs up entire hippo” and attain a deeper understanding of what’s going on J. Also commentary on more serious spanks, so this could vary a lot in tone.
• Comparable to shows that comment on viral videos. Talk show quality.

2. Lightning News.

• We actually report the news. Maybe a headline blitz – all the week’s news in 30 seconds.
• Comparable to real news + MTV news or something.

3. Interview: Viral Video Creator.

• We track down and interview the people who have created popular spanks.
• Comparable to a talk show / news.

4. Interview: Portrait of a Spanker.

• We interview prominent Spankers. Who is the mastermind behind KidBaby? How did he reach Level 5 with such a low quality rating? Do we think he’s in the running to win the secret Spankathon prize?
• Comparable to ESPN sideline reporting. (How did it feel to score the winning touchdown? What will it take to win next week?)

5. Street Reports.

• We interview people on the streets and review local establishments. This is usually pretty fun.
• Comparable to : that geography quiz video.

6. Caller Segments.

• We let people call into the show and discuss a concept that we just shared or something from last week.
• Comparable to : radio or TV talk show.

7. Reporting and Analysis of Current Contests.

• We give John Madden X and O diagram – type analysis of current contests- who’s winning, how, predictions, analysis, opinions.
• Comparable to : ESPN shizzle.

8. On-Air Games

• Game show type activity oriented around linkspank, with opportunity to win points on Linkspank and/or sponsor prizes.
• Comparable to : game shows, Linkspank itself .

9. Workplace disruption missions

• Visit spankers in their workplace or try to convert bored workers to the spank. Try not to get sued!
• Comparable to : nighttime TV skits, YouTube stuff.

Jason Fried and 37signals

I trekked to Providence to hear Jason Fried of 37signals speak this week.

Random picture of Jason Fried from somewhere else

I'll quote here:

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that's not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn't).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don't.

Lightning summary:

• I know and agree with his philosophy (maybe from influences of Google, non-tech aspects of my background, friends, my own laziness) -- this is definitely Super-Official Linkspank Philosophy...

• ... but I still found the talk useful and will probably check out their book (which you can read free online - go smarties). Based on my limited experience I have admiration for the products as well.

Cover design was not important to this book.

• The limitations and influences of Jason's theory are not well explored. When asked how Google had influenced him, Jason said he didn't know. C'mon! Google was the start of this with its pristine homepage back in '98.

• Another limitation can be inferred from Google's experience - this method doesn't work well for integrating products. Don't things become more complicated at some point? Isn't the process of managing many simple tools complicated, and isn't there some way technically to help a person do that? (Of course - like any operating system, microsoft office, your Google account.) The more you hammer on this point, the more the general philosophy starts to fall apart and becomes nothing more than "we prefer to focus on building simple products" :-).

The whole thing and especially the last bullet raises a question for Linkspank - which is its scope? How complicated should it be and how wide should its set of features be? Example: people often ask for features that other sites have, especially adding more photos :-).

Short answer: I think Linkspank's feature set can grow, but we still DEFINITELY have work to do around the core idea.

List of Things on my Mind

The irony of blogging: we tend to do it least when we are busiest and have the most to share :-).

In that vein, I will simply list some of the things on the radar screen:

+ Forming team for linkspank's weekly Internet TV show
+ Polishing design for browser toolbar
+ Working on model for corporate sponsorship of contests
+ Iterating over and over on site UI
+ Sit-down and A/B tests with users on UI
+ teeing up formation of advisor board
+ coming soon: new site preview / demo
+ very excited about MBA team helping with business plan / pitch
+ possible upcoming event: National Sticker Day

We're doing a TV show

We're going to have a Linkspank Internet TV show.


How freakin' cool is that?

Goal is to have a rough pilot by the end of October.

We have two co-anchors for the show, to be introduced later. Can you guess who they are???

Facebook Apps for Linkspank, Part 1

Development began and almost completed today for a baby Facebook app for Linkspank. It will hopefully debut next week.



I would bet any sum of money that if you were to guess what the app did, you'd be wrong! :-). I'm trying something slightly different from what the sites most similar to ours (as if any other site could be placed in the same category as linkspank) have been doing. To be discussed more later.

I must say, the development environment is great. Wow! I personally don't think the open apps environment is strategically the best move for facebook (I know I'm a lone warrior on this) but I must give the development environment, tools, and wiki big props.

The Death of Business 2.0

I got my last issue of Business 2.0, which has been canceled. While I didn't consider it a paragon of journalism, and did find its predictions of "What's Next" a little repetitive, I am still quite sad to see it go. I joined the Facebook group to save the magazine but to no avail.

bye

What will I miss? I can put it in these terms. One of my entrepreneurship professors presented our class with a series of new businesses, a great many of which turned out to be no-go's. When asked if this was a dirty trick to fool us, he explained that we are too accustomed to studying success cases, and ignoring failure cases.

One thing I liked about Business 2.0 was that it reported on not-yet-successful cases-- so, as in my entrepreneurship class, you got a flavor of the failure in with the success. That was a good thing. On the other hand, the magazine had a tendency to depict everything it reported on with glowing optimism, which was not realistic (and maybe the opposite of realistic). Reporting with more skepticism would have improved the usefulness of the publication to everyone (except maybe the companies being covered).

I guess now I'll just have to read even more blogs as a substitute. Sigh. Maybe blogs are the way of the future, but it's a pretty disorganized shuffle right now. Maybe Linkspank can help someday...

Stumbling on Happiness...as an Entrepreneur

I've been reading Stumbling on Happiness. I won't review the book, but merely apply some of its observations to entrepreneurship.

Finding #1: Control, rather than outcomes, is key to happiness.

Corollary #1: To be happy, be an entrepreneur.

Finding #2: We are happier with irreversible decisions than reversible ones.

Corollary #2: When applying Corollary #1, do it boldly.

What Took So Long? (news feeds pt 1)

News on the Homepage

One of the motivating ideas behind Linkspank is that, when it comes to finding and sharing new stuff on the web, too many things are harder than they need to be. One of these way-too-hard things is reading news from a variety of sources by the use of feeds.

I could speak for an hour about news feeds (RSS feeds), sharing my relatively unique views. But suffice it to say that today we threw up a test of an original idea: give the user feeds! Don't make it just "easy" (because there is no easy way to choose a bunch of feeds), make it "done." With better versions of done to come.

We'll see how that goes. Not a huge change but I am excited about it as I am about everything.

Customer Service: MySpace's Tom, Pandora's Tim, and a robot

As part of my quest to sign up for every free service available on the Internet, I joined Pandora yesterday and checked it out.

On joining, I received this email:



An interestingly uber-personal, reply-right-to-this email approach to serving your customers. I personally thought it was really cool to receive Tim's email...but I am not sure that a similar approach would make sense for Linkspank. Pandora, after all, is not really about befriending people.

When linkspank was getting set up I thought a lot about Tom on MySpace. The idea of having a real person at the company automatically be your friend is a pretty brilliant one, I think. But the idea seemed (and still seems) a little passe to me now. People are less psyched than they used to be about friending someone online who they don't know.

Out of all this came the Spankdroid - an admittedly bizarre creation. Basically, we decided to have a mascot, rather than an actual person, be our spokesperson. This idea is little used on social networks!



The idea is that if you make friends with the Spankdroid, you then get messages from him about contests and so forth. Spankdroid is also like a little helper whom you can email with questions.

We did a lot of consumer research and determined that a robot wearing an Uncle Sam hat resonated perfectly with our users. Ok, maybe not :-). Rather, we do know that Linkspank is different, and it prides itself on doing things that big sites are afraid to do.... so we have a robot spokesperson.

Just some musings on this subject... :-)

Reactions to Google Presentation

Google released its version of PowerPoint this week, which you can try out with your Gmail account at http://docs.google.com. I jumped on the opportunity to try it, because I use the other docs services and also because I was doing some remote collaboration with people in Russia, India, everywhere this week and it seemed like this could be really useful.



My reactions, in order of appearance:

1. It's pretty cool
2. Not enough keyboard shortcuts, or I didn't know what they were
3. Default template SUCKS. The bullet points suck - too small, no spacing. Don't they know the 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki?
4. Line spacing and font size - probably THE key formatting issue in a presentation - is difficult and sucky.
   
5. I had a little trouble publishing, in that I'd publish, then edit my doc, and the published version didn't change, so I had to keep unpublishing and publishing.
6. Download to a zip file is cool. You can view your preso on your desktop or publish to a site.
7. Not everyone could view the file! In conjunction with #8 this put a huge damper on my experience.
8. You can't convert to microsoft ppt. In conjunction with #7, it means that I made a presentation and had no way of sharing it with one of my team members without REDOING the whole thing in PowerPoint. Not good.
9. On the flip side, this worked really well in IM collaboration with people working in India - I just IM'd them the link and they checked out the presentation. Cool.

Summary: it's good for collaboration, which is the key to any document. But its strength is ease of access on the web, and this is undermined by the inability to put into .ppt, especially given that it's new and has bugs. Secondly, it's easy to use, but still falling short on some of the usability basics of making a simple preso.

Will I use it again? Not sure. Maybe. I have spent lots of effort in the past getting team members onto Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs. They usually have lots of trouble getting their accounts set up and getting to the file. Sometimes it seems like it's worth it, but definitely not always. I believe in the product though and certainly it has a bright future.

I think their team should think more about Guy Kawasaki - a simpler online presentation tool is perfect for the 10/20/30 rule. It should be the strategy one-liner for their product, because it informs not just how you give presentations, but you sit down to create them.

As for the presentation I was working on today - a storyboard for a flash animation to replace our 1996 preview. So far I am PUMPED about it.

Banner Ads: 6 lessons; 3 winners

I'm calling the banner ad experiment to a halt. I give it a while and various experiments but here is the deal according to me.

The top performing ad: It's the shizzle, but still fizzling expensizzle

On Ad Placement

1. Network-wide banner ads suck. They are like sending everyone on the planet junk mail - it has some return, but you are essentially polluting. <1% can make money but it is pollution.

2. Domain targeting makes a difference. Your banner ads will consistently perform better on some sites than others. You have to experiment to find the right ones.

3. Search advertising is great, but it only works if you can offer something in a language that people are looking for on a search engine. (Sometimes people don't know what they want, or don't look for it on a search engine.)

Performer #2: The reason I tried banner ads, and as usual, someone else's idea at a bar.

On Copy

4. Some of my ads had the linkspank logo; others were clever and obscure; others were in-your-face. The best combination seemed to be "in-your-face, but slightly obscure."

5. White text on black background wins. I learned this in Ogilvy on Advertising and I recommend the book.

Performer #3: Maybe visionaries click ads more often than other people.

Summary

6. It's too expensive, and doesn't feel good, compared to other methods of promotion - like the contests.

What does it all mean to you?

I don't know, but I'll offer an opinion in an area that is interesting to many people right now - mobile phone advertising -- and especially mobile-phone promotions and contests.

Google has launched "Adsense for Mobile" -- namely, banner ads for mobile, so you want to know, should I be putting my banner ads on people's phones?

I would say, try going to the mirror and saying to yourself, "I run a junk mail business." If that sounds accurate, go for it! ;-)

People also have a blithe notion these days that by offering customers the opportunity to win something, you are immediately their friend and they won't mind constant contact from you. (E.g., constant text messages.) My dos centavos is that you should keep in mind that a good chunk of people - possibly 100% of your target market - will assume that it will be impossible for them to win, even if it is not that difficult (I learned this in the case of linkspank).

AdWords/the search context is just a way way better way to reach people, if it makes sense for your medium. Otherwise, go for some PR stunts and work on using your consumer evangelists - they WANT to receive your text messages. :-)

The Lost User, and Allegories of Gmail

What is Gmail's "value proposition"?

Try to tell me, right now, in ten seconds, what supposedly makes Gmail better than Hotmail or Yahoo!.

If you can do it, then in my opinion you are a rare individual. Because I have rarely heard Gmail's value proposition explained well. That would include Gmail's site:

Big list, little meaning

These four things about Gmail are not particularly unique, compared to Yahoo! and Hotmail (although some of them used to be).

Here's my answer: "Gmail, the first web service that allows a layperson to be as fast and efficient as an expert user of pine and other tools in a Linux environment."

It's a pretty simple idea, but it's hard to explain to people. Pine is very geeky:

Comparing something to Pine may not be desirable

Sometimes simple things are hard to explain to people, if they aren't familiar where you're coming from. And if you're coming from a different place from your users (and as the designer of a technical product for laypeople, that's always true), it's hard to know what will be clear to people.


Lost Features, Lost Users

I'm not picking on Gmail - I like Gmail a lot, and so I'm writing from experience. I have a lot of experience explaining keyboard shortcuts, search syntax, and filters to people in Gmail.

Also, I remember what it was like to first start using Gmail. It was a new environment. Yet now, it's so simple... to people who know it ;-).


Parlez vous Spank?

I've been thinking about the old "Gmail challenge" because I keep discovering how many Linkspank users - even people who obediently, regularly check their inboxes - don't understand what a spank is or how to do it.

(So if you're among them, don't feel bad.)

As I always do, I'm blaming it in part on UI issues, and a solution is in the works. But the challenge does not disappear with a good UI. (After all, Gmail's UI is pretty good.)

It's really a new concept, which savvy UI and tutorials can educate on, but which is still new... even if it's very simple.

My new mission: get people to understand what a Linkspank is.

Like I said, new UI is on the way. Until then, the best way is to try :-), and maybe refer to our primitive tutorials (especially the first two):

How to Spank

How to Spank Faster

How to Earn Points

Possible New Prize: Jawbone

One of the most fun things about running the contests is the satisfaction of giving people their prizes. I have been able to hand some prizes over in person -- like djperry1973's iPhone, Naytrain's Bose Sounddock, nrogers' Sounddock, and MrZach's Apple TV.

Prizes are fun.

The Jawbone may have the makings of a future Linkspank prize.

I'm not sure if people would bust their humps spanking for a few weeks to win a Jawbone. But it might make a decent prize for something like the Spankathon. It's a bit cheaper than some of the other prizes, so maybe we will give away a few more. Many spankers are corporate types and hence they may salivate over this product. What do you think?

One other reason I was looking at the Jawbone is that the time is approaching to spruce up Linkspank's preview, which doesn't do any justice to the site. The Jawbone demo is awesome, and while it's a very different product from Linkspank, it's good inspiration.

Special Power Experiment: Flair

Today we're trying out a "special power" for spankers. It will be interesting to see if people like it (the only way to REALLY know is just try it I believe). You can see the official post for what the feature is all about.

It would certainly be possible to build an elaborate environment of special powers, based on Level achievement by spankers. I'm not averse to such a possibility, but I'd like to keep the special powers tied to the bread and butter of linkspank, which is links or content. Not everyone relates to winning points or achieving (in fact only a minority do), but everyone (on linkspank at least) likes good links and an environment that enriches that would be rich indeed.

More Fun with Menus

Lao Tzu writes:

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.

Spank Tzu may have written:

Governing a small startup
is like playing with a large pinyata.
Beat the crap out of it.

In other words, I am often pushing changes too quickly to be able to measure their effects scientifically, or let things take their course fully. :-)

Today's experiment is a further push with menus. I am proud (so far) of some of the recent menu changes described in this previous post, but I still faced a problem: the browse menus on the right weren't being noticed by people.

The problem seemed to be that the menu was located to the right of the page:

Browse menu at the right of the page

... where spanker eyes were not travelling to.

So let's try the menu on the left side...

Browse menu at the left of the page

Along the way, this inspired a shortening of the dark gray box at the top left, which was probably warranted anyway. (With regards to the other post, note the formatting of this menu somewhat like Facebook.)

The main trade-off of putting the browse menus on the left is that they have eliminated the "random profile" listings and the Spankathon/contest reminder. But I want to experiment with more sophisticated ways of sharing information about people and the contests in the context of the home page anyway... hence the experiment is underway! I'll get back to you on whether people browsing behaviors change.

This Ain't Your Daddy's Search Function

A dorky and slightly technical post today.

As just mentioned on the super-official blog, we have put up a new "quick search" feature for testing. (This was the "small but cool" feature I was excited about in last week's post.)

This feature is interesting to me for three reasons:

1. It gives a new perspective on search
2. It is an interesting topic to discuss the use of "AJAX" vs. web 1.0 programming
3. It is the latest chapter in an interesting story about the design of linkspank's user interface


1. Can Search be Improved?

Google rules the world of search (image courtesy of google earth). I remember when I first tried Google (sometime around 1998) and immediately felt, wow, this is something truly new and special. The rest of the world agreed, and since then lots of people have asked, Can search be improved? What is the future of search?

To me, search is not a sensible place to compete as a little startup because it's a bloody "red ocean" of competition.

But there are two kinds of "searching" that I feel are being underserviced right now: searching for "new stuff" (including news articles, but also new websites!), and searching for or organizing links that we view, share, and receive.

Linkspank quick search is a little step towards addressing these consumer needs. Even at Linkspank's young age, I already think the quick search does a great job of helping to find new stuff and keep track of quality links.


2. On the use of "AJAX"

The quick search feature allows you to search for links and browse results without opening a new browser window. I think it's a pretty cool use of ajax technology.

Fact: Stuff that loads or processes right in the page is cool for the user, because it's so fast. But that fact stops being true when the thing in the page takes a long time to load and it would actually be faster just click a normal link.

So the challenge in making an ajax feature is whether it will be (and stay) fast enough. One interesting thing is that ordinary web search like google is generally not fast enough for ajax, whereas searching for new links IS fast enough (or at least way faster). I'll leave the argumentation as a puzzle for the technically minded. :-) If you're not familiar with ajax and you want to read about it, see this wikipedia article.


3. An Interesting Story about User Interface (UI) Design

In December 2006 I developed a very strange-looking, very slow prototype of Linkspank. (It was called "stuffmoo" at the time!) Part of what made it so slow was that I wanted people to be able to view screen of links without loading a new page in their browser. (In the terms of the last paragraph, I was using too much ajax and it was too slow.)

I hung onto this design concept. When I gave up on it for most of linkspank, I still tried to use it for searching for links within linkspank. I was foiled again: searching for links and viewing page after page of links within one page load was way too slow...

...and in fact, the "normal" search function (as an ordinary page load) was itself way too slow.

But this problem turned out to be an opportunity - through rethinking the way to format the search and display results, it was possible to make a search engine using ajax that was faster than the "normal" way we had it implemented.

Lesson to self: hang on to the design concepts you believe in - technical problems can foil them in the short term, but they may eventually sidestep, or even solve, those technical problems.

On the Fancy-ness of Navigation Menus

Mission: Make Menus Prettier

The eternal quest for the perfect spank experience led me back recently to the navigation menus on linkspank. People had suggested to me that the right menu of popular sites and categories was ugly. Also I felt the top menu and the left menu could stand for some beautifying.

Our philosophy along the way has been to focus on making something that works well and is easy to use and fast, with beauty trailing behind as a distant priority. Nevertheless, "little things can make a big difference," and I didn't want to alienate people who were trying out Linkspank just because we have ugly menus.

The easiest way to construct beautiful menus is to use images. This allows you to use any font that you want for the text. You can also create elaborate backgrounds for the images and use javascript to make the menu tags do neat things when you hover over them.

Some Menus on Well-Designed Sites

But a lot of big great sites that work well shy away from images. Some examples.



Gmail uses a text-based menu with very little formatting. It used to be even plainer, and over the last year or so they added the "more" menu and the line under the menu.

Pros: loads very fast. You never have the problem of an image failing to load on a page. Easily confused users can recognize that the menu elements are in fact links (which can be a problem). It's pure and simple.

Big pro: if you change the size of the text on your page, the menu gets bigger. (not really doable with an image).

Cons: a bit ugly.



Facebook's menu has similar pros and cons to the Gmail menu. It's actually a text menu with css formatting, but it is as attractive as many an image-based menu. It makes clear that links are links by using changes in color, rather than underlining.



YouTube has two menus: an ugly but very clear text menu, with traditional blue color and underlining; and a set of tabs. The tabs look like images but if you change the size of your text you can see that they are actually images with text overlaying them.

Casual Conclusions

You can get the hint from these quality sites that there are major virtues to text menus. YouTube uses some images, but in what is still a text-based menu, and employing wide tabs that wouldn't work if you had more menu items (and which take up a lot of vertical real estate as well frankly).

So, how do you spice up menus without images?
(1) gmail says, "you don't"
(2) facebook says, "use colors and css"
(3) youtube gives a mixed answer.

Linkspank's menu (For Now)

Gmail's menu and YouTube's plain menu is very close to where we are starting, which we have deemed a bit ugly. YouTube's vertical marks are interesting though - we stuck them in since our menu items have multiple words and the links are not underlined, leading to some link parsing confusion.

YouTube's tab method doesn't work for Linkspank's menus, once again because they have multiple words / are long.

The color / css style used by facebook is probably best for most sites. It doesn't work well in Linkspank's color environment though - it's more a minimalist design overall, much like Gmail.



We ended up using an old trick from the (paper) publishing world: just use a different font. Open up some books: you may be surprised at how often section headers, in addition to being a bold font, are also a totally different font (often a rounder font).

Gmail, facebook, and YouTube don't use the other font method. Fonts are generally tricky since there aren't many fonts that are supported by various browsers and computers. But I figure, hey, it must be ok to use TWO fonts, and in fact I think this would be an improvement on an all-Arial world. So we're trying a little Trebuchet and we'll get back to you on how it goes. If you have suggestions - or the font isn't showing up for you correctly - let me know ;-).