1. Get the Linkspank toolbar for Firefox at http://www.linkspank.com/toolbar. It is far and away the fastest way to share links on the web. You also have the option to view a news ticker and you can save pages with a click for later browsing.
You can send your spanks to Facebook and to Twitter at the same time as individual email addresses! Use these tools:
2. Add the facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/linkspank The app is not super pretty right now, and the page to import your friends takes about fifteen seconds. But once you have the app in, you can spank individual facebook friends, and post links to your facebook wall at the same time as you send them to email or facebook people. Plus you'll enjoy better features as I improve the facebook app.
3. Add your twitter account at http://www.linkspank.com/twitter You can see what spanky tweets look like on my Twitter profile: http://www.twitter.com/bitchell.
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Value Creation vs. Value Capture in Technology
In any business area where value is truly created (=technology) you gotta think about value creation vs. value capture. You write code, develop products, make a new chip or doohickey; you create value, but how much of the payoff can you secure?
Microsoft, Apple, and Nintendo have made so much money not because they have created the most value, but rather because they have created a lot of value AND managed (with amazing shrewdness relative to everyone else) to capture most of the bucks that that value can produce. Plenty of value creation (e.g., the average new, neat cell phone) is too easily imitated.
Doubts about Google's business model? They are such: Google continues to create tremendous value, but without capture (unlike the early and ongoing beautiful marriage of search and ads).
Facebook vs. LinkedIn. Facebook creates more value; it's cooler, does more, people love it more, it's just all around contributing to society more. But LinkedIn does provide value, and it captures that value better because it's an environment in which it's sensible to charge some users (and for them to pay) for premium services. You could say Facebook is the better company from the public's eye, but LinkedIn is the better business.
Microsoft, Apple, and Nintendo have made so much money not because they have created the most value, but rather because they have created a lot of value AND managed (with amazing shrewdness relative to everyone else) to capture most of the bucks that that value can produce. Plenty of value creation (e.g., the average new, neat cell phone) is too easily imitated.
Doubts about Google's business model? They are such: Google continues to create tremendous value, but without capture (unlike the early and ongoing beautiful marriage of search and ads).
Facebook vs. LinkedIn. Facebook creates more value; it's cooler, does more, people love it more, it's just all around contributing to society more. But LinkedIn does provide value, and it captures that value better because it's an environment in which it's sensible to charge some users (and for them to pay) for premium services. You could say Facebook is the better company from the public's eye, but LinkedIn is the better business.
Monday, August 25, 2008
The REAL Story Behind the "New Facebook"
If facebook sent you an announcement indicating that Applications were being deleted from the site, how would you feel?
Possibly, a mix of relief, indignation, and apprehension. Relief that your facebook experience wasn't going to be so chaotic anymore. Indignation that the efforts of all the little people out there to build apps were suddenly being shut down. And apprehension that, with apps gone, you might be missing out on something great.... something great that you could have used or played with if apps had been around.
Well, prepare to unleash those feelings. I am sorry to report that the "new facebook" has been introduced primarily to brush Applications under the carpet. Sure enough, applications are still a part of facebook. But they are a hidden part, one that facebook makes you work extra hard to find. And they are harder than ever to receive: all the work you do sending hatching eggs to your friends goes quite unnoticed now.
Consider this: what is so "new" about the new facebook? Here are some of the differences you may have noticed:
+ Some of the stuff that was on the left was moved to the right, and vice versa;
+ Some borders and shadings have been removed or added;
+ Stuff has been moved into "tabs"
These changes, especially the last one, make the site a lot "cleaner." Basically, a lot of junk that you were looking at before (i.e., applications) is back in the invisible tabs now. You click on them sometimes. Sometimes. Kinda like how you click on advertising sometimes :-).
What's in the front tab? It looks kinda like facebook used to look... before the whole applications thing got started.
There are three main ways to interact with facebook applications: through your own mini-feed; on the profile pages of other people; and via emails that you receive. The latter method of communication is restricted almost to the point of making all of the apps worthless. Now, the former two methods have also been hobbled.
There you have it. May the relief, indignation, and apprehension commence. Personally, I feel mostly relief. I liked a lot of the facebook apps, but the quality is "inconsistent" and it's part of a grand strategy of trying to be everything to everyone -- which, as it turns out, is the exact definition of not having a strategy. Of course, now that the apps have been shuffled away, it looks like maybe facebook did have a strategy: the apps were helpful, for a while. If you believe that, you may want to move your "indignation" slider a bit to the right. But maybe it would be wrong to credit them with that idea, since technology companies tend to be short on foresight. And now we are back to the basics of facebook, and the basics are a beautiful thing.
Possibly, a mix of relief, indignation, and apprehension. Relief that your facebook experience wasn't going to be so chaotic anymore. Indignation that the efforts of all the little people out there to build apps were suddenly being shut down. And apprehension that, with apps gone, you might be missing out on something great.... something great that you could have used or played with if apps had been around.
Well, prepare to unleash those feelings. I am sorry to report that the "new facebook" has been introduced primarily to brush Applications under the carpet. Sure enough, applications are still a part of facebook. But they are a hidden part, one that facebook makes you work extra hard to find. And they are harder than ever to receive: all the work you do sending hatching eggs to your friends goes quite unnoticed now.
Consider this: what is so "new" about the new facebook? Here are some of the differences you may have noticed:
+ Some of the stuff that was on the left was moved to the right, and vice versa;
+ Some borders and shadings have been removed or added;
+ Stuff has been moved into "tabs"
These changes, especially the last one, make the site a lot "cleaner." Basically, a lot of junk that you were looking at before (i.e., applications) is back in the invisible tabs now. You click on them sometimes. Sometimes. Kinda like how you click on advertising sometimes :-).
What's in the front tab? It looks kinda like facebook used to look... before the whole applications thing got started.
There are three main ways to interact with facebook applications: through your own mini-feed; on the profile pages of other people; and via emails that you receive. The latter method of communication is restricted almost to the point of making all of the apps worthless. Now, the former two methods have also been hobbled.
There you have it. May the relief, indignation, and apprehension commence. Personally, I feel mostly relief. I liked a lot of the facebook apps, but the quality is "inconsistent" and it's part of a grand strategy of trying to be everything to everyone -- which, as it turns out, is the exact definition of not having a strategy. Of course, now that the apps have been shuffled away, it looks like maybe facebook did have a strategy: the apps were helpful, for a while. If you believe that, you may want to move your "indignation" slider a bit to the right. But maybe it would be wrong to credit them with that idea, since technology companies tend to be short on foresight. And now we are back to the basics of facebook, and the basics are a beautiful thing.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Representativeness Bias in the Tech Industry
In business school Dick Thaler taught us about the representativeness bias, which could be crudely stated as the bias of over-weighting everything you're familiar with when making judgments, estimates and guesses about stuff. Dr. Thaler convinced me in class that we all fall prey to this bias far more often and with a greater deepness of error than we imagine, even after the bias has been explained to us.
Dick Thaler taught us about representativeness bias
For people in the tech industry, the representativeness bias can lead to (1) an over-estimation of the penetration of a product or service, either in awareness or usage, and, on the flip side, (2) an under-estimation of potential market sizes. As someone in the tech industry, you are a techie and you know lots of techies. Hence when all the techies you know start using a website, say Twitter, you overestimate how much people use Twitter or even know about Twitter. On the flip side, you underestimate how much Twitter has at stake to win by capturing the uncaptured market, or how badly some other service could thrash Twitter by grabbing the uncaptured market.
less of a big deal than people say
(though I wish them luck)
To stick with Twitter for a moment: how many people use Twitter? About a million. If they were all in America (which they aren't), they would number 1 American out of every 300. Hey, that doesn't sound like very much! How much of the remaining 299 out of 300 Americans do you think have heard of Twitter? Hint: *much* less than half! In other words, no one knows about this service, given that it's supposed to be something that any old person with a phone and friends can enjoy. Now, I like Twitter. But this is a service that is supposed to be as neat and as of general interest, as, say Facebook, which has 80 million users. If you needlessly chop a huge portion off that number to be "conservative," you have a potential market for a Twitter-like service of 50 million people. So, in user accounts, Twitter has penetrated 2% of its potential market. Basically, it's sucking big time. You'd be inclined to ask yourself if it's designed wrong, marketed wrong, or environmental factors are against it. Some conclusions: (1) Twitter is overhyped; (2) the idea of trying to build a better Twitter is undervalued. Now I don't mean to pick on Twitter exclusively. It's true for any site you like, to varying degrees. You can even say it about Facebook. Facebook's membership -- again even if you inflate it by counting everyone as an American -- compromises about a quarter of the country. That's a heck of a lot of people. But it's also outnumbered 3 to 1 by the non-Facebook users. For a site whose goal (according to me) is to be entertaining enough to compete with sitting around and watching television, it's a massive but still quite incomplete advance.
With a relentless focus on the mass market, Jobs avoids the representativeness bias of techiedom and can think big, score big
A great example to the contrary is the iPhone. As you may recall, Steve Jobs made some pretty bold sales forecasts for the iPhone before it was launched. If iPhone had been viewed in terms of the "smartphone" market, Jobs would have seemed crazy. But he was thinking correctly. You could say that the smartphone market was like Twitter - cool, but nowhere near the size it was supposed to be. He wanted to go for the real market, which was more of a Facebook type size (to continue the analogy). Of course, don't go saying that "everyone" knows about the iPhone now! ;-)
This logic inspired my foray into Linkspank. A tech insider may think of the competitive arena for link sharing, social news, or whatever you want to call it, as saturated. But the reality is quite the opposite. One of the biggest sites in this area - Digg - has only a few million users. Compared to the size of the market -- for really any person you likes YouTube, reads news on the web, or gets or receives email forwards is a potential user of such a site -- Digg is a little sniveling baby.
It IS true that the small minority of people who use Twitter, for example, may be different from the other 97-99% of Americans in some meaningful way... but I'll leave that point alone at this time.
Here's another, slightly more fun example. You know those "viral videos" on YouTube and elsewhere that "everyone" has seen? The all-time most viewed video on YouTube, the Evolution of Dance:
It has been viewed about 90 million times, which is say about 90 million people. By comparison, an estimated 140 million people view some part of the Super Bowl each year. So, while it's impressive, it still falls a bit behind the Superbowl Halftime Show (estimating, since that's not what the previous figure refers to). And that is the number 1 video - the number of views drops off VERY quickly as we go down the list. Still in the top ten is the "laughing baby video, which has a mere 50 million views:
It's pretty funny, and a lot of people have watched it, but unless you live on a special techie-only planet, you know more people who HAVEN'T seen this video than you know who HAVE seen it. Fewer than 1 in 6 Americans has seen it (once again, with my grotesque the-world-is-America math).
People like to talk about the magic of a technology that has enabled 50 million people (if views = people) to watch something filmed casually in someone's kitchen. And it is magical, I agree. But looking at the numbers closely turns the viral video concept a little bit on its head. Our popular notion is that something catches fire on the web and then "everyone" sees it. But the reality is that sharing is still rather inefficient, and it's more right in many respects to think that "no one has seen anything." :-)
Linkspank addresses this problem in a few ways: it lets you share more videos and links with your friends, without inconveniencing them (since they can manage their Inbox and email settings). You can also see which of your friends have already received a spank. So rather than being a part of the problem, be a part of the solution (haha): join the spank and spank this page to your friends, so they can read this nifty article... and catch up on the Evolution of Dance and the Laughing Baby.
Dick Thaler taught us about representativeness biasFor people in the tech industry, the representativeness bias can lead to (1) an over-estimation of the penetration of a product or service, either in awareness or usage, and, on the flip side, (2) an under-estimation of potential market sizes. As someone in the tech industry, you are a techie and you know lots of techies. Hence when all the techies you know start using a website, say Twitter, you overestimate how much people use Twitter or even know about Twitter. On the flip side, you underestimate how much Twitter has at stake to win by capturing the uncaptured market, or how badly some other service could thrash Twitter by grabbing the uncaptured market.
less of a big deal than people say(though I wish them luck)
With a relentless focus on the mass market, Jobs avoids the representativeness bias of techiedom and can think big, score bigA great example to the contrary is the iPhone. As you may recall, Steve Jobs made some pretty bold sales forecasts for the iPhone before it was launched. If iPhone had been viewed in terms of the "smartphone" market, Jobs would have seemed crazy. But he was thinking correctly. You could say that the smartphone market was like Twitter - cool, but nowhere near the size it was supposed to be. He wanted to go for the real market, which was more of a Facebook type size (to continue the analogy). Of course, don't go saying that "everyone" knows about the iPhone now! ;-)
This logic inspired my foray into Linkspank. A tech insider may think of the competitive arena for link sharing, social news, or whatever you want to call it, as saturated. But the reality is quite the opposite. One of the biggest sites in this area - Digg - has only a few million users. Compared to the size of the market -- for really any person you likes YouTube, reads news on the web, or gets or receives email forwards is a potential user of such a site -- Digg is a little sniveling baby.
It IS true that the small minority of people who use Twitter, for example, may be different from the other 97-99% of Americans in some meaningful way... but I'll leave that point alone at this time.
Here's another, slightly more fun example. You know those "viral videos" on YouTube and elsewhere that "everyone" has seen? The all-time most viewed video on YouTube, the Evolution of Dance:
It has been viewed about 90 million times, which is say about 90 million people. By comparison, an estimated 140 million people view some part of the Super Bowl each year. So, while it's impressive, it still falls a bit behind the Superbowl Halftime Show (estimating, since that's not what the previous figure refers to). And that is the number 1 video - the number of views drops off VERY quickly as we go down the list. Still in the top ten is the "laughing baby video, which has a mere 50 million views:
It's pretty funny, and a lot of people have watched it, but unless you live on a special techie-only planet, you know more people who HAVEN'T seen this video than you know who HAVE seen it. Fewer than 1 in 6 Americans has seen it (once again, with my grotesque the-world-is-America math).
People like to talk about the magic of a technology that has enabled 50 million people (if views = people) to watch something filmed casually in someone's kitchen. And it is magical, I agree. But looking at the numbers closely turns the viral video concept a little bit on its head. Our popular notion is that something catches fire on the web and then "everyone" sees it. But the reality is that sharing is still rather inefficient, and it's more right in many respects to think that "no one has seen anything." :-)
Linkspank addresses this problem in a few ways: it lets you share more videos and links with your friends, without inconveniencing them (since they can manage their Inbox and email settings). You can also see which of your friends have already received a spank. So rather than being a part of the problem, be a part of the solution (haha): join the spank and spank this page to your friends, so they can read this nifty article... and catch up on the Evolution of Dance and the Laughing Baby.
Friday, May 2, 2008
facebook's iPhone app is OKAY
For the latest couple days my iPod Touch has been grafted onto my body, in my brain, forming a Voltron-like monster who constantly browses the web and does pretty much anything you can do on the iPod Touch.
The result will be an iPhone app that rivals the best ones out there. Stay tuned, and practicing tapping things to build your endurance.
You call that a knife?
The result will be an iPhone app that rivals the best ones out there. Stay tuned, and practicing tapping things to build your endurance.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
this blog just got way more micro (I'm talking about Twitter)
I just checked out the Social Media Breakfast. Was cool, thanks Bryan.
The thing was basically a huge Twitter lovefest. It helped me to think a little deeper about the service.
Anyway, I'm going to try the twitter things for people who for some reason think it's interesting to follow the individual firings of my synapses. That place will be
twitter.com/bitchell
I'll still blog here, of course - when it's more than just a snippet.
You can see that I used my (sort of) real name rather than "linkspank" as my twitter handle. The reason: twitter is not about companies, but rather people. A huge portion of what I do is "Inside Linkspank" type stuff. But there will be & has to be other junk in there too, because when you go high volume the line gets blurry between this & that. Some people raised an eyebrow at the user name "bitchell." I raise an eyebrow back at them. I'm like hey, What do you expect from a person who names a site Linkspank? ;-)
The thing was basically a huge Twitter lovefest. It helped me to think a little deeper about the service.
1. Often I want to blog here, but my thought is "too small" for a blog post, or maybe a bit off topic. Reason to try Twitter.
2. Facebook status updates are fun, and I have previously been of the opinion that they killed the need for twitter. But now I'm understanding that the whole game of twitter is VOLUME.
You COULD do a high volume of status updates in facebook, but that's not really quite what it's for and your friends are likely to get bummed. Twitter is designed more to be high volume.
Actually this scenario is similar to Linkspank - you can post a link on facebook, but you can't do it in high VOLUME efficiently (i.e. without spamming your friends). Enter Linkspank, and your world is awesome - more content, bigger brain, bigger laughs.
Anyway, I'm going to try the twitter things for people who for some reason think it's interesting to follow the individual firings of my synapses. That place will be
twitter.com/bitchell
I'll still blog here, of course - when it's more than just a snippet.
You can see that I used my (sort of) real name rather than "linkspank" as my twitter handle. The reason: twitter is not about companies, but rather people. A huge portion of what I do is "Inside Linkspank" type stuff. But there will be & has to be other junk in there too, because when you go high volume the line gets blurry between this & that. Some people raised an eyebrow at the user name "bitchell." I raise an eyebrow back at them. I'm like hey, What do you expect from a person who names a site Linkspank? ;-)
Friday, January 11, 2008
Facebook Apps - Notifications, Clutter, and You
It's been in the news that Facebook is giving you tools to de-clutter your profile layout. Fine. (People who listen to the Linkspank blogs will recall that I was predicting this kind of thing a while ago.)
But the "clutter" of applications has been an issue for a few months and particularly with notifications.
Meanwhile, Linkspank is building its facebook app - The Real Version. In doing so, we've bumped up against the second issue: notifications.
Who can send a notification or email to whom within an app, and how? You'd think that's a pretty straightforward, important, basic question. Well, in fact this question has a non-straightforward, confusing, answer:
Holy crap.
(Note, it says confidential but at the page where I found it it appears to be pasted by the source.)
I give facebook a lot of credit for their willingness to take bold action to protect their user experience. The flip side is that the boldness has created that table. Wow.
People want to be able to play around and try games and applications. But they also want a simplified AND organized stream of communications. Not easy to do. This is part of why Linkspank is "sticking to its knitting" and will only build in features that touch the core idea and "ecosystem" at multiple points.
Anyway, regarding the facebook app, we'll be phasing it in starting on Monday hopefully.
But the "clutter" of applications has been an issue for a few months and particularly with notifications.
Meanwhile, Linkspank is building its facebook app - The Real Version. In doing so, we've bumped up against the second issue: notifications.
Who can send a notification or email to whom within an app, and how? You'd think that's a pretty straightforward, important, basic question. Well, in fact this question has a non-straightforward, confusing, answer:
Holy crap.
(Note, it says confidential but at the page where I found it it appears to be pasted by the source.)
I give facebook a lot of credit for their willingness to take bold action to protect their user experience. The flip side is that the boldness has created that table. Wow.
People want to be able to play around and try games and applications. But they also want a simplified AND organized stream of communications. Not easy to do. This is part of why Linkspank is "sticking to its knitting" and will only build in features that touch the core idea and "ecosystem" at multiple points.
Anyway, regarding the facebook app, we'll be phasing it in starting on Monday hopefully.
Friday, November 23, 2007
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...
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...
Sunday, November 4, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
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. :-)
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
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.
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...
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...
Monday, September 10, 2007
More Fun with Menus
Lao Tzu writes:
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.
Governing a large countrySpank Tzu may have written:
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.
Governing a small startupIn other words, I am often pushing changes too quickly to be able to measure their effects scientifically, or let things take their course fully. :-)
is like playing with a large pinyata.
Beat the crap out of it.
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
So let's try the menu on the left side...
Browse menu at the left of the pageAlong 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.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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 ;-).
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 ;-).
Friday, August 10, 2007
Linkspank has no competition.
Linkspank has no competition. I'm totally serious. Really, I mean come on, what's the competition?
Ok, I'm kidding. In talking with me, one of the things people are most obsessed about is "competition." So I've had the opportunity to think about it and talk about it and so it's an Inside Linkspank kind of topic.
bring it, biatch
How I Don't Think about Competition: Laundry List Comparison
Don't create a list of companies that seem reminiscent of Linkspank and worry about whether they are "already doing" what Linkspank is doing, and whether we "need" something like Linkspank.
thinking inside the box
In my opinion, that is the DEFINITION of thinking inside the box. :-)
How I Do Think about Competition: Consumer Opportunity
Start with the customer. Competition is forever a secondary business question - second to the user and what the user wants.
Thinking about people is how good stuff gets started. I started working on Linkspank because I remarked to myself,
And that's how I got started. We created a "customer manifesto" of sorts. And we had a team of people and we researched the idea. We found that Linkspank (as it would later be called) would not be for everyone, but that there was a real opportunity.
there must be a better way
You can only talk about competition in my opinion once you have an opportunity to do something new in mind.
Now, if the opportunity is real, then by definition your competition is failing in some way. They aren't addressing the opportunity, or not that well. Take Digg, which is a great site but suffers from both issues. First, it doesn't really address sharing with friends in any real way (it's a "wisdom of crowds" application, not a friends site or social network). Second, it doesn't really address it right - it's too techie and hasn't grown beyond a slice of the web population.
Even though lots of people have been working at this problem, they have not solved it yet. People still share using email above all - and while email is ok, it's easy to imagine a better world for people who share more than like a couple links per month.
No Competition is Usually a Bad Sign
If there is a real opportunity, then you should expect competition. If there is no competition, you either don't understand the market, there is no market, or you're WAY ahead of everyone. (Of the three, the last is the best, but it's still a rough place to be.)
So How Do You Know if You Can Compete?
If you're competing just on speed, don't bother. The trick is to solve the problem better! And in a rich, interconnected way, as explained by Porter's concept of strategic fit.
To my mind that means, the more complicated your problem is, the better chance you have at being able to compete - if you can solve it. :-).
Just one competitor's thoughts.... ante up.
Ok, I'm kidding. In talking with me, one of the things people are most obsessed about is "competition." So I've had the opportunity to think about it and talk about it and so it's an Inside Linkspank kind of topic.
bring it, biatchHow I Don't Think about Competition: Laundry List Comparison
Don't create a list of companies that seem reminiscent of Linkspank and worry about whether they are "already doing" what Linkspank is doing, and whether we "need" something like Linkspank.
thinking inside the boxIn my opinion, that is the DEFINITION of thinking inside the box. :-)
How I Do Think about Competition: Consumer Opportunity
Start with the customer. Competition is forever a secondary business question - second to the user and what the user wants.
Thinking about people is how good stuff gets started. I started working on Linkspank because I remarked to myself,
You know, Andrew, procrastination is too much work, it's not as fun as it could be, and it's still really primitive. When I get an email forward, I have no idea where it came from and I don't know whether my other friends saw it. Wouldn't it be nice to know that?(one man's dream come true... or on the way at least)
(and again)
Also, despite search engines and websites, it's still way too hard to find all the good stuff out there. There are videos that hit the web and are viewed by 3 million people in a week. How do you know what they are, which of your friends are watching them? and it's just too hard to find the stuff you are really going to like - especially new stuff.
When I go to YouTube, I know there's a lot of great stuff. But it would be way better if I could see what my friends were watching, what they liked, and if I could share things with them more easily and save it all to watch it and share it later.
There are all kinds of ways to share links - you can email them, "share" on sites like YouTube, Break, eBaumsworld, you can post on MySpace or share on Facebook, and there are all kinds of techie sites like stumpleupon, digg, delicious, etc, -- but I've tried all these things and I just am not that impressed. Sharing is too technical, too much work, and you still can't do half the stuff I want to do.
Basically, all the stuff out there sucks. And I can imagine a site that doesn't suck. Maybe I should try to make that. Wouldn't that be fun?
And that's how I got started. We created a "customer manifesto" of sorts. And we had a team of people and we researched the idea. We found that Linkspank (as it would later be called) would not be for everyone, but that there was a real opportunity.
there must be a better wayYou can only talk about competition in my opinion once you have an opportunity to do something new in mind.
Now, if the opportunity is real, then by definition your competition is failing in some way. They aren't addressing the opportunity, or not that well. Take Digg, which is a great site but suffers from both issues. First, it doesn't really address sharing with friends in any real way (it's a "wisdom of crowds" application, not a friends site or social network). Second, it doesn't really address it right - it's too techie and hasn't grown beyond a slice of the web population.
Even though lots of people have been working at this problem, they have not solved it yet. People still share using email above all - and while email is ok, it's easy to imagine a better world for people who share more than like a couple links per month.
No Competition is Usually a Bad Sign
If there is a real opportunity, then you should expect competition. If there is no competition, you either don't understand the market, there is no market, or you're WAY ahead of everyone. (Of the three, the last is the best, but it's still a rough place to be.)
So How Do You Know if You Can Compete?
If you're competing just on speed, don't bother. The trick is to solve the problem better! And in a rich, interconnected way, as explained by Porter's concept of strategic fit.
To my mind that means, the more complicated your problem is, the better chance you have at being able to compete - if you can solve it. :-).
Just one competitor's thoughts.... ante up.
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