Sharlene would like to be added as one of my friends!

I got a MySpace friend request from Sharlene.

I don't recall ever meeting her or talking to her in any way shape or form, but she is pretty cute!

Plus she has personality to back it up:

Ah, it's kind of fun. Since most of my friends don't do much on MySpace it's nice to meet a whore-bot every now and then. Maybe I'll let her catch a glimpse of my USB dongle...

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... :-)

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,

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 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.