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. :-)