Google's product development mantra and the Tipping Point

I've been thinking about when and how to release and push out Linkspank's new toolbar / Firefox extension, which is really cool and quite well received by its small number of users so far. The question is “when and how to launch.”

For at least a few years, Google has advocated an approach to product development whereby you release your product at an early stage and then “iterate” - make improvements as users demand them and improve the process. Google has been voicing this mantra for a few years. This approach to designing a piece of software works best when you're building something simple and you can change it easily (the web is good for that). The philosophy is not too far off of the ideas espoused by 37Signals.

But also taken as a truism is what Malcolm Gladwell has to say in The Tipping Point. Small changes (say, in an Internet site) can make a big difference. Tipping-point thinking implies that your average cool website with a couple thousand users, like Linkspank, may be just a few crucial changes away from explosive growth.

Google's product philosophy and the tipping point meesage have something in common: tweaking. When you iteratively develop a product you have released, you're making pretty small changes. And in searching for the tipping point, you are trying to find the devilishly minor changes in your product that can take it from zero to sixty. You can think of iterative development as a way to search for the tipping point.

Here's a flipside, though. Part of the underlying message of the release-and-iterate idea is that people overestimate the risk of release. “If you get fairly close to the right product,” Google means, “your users will help you close the gap more efficiently than you would have done otherwise.” IF, that is, the customers know what they want; but as traditional marketing does a good job of showing, customers generally don't. And as the tipping point argues, it can be tough for anyone (designer or user) to identify that the small changes that are going to be crucial. That's in contradiction with Google's idea.

Moreover, the mere fact that small changes are critical according to the Tipping Point undermines one of Google's messages: that there is a low cost to release. Who are we kidding? Releasing a product always has a risk. Any potential user who turns away from your product may not turn back, so any time you to go them there is a risk.

It's easy for Google to proclaim iterate-and-release now that the company has a huge user base and a pervasive brand: they can easily tap into pre-zealous users, and if they alienate some users on some products, there are still billions of Google users out there for the following iterations.

The early days of Google – the development of search – was similar to release-and-iterate in some ways, and different in others. The founding duo was informal and agile when it came to making a product and trying it out. Nevertheless, the “releasing” they did in the early years was pretty cautious.

Release-and-iterate is not an answer in and of itself; you have to think about the risk of launching in terms of your resouces, and what you hope to find or achieve in your iteration (perhaps the tipping point).

Beware of mantras - Wittgenstein taught us that.

Anyway, the toolbar is coming soon and it's sweet!

Building the New Google

Soon I will write about the Facebook invitation bonanza that you may have noticed, but today I'll just drop a note about a current project.

Linkspank Version 2, coming in a couple weeks, will feature a "New Google."  How's that for a bold promise?  It's called the "New Google" for two reasons.  First, it's not Google, so if it's any form of a Google it's a new Google.  But there is a second and better reason to call it a Google, which is that it is going to be a Google (search engine) for "new" stuff.  

We are testing the search engine and it's already totally sweet.  It does something that is really obvious and needed, but for some reason no one is providing it right now.  Hence I'm predicting you'll be all over it.  To prove me right or wrong, stay tuned to this blog.  And get prepared to pump it up to your friends and stalkers when it comes out.

In the meantime... see you on Facebook :-).

Chrome (by Google) is the Usain Bolt of Browsers

With Chrome, you can find cool crap on Linkspank faster than ever before

When I heard about Google Chrome coming out as an alternative to browsing the web with Firefox or Internet Explorer (among others), I wasn't too interested at first.  I just saw the browser's appearance as part of the big G's strategy to provide everything online that you are formerly used to installing on your computer (e.g., Microsoft Office).

But I heard that Chrome was really fast, so I downloaded it.  BY GOD this browser is fast.  It's also nice to see that Linkspank works well in it.  I'm personally quite excited.

From a Linkspank perspective, Chrome underscores the mighty power of Google.  I often look at Linkspank's so-called competitors and I'm stunned by just how little they achieve.   What have all those big teams doing for all these years (quite a few years, for some of them)?  Google, on the other hand, can come in and change the game quickly.  For Linkspank, it means that we have to use our smallness as an advantage, which is an ongoing consideration in the strategy.

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. :-)

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. :-)

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.