Improving Search and Discovery: My Explicit Is Your Implicit

March 24, 2008 1 Comment

Two recent posts on the implicit web provide two different takes. They provide good context for the implicit web.Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb asks, Aggregate Knowledge’s Content Discovery – How Good is it, Really? Aggregate Knowledge runs a large-scale wisdom of crowds application, suggesting content for readers of a given article based on what others also viewed. For instance, on the Business Week site, you might be reading an article about the Apple iPod. Next to the article are the articles that readers of the Apple iPod article also viewed. MacManus finds the Aggregate Knowledge recommendations to be not very relevant. The recommended articles had no relationship to Apple or the iPod.

Over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern writes that Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like. Toluu lets you import your RSS feeds and friends who have also uploaded their RSS feeds. It applies some secret sauce to analyze your friends’ feeds and create recommendations for you. Stern finds the service a bit boring, as all the recommendations based on his friends’ feeds were the same.

In the case of Aggregate Knowledge, the recommendations were based on too wide a pipe. The implicit actions – clicks by everybody – led to irrelevant results because you essentially the most popular items. In the case Toluu, the recommendations were based on too narrow a pipe. The common perspectives of like-minded friends meant the recommendations were too homogeneous.

Both of these companies leverage the activities of others to deliver recommendations. The actions of others are the implicit activities used to improve search and discovery. A great, familiar example of applying implicit activities is Google search. Google analyzes links among websites and clicks in response to search results. Those links and clicks are the implicit actions that fuel its search relevance.

Which leads to an important consideration about implicit activities. You need a lot of explicit activity to have implicit activity.

Huh?

That’s right. Implicit activities don’t exist in a vacuum. They start life as the explicit actions of somebody. This is a point that Harvard’s Andrew McAfee makes in a recent post.

Let’s take this thought a step further. Not all explicit actions are created equal. There are those that occur “in-the-flow” and those that occur “above-the-flow”, a smart concept described by Michael Idinopulos. In-the-flow are those actions that are part of the normal course of consumer activities, while above-the-flow takes an extra step by the user. A couple examples describe this further:

  • In-the-flow: clicks, purchases, bookmarks
  • Above-the-flow: tags, links, import of friends

Above-the-flow actions are hard to elicit from consumers. There needs to be something in it for them. Websites that require a majority of above-the-flow actions will find themselves challenged to grow quickly. They better have something really good to offer (such as Amazon.com’s purchase experience). Otherwise, the website should be able to survive on the participation of just a few users to provide value to the majority (e.g. YouTube).

So with all that in mind, let’s look at a few companies with actual or potential uses of the explicit-implicit duality:

Google Search

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer talks about two different forms of social search:

  1. Users label search results and share labels with friends. This labeling becomes the implicit activity that helps improve search results for others. This model is way too above-the-flow. Labeling? Sharing with friends? After experimenting with this, Mayer states that “overall the annotation model needs to evolve.” Not surprising.
  2. Google looks at your in-the-flow activity of emailing friends (via Gmail). It then marries the search histories of your most frequent email contacts to subtly alter the search result rankings. All of this implicit activity is derived from in-the-flow activities. For searches on specific topics, the more narrow implicit activity pipe of just your Gmail contacts is an interesting idea.

ThisNext

ThisNext is a platform for users to build out their own product recommendations. They find products on the web, grab an image, and rate and write about the product. Power users emerge as style mavens. The site is open to non-members for searching and browsing of products.

ThisNext probably relies a bit too heavily on above-the-flow activities. It takes a lot of work to find products, add them to your list of products and provide reviews. It also suffers from being a bit too wide a pipe in that there’s a lot of people whose recommendations I wouldn’t trust. How do I know who to trust on ThisNext?

Amazon Grapevine

Amazon, on the other hand, has a leg up in this sort of model. First, its recommendations are built on a high level of in-the-flow activities – users purchasing things they need. This is the “people who bought this also bought that” recommendation model. Rather than depend on the product whims of individuals, it uses good ol’ sales numbers (plus some secret sauce as well) for recommendations. This is a form of collaborative filtering.

Amazon Grapevine is a way of setting the pipe for implicit activities. The explicit activity is the review or rating. These activities are fed to your friends on Facebook. One possibility for Amazon down the road is to use the built-up reviews and ratings of your friends to influence the recommendations it provides on its website. Such a model would require some above-the-flow actions – add the Grapevine application, maintain your account and connections on Facebook. But these aren’t that onerous; the Facebook social network continues to be an explicit activity that has high value for individuals.

Yahoo Search

Yahoo bought the bookmarking and tag service del.icio.us back in 2005. It’s hard to know what, if anything, they’ve done with that service. But one intriguing possibility was hinted at in this TechCrunch post. The del.icio.us activity associated with a given web page is integrated into the search results. Yahoo search results would be ranked not just on links and previous clicks, but also on the number of times the web page had been bookmarked on del.icio.us. And, the tags associated to the website would be displayed, giving additional context to the site and enabling a user to click on the tags to see what other sites share similar characteristics.

This takes an above-the-flow activity performed by a relative few – bookmarking and tagging on del.icio.us – and turns it into implicit activity that helps a larger number of users. But with the Microsoft bid, who knows whether something like this could happen.

The use of implicit activity is a powerful basis to help users find content. Just don’t burden your users with too much of the wrong kind of explicit activity to get there. Two factors to consider in the use of implicit activity:

  1. How wide is the pipe of implicit activities?
  2. How much above-the-flow vs. in-the-flow activity is required?

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Stick-To-It-Ness Pays: Rapt To Be Acquired by Microsoft

March 20, 2008 Leave a comment

Rapt Inc. is being acquired by Microsoft, as reported over at TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld. Rapt is an online ad optimization application, which fits Microsoft’s continued push into more and better advertising solutions. Rapt is also a great case of stick-to-it-ness. By that, I mean keep working at figuring what will make your business successful, and survive long enough to get there.

But let’s back up for a second. To greatly simplify things, one can say there are three types of outcomes for venture capital funded companies:

  • Supernova: legendary companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com)
  • Moderate: cash flow positive (Rapt, SquareTrade, ebates)
  • Flameouts: bust (Pets.com, Webvan, Pay By Touch)

There’s plenty of press for supernovas and flameouts. But not so much for the moderate successes. The moderate successes represent a fairly broad range of outcomes. But they are an interesting study in starting a company, getting to profitability, and having the option what to do next. The three companies above – Rapt, SquareTrade, ebates – are each Web 1.0 holdovers who continue to be successes in today’s Web 2.0 world.

Rapt Inc.

Founded in 1998, Rapt started out life as some sort of procurement optimization provider for manufacturing companies. Here’s how their product Rapt Buy was described in 2001: Rapt Buy is a web-based application that gives companies real-time intelligence to optimize the procurement of strategic goods.

So the company was in the optimization game, but pretty far away from applying that to online advertising. But read what the company described itself as in that same 2001 press release: Rapt Inc. is a leading provider of software and services for enabling real-time, risk-optimized buying and selling decisions in complex business environments, and internet marketplaces.

Somewhere in there is the kernel of Rapt’s transformation from procurement of strategic goods to online ad optimization solution. I don’t know the success of Rapt’s original model, but they stuck with things and found a good market to apply their strengths. They came out with a series of products that enabled web media companies to optimize ad inventories. A March 2005 press release talks about Rapt being used by MSN to improve pricing for online ads. Subsequent client wins included iVillage, Yahoo, Tacoda, CNET and others.

Rapt did raise $55mm, so it needed a lot of capital to get where it is today. But by persevering through different markets and products, Rapt won many marquee clients and an acquisition offer from Microsoft.

SquareTrade

SquareTrade was started in 1999. Its original purpose was to be a mediator for disputes among buyers and sellers on eBay. The company received $9 million in VC funding back in 2000, and it hasn’t taken anymore since then.

The mediation services clearly paid the bills early on. SquareTrade also offers an eBay Seal, which tells potential buyers that a merchant has been reviewed and approved according to SquareTrade’s standards. Again, a nice little money maker for SquareTrade.

The absence of any new VC funding since 2000 tells you that the company is cash flow positive. Which is a nice place to be for SquareTrade. The company could live off the success of its model and dividend out the excess cash to investors and other shareholders. That’s something a lot of traditional, offline companies have done for years.

But you could view that cash flow in a different way. Your own source of “VC money”. Figure out new business lines, and self-fund their rollout. Forget the VCs. What a great option to have.

And that’s exactly what SquareTrade is doing. They’re trying to establish themselves as the largest independent warrany provider. Basically, sell the SquareTrade brand for warranties. I don’t know how they’ll do, but their established cash flow is going to give them the chance to stick-it-out and make a run of it.

ebates

ebates was established in 1998 by San Mateo County prosecutors. Huh? Well, what they created has lasted for quite a while. ebates gives consumers cash back on their purchases with 800+ online retailers. Basically, you just launch your shopping trip via ebates.com, and your purchase info will automatically be captured and your rebate calculated.

It was cool idea in 1998, and this is essentially the same thing ebates does today. Something like 1 million consumers are active on the ebates site. The company raised a $25 million round in 2000, and nothing else since then.

ebates is in a similar position to SquareTrade. Cash flow positive, and able to try new things. So far, ebates seems to be sticking with its 1998 model. More execution around its core model: more retailers, more consumers. Perhaps there’s something big brewing over there. But maybe not – they just enjoy the cash.

In Conclusion

The tech superstars garner the most press and certainly have the largest influence on the tech and business landscape. But the next level down, the cash flow positive moderate successes, do have some interesting things going on. Some keep hustling to position themselves for the next big thing, others enjoy the fruits of past labors.

Keep an eye on them, their cash flow gives them options.

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Farewell, Pay By Touch, Farewell

March 19, 2008 24 Comments

Pay By Touch has come to the end of the road. In a press release issued today, the company said it was ceasing all remaining biometric operations:

Solidus Networks, Inc., DBA Pay By Touch, regretfully announced today that it will no longer process biometric transactions on behalf of its merchant customers and consumer membership base, as of 11:59:59 pm March 19, 2008.

 

Alas, this is no surprise. The company was overextended, and bankruptcy is a terrible position for a start-up trying to right the ship. The employees and new management brought in gave it a valiant effort.

A few post-mortem observations about the company are in order.

Consumer Adoption of Biometrics

It’s tempting to consider biometrics a loser in the consumer space. Ben Worthen at the Wall Street Journal does a nice job talking about biometrics’ value as well as its shortcomings. Biometrics is very sci-fi. And yes, it is too spooky for a large percentage of people. Inside Pay By Touch, we found there were two types of people who wouldn’t sign up: those who were concerned about privacy, and those who were against it on religious grounds (mark of the beast). If you follow Crossing the Chasm theory, there was also the mainstream part of population that would wait to adopt.

But there were early adopters. Pay By Touch processed several hundred thousand biometric transactions per month. Now in the grand scheme of things, those numbers pale in comparison to the volumes processed by Visa, MasterCard, American Express and the overall number of transactions occurring at grocery stores. But processing several million transactions over the course of the year is nothing to sneeze at. It shows that consumers were indeed willing to use biometrics for adoption.

I do think the adoption curve for biometrics is longer than for, say Twitter or RFID-enabled credit cards.

Economics of Biometrics

Biometrics requires both hardware and software. The hardware is pricey, and it does need to be replaced periodically. One thing about the field is that vendors continually innovate. Hardware gets more durable and reliable, and prices do come down. I had the chance to test different vendors’ new biometric readers. A lot of effort is being put into biometrics out there. I remember one of my favorites during testing was actually from Casio. It performed well, and brought back childhood memories of my wristwatches.

But the cost of installing and replacing the biometric readers is an issue.

Installing in the grocery lanes also took money. Each lane in each store had to be outfitted. Pay By Touch had to be ready for the different POS versions the stores were running: IBM, NCR or Retalix. Always with some different configuration or customization.

Pay By Touch’s biggest play for grocers was shifting consumers to ACH. ACH is much cheaper than PIN debit, signature debit or credit cards. So, of course, Pay By Touch couldn’t charge too much per transaction. This meant that operational costs needed to be kept low, the company kept small and lean. This didn’t happen, of course.

Level of Certainty in Authentication

Pay By Touch was very focused on a high degree of confidence in its authentication of each consumer, each transaction. There are two measures for how the biometric authentication performed: false rejects and false accepts. False rejects were cases where the consumer was legitimately trying to authenticate, but the system rejected him. False accepts were cases where the system wrongly identified a consumer as someone else.

The company’s bias was to avoid false accepts. One false accept could become a major news story undermining confidence of consumers in using Pay By Touch. And the system was quite good at avoiding false accepts.

The focus on avoiding misidentification meant that false rejects ran higher. False rejects were more acceptable – no one’s checking account would be wrongly debited. Early on, the company had a bad problem with false rejects. But a lot of work reduced that number significantly to a barely noticeable level. And that was important. Too many false rejects also undermine consumers’ confidence in the system: “Oh that fingerprint payment system never works.”

A lot of time was spent improving biometric authentication at the in-store hardware level, in-store software level and the hosted server level.

What Would Have Been Better for Pay By Touch

Hindsight is always 20/20. But it’s clear the gobs of money raised and multiple business lines hurt the company. Pay By Touch really needed to be run as a small company for a while. Keep the focus simple – ACH payments in multi-lane grocery stores. The company would have run in the red for a while, and needed infusions of funding. But it would have time to work through the operational levers and to bring costs down. Work in concert with the grocers to shift consumers toward ACH usage (e.g. better product discounts for ACH users; higher discounts funded through CPGs’ trade promotion dollars).

Expansion into other areas would come after prudent consideration of what was needed to succeed. One good, but admittedly tough example: provide grocers with lower credit card interchange for biometrics than for mag strip cards due to lower loss from fraud.

Also, this is a company that really could have used the guidance of a traditional VC firm. The hedge fund investors ultimately were little more than silent money. Still not sure why hedge funds parked money in an illiquid, high risk start-up.

It’s Over

So now the remaining Pay By Touch employees are left to find new jobs. Creditors won’t see much of what they’re owed. Merchants have to tear all that hardware and software out of their stores.

But Pay By Touch’s acquired division S&H Solutions will carry on (independently or as part of some other company). It’s got a strong loyalty marketing business and some momentum from SmartShop implementations. And the biometric check cashing business, formerly Biopay, lives on as Phoenix Check Cashing. Good luck Jon Dorsey.

And someday, some start-up might try to do mainstream consumer biometrics again.

I’m @bhc3 on Twitter.

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FriendFeed Will Make Switching Social Networks Easier

March 18, 2008 4 Comments

There has been quite a lot of coverage for the FriendFeed service. FriendFeed aggregates updates from a variety of other social networks and Web 2.0 apps, such as Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that FriendFeed just added a search capability, making it “suddenly feel like a destination site”. The service is growing and improving.

Aside from aggregating your feeds, you can subscribe to the aggregated feeds of others. You “friend” others the same way to do with Twitter. Just subscribe to their FriendFeed. They don’t approve your subscription, you just do it. FriendFeed is essentially a social network in its own right, allowing users to post comments and share feeds amongst friends.

Which got to me thinking…the emergence of FriendFeed and other “networks of social networks” is going to make switching services a lot easier for individuals. And that’s going to make life harder for the social networks.

Here’s what I mean. I signed up for FriendFeed. I added several other services to which I belong: Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Pandora and del.icio.us. Suddenly, I see my updates all in one place. That, by itself, is pretty cool.

I then subscribed to the FriendFeeds of others. Robert Scoble is an active FriendFeed guy, by virtue of his involvement in every other social network and Web 2.0 service out there. It’s pretty interesting to see what he’s up to and what he’s commenting on.

Then I notice something. I’m seeing Scoble’s Jaiku updates (Jaiku is a competitor to Twitter).

Jaiku? I don’t belong to Jaiku!

And this is how these social network aggregators are going to change things. On Twitter, I can subscribe to others’ Twitter posts. For example, I subscribe to Scoble’s Twitter updates. But to subscribe to Scoble’s Twitter updates, you need to join Twitter. Through FriendFeed, that’s no longer the case. You can follow anything Scoble puts up on his FriendFeed: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and others.

So here’s how this unfolds. You and your friends join FriendFeed. You’re all on Twitter. You love the ease and carefree way you can post updates to Twitter. Your friends on Twitter see your updates, either on Twitter or on FriendFeed. But after a while, you decide the features of Jaiku are even better – you make the switch to Jaiku.

Normally, the switch to Jaiku from Twitter would be disruptive. Your Twitter-using friends no longer see your updates, and you can no longer see theirs. The pain of this disruption is a form of lock-in, as the value of switching does not equal the costs of doing so (see In Praise of Inertia: MyYahoo #1 for more discussion on this topic).

But with FriendFeed, the cost of switching social networks nears zero. Whether I post updates on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or Google Talk, my friends will see them on FriendFeed. There is a loss of the the ability to talk back to your friends directly on their different service, but FriendFeed lets you post comments on any update of your friends.

This is great for the individual, expanding the choices for different services. And it puts more pressure on social network and web service apps to continually improve their features and user experience. Otherwise, users will easily switch to a better service.

Lookout social networks and web services – the lifestream aggregators are coming.

UPDATE: Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has a March 20, 2008 post up entitled “The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere“.  In it, she observes that blog comments may ultimately migrate to lifestream aggregators, such as FriendFeed.  This thought is another variation on the idea that the lifestream cloud becomes the community, replacing the apps-based communities we know today.

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Facebook Beacon Is Dead. Long Live Amazon Grapevine.

March 13, 2008 1 Comment

Amazon has just come out with two new Facebook apps, as reported by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. One is Amazon Giver, which lets friends share wish lists. The other is Amazon Grapevine, which lets you broadcast your activities on Amazon back to the Facebook newsfeed.

Pardon me…but isn’t that the basis of Facebook Beacon? Well, sort of. There are a few differences.

Amazon made this completely opt-in, which differs from the opt-out philosophy of Beacon. Also, product purchases are not included in Grapevine, but they were an important part of Beacon.

Personally, Beacon doesn’t bother me that much. I did not experience the early versions of Beacon with the too-fast notice that popped up on e-tailers’ sites. No accidentally revealing an engagement ring purchase. But there are times a purchase says something about you.

In fact, I think the idea of sharing your purchases with your friends has a lot of interesting potential. I can think of three different reasons people would share purchase information with friends and check out what their friends have purchased:

  1. Self-expression
  2. Product discovery
  3. Friends’ reviews

I’ve mapped those reasons to several different retail sectors.

  • Apparel = self-expression
  • Computer Hardware/Software = friends’ reviews
  • Consumer Electronics = friends’ reviews, self-expression
  • Home & Garden = self-expression, friends’ reviews
  • Sporting Goods = self-expression, friends’ reviews
  • Baby Products = product discovery, friends’ reviews

For instance, I think broadcasting your Apparel purchases is more a form of self-expression. People’s fashion tastes are an extension of themselves. Participation in some sort of Beacon-like program for Consumer Electronics, on the other hand, would be a chance to provide reviews to friends and read the reviews of your friends. And Baby Products would have a lot of discovery and reviews. See what your friends have purchased for their infants. Anyone who is a first-time parent knows the challenges of figuring out what to buy.

But, Beacon is still controversial, and Amazon doesn’t go as far as broadcasting purchases. So for now, we broadcast our ratings and reviews. This is pretty good. I can learn a lot from that.

The only problem is, the opportunities to share this way are still quite limited. Not too many e-tailers are doing this yet. However, Amazon has a rich history of driving innovation in e-tail. It was the early leader in e-tail. It was among the first to set up an affiliate program (Amazon Associates). It pioneered product recommendations.

So now it’s experimenting with the sharing of product-related information on social networks. Probably won’t be long before other e-tailers get on board.

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Search Smackdown: Mahalo – del.icio.us – Google

March 10, 2008 3 Comments

I was reading the Crowdsourcing vs. Expertsourcing: A Misleading Comparison post over at Mashable. In it, Paul Glazowski analyzes a Newsweek article that suggests the bloom is off the Web 2.0 rose. Too much junk is enabled via everyday people logging on, and there’s a movement for more professional, expert information sourcing.

One example of expertsourcing is Mahalo. Mahalo was started to be a guide to Web content. Paid professionals own a topic, they research a number of sites related to that topic, and post the links that provide the best information. In their opinion, that is.

I’ll admit to some skepticism here. Google has been so good at revealing information and letting me see what’s out there. The idea of limiting my results to what someone deems worthy seems so incomplete. I’m afraid I’d be missing something that’d be really important to me.

But Mahalo has gotten some traction, so there’s something there.

I decided to run my own simple test of Mahalo, pitting it against two other ways to find relevant web content: del.icio.us and Google search. Quick backgrounder on those. del.icio.us is a bookmarking/tagging app that lets you save websites you like, and give them terms that have meaning to you. You can also find content on a given subject by searching tags, and seeing what others have bookmarked. Google is, of course, the preeminent Web search engine.

I tested three separate search terms, going from broad to specific:

  • Running
  • Marathon training
  • Tempo run

My scoring system is simple. For each search term, gold, silver or bronze will assigned based on my own subjective view.

SEARCH TERM #1: RUNNING

‘Running’ is a fairly broad topic. There are a lot of areas that may apply, making it a challenge to return results that are relevant . With that in mind, let’s see what the three search apps returned.

Mahalo: SILVER

The foundation of Mahalo’s search results is “The Mahalo Top 7”. These are the seven best links for a given topic. It is the Top 7 where expertsourcing proves its value.

The ‘Running’ Top 7 provide links to two running publications and wikipedia’s entry for running. Another link is to About.com’s page for running, itself a form of expertsourcing. A little uninspired, but a serviceable offering.

Mahalo also has several other sections in its running page. These include health-related topics, oddball sites, web tools and user recommendations. The web tools include MapMyRun.com, which lets you map a run or view others’ running routes. A user recommendation includes LetsRun.com, which is the best site for the competitive runner.

One other thing that’s good. All the links relate to the physical exercise running.

del.icio.us: BRONZE

This search shows both the power and the weakness of bookmark/tagging sites. On the plus side, I love the running results that are returned. Very interesting variety. The downside? A lot of sites that aren’t exercise running-related. Things like “Running a Windows Partition in VMware” and “Internet Explorer 7 running side by side with IE6”. In fact, 26 of the first 50 results were not related to exercise running.

There are interesting sites that del.icio.us users have posted related to running. MapMyRun.com is here. How to Select a Running Shoe by eHow.

Several, but not all of the Mahalo Top 7 appear in the first 50 del.icio.us results.

Google: GOLD

You can see how Mahalo picked its Top 7 websites…they’re all the top results in Google search! Google also returns the fun stuff in del.icio.us.

Then Google offers a plethora of other sites, and only 6 of the first 50 are not related to exercise running. Pretty much everything on Mahalo is there, plus other interesting sites. A site listing running movies. A company that sells the running skirt! Ultrarunning.

SEARCH TERM #2: MARATHON TRAINING

‘Marathon training’ is not nearly as wide open as ‘running’. This search is for someone who has a a goal in mind.

Mahalo: BRONZE

First, let me say that the bronze here is a very strong showing. If there was photo finish, you’d have a hard time telling Mahalo hadn’t won this test. The presented sites are all good and worty of consideration for anyone contemplating a marathon.

There are a variety of programs available here: Runners World, Running Times, marathontraining.com, etc. And to Mahalo’s credit, there’s no listing for Galloway’s training program! Editor bias there, I’ll admit.

I was disappointed that Pete Pfitzinger’s program isn’t shown. It’s my own favorite. But I liked the CrunchGear site, listing stuff marathoners would want.

del.icio.us: GOLD

One thing that immediately struck me this time is that all 50 of the del.icio.us results were related to marathon training. The greater specificity helped del.icio.us here. Also, “running” has several meanings, but “marathon” has few.

Several of the Mahalo Top 7 are in the first 50 results. Missing are the Running Times program, the AIDS national training program and the Boston Athletic Association program. But Team in Training is included (if you’re offsetting charity-related programs).

Several other valuable sites are here. For example, there’s McMillan Running, which includes running pace calculators and marathon time prediction workouts.

Unfortunately, Jeff Galloway’s site is bookmarked here. But…Pete Pfitzinger is included as well. Bonus points for that.

Google: SILVER

Google does its usual excellent job in its results. 6 of the Mahalo Top 7 are here; Running Times is missing from the first 50 results. Surprisingly, Team in Training is not in the top 50 results.

Google gets dinged for no race calculator in the first 50 results. No Pete Pfitzinger. But Jeff Galloway is there! Noooo…

SEARCH TERM #3: TEMPO RUN

A tempo run is a specific training technique in which you hold a fast pace over several miles. It’s a tough workout, but it can advance your performance dramatically. Obviously, we’re now in the technical weeds of running.

Mahalo: DISQUALIFIED

Mahalo has no entry for tempo running. We’ve gone too detailed for Mahalo here. DQ’d.

del.icio.us: SILVER

Use of the term “run” again confuses poor del.icio.us here. 34 of the first 50 results are not related to exercise running. But there are several good sites related to the tempo run. Runner’s World has Learn How To Do A Perfect Tempo Run. Running Times has A Tempo Run by Many Other Names.

And this is one of my favorites…a LetsRun.com post/discussion about Tempo run length vs. speed from 2003. One would have to go pretty deep into the LetsRun site to unearth that one. A true credit to the power of social bookmarks & tagging.

Google: GOLD

Incredibly, all of the first 50 results were related to exercise tempo runs. Very impressive. Lots of good info about the temp run. A LetsRun post/discussion, but different than the one on del.icio.us. Bloggers describing their tempo runs. Formal programs that advise on the pace of the tempo run. Just really good stuff.

Recap: Broad, Narrow, Technical

Broad search: Google, Mahalo, del.icio.us
Narrow search: del.icio.us, Google, Mahalo
Technical search: Google, del.icio.us, (Mahalo DQ’d)

Conclusions that I draw from this admittedly small, subjective test:

  • Mahalo is a good starting point for finding information on something that’s not familiar to you. It only covers broader, more popular categories. It does appear that the Mahalo expert just skims the top results from Google. But the clean interface and human filtering makes it a decent place to start your search.
  • del.icio.us is challenged by results that are not related to the search topic, which is consistent with its user-generated chaotic nature. It’s also a really good place to find hidden nuggets of valuable information not easily found elsewhere. And for a narrow topic with words that do not have multiple meanings, del.icio.us really shines.
  • Google still makes sense as the first place to look. Breadth and depth of results, and it takes on all comers. It also does an exceedingly good job of figuring out what sites relate to a search topic.

One final note in favor of Mahalo. There is research that shows consumers are actually better off with fewer choices than more. Give me 7 good choices, and I’ll be able to begin my journey to learn more about a topic. Give me 50 choices, some great, some terrible, and I’ll be flummoxed as I try to read them all.

Mahalo does have the advantage of providing a simple, limited set of good results to get beginners going. There is value to that.

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A Moment of Silence for Atari

March 7, 2008 1 Comment

I’m going to wax a little nostalgic here. Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka has a post up about French company Infogrames buying the rest of Atari that it doesn’t own. Kafka’s take is that the plan is to ultimately shutter Atari, the company, and to use the Atari name as a brand for several of its games.

Atari is a relic now. But once, it was so mighty. I came of age during the Atari Supremacy (early 1980s). And it really was an obsession for my friends and me.

Atari 2600 was the bomb. I mean, you had to have it. I think we paid something like $120 for the 2600 console. That was too high, you would get it for less. If you could find it. We found one and by God, I was going to have it, no matter the price. I also bought a small black & white TV to use it.

You got Missile Command and Combat with the 2600. Those were just fine for getting started. I played the heck out of that Missile Command game. Combat was OK, but could get a little boring after a while.

So you had to get new games. Man that was the best. Atari had all these great games in the pipeline to keep you salivating. They also drew from their successful line of arcade games, and those of others.

And it wasn’t just Atari making games. Activision too.

What were those games that had us kids so excited?

  • Space Invaders was one of the first big hits. It started in the arcades, was hugely popular for the 2600 console. I liked it, but it was not a huge favorite for me.
  • Asteroids was hugely anticipated. Big blobs moving up and down the screen, with your little triangle spaceship shooting them. Clifton got this game first in our neighborhood, so we all went to his house.
  • Frogger was just fun. I can still hear the sound of that frog making its way across the road: “boip” “boip” boip”.
  • PacMan was like a movie blockbuster. It had been huge in the arcades, and we couldn’t wait for it to come to the 2600.
  • Defender was another arcade crossover. I liked the 2600 version better than the arcade game, because I never got the hang of all those buttons.
  • Donkey Kong was my personal favorite arcade game. In the arcade, I got to the third pie factory. The 2600 was disappointing, because it didn’t include the pie factory.
  • Adventure was fun, if only for tapping into the geeky Dungeons & Dragons wave that was afflicting us dorks.
  • Centipede was eagerly anticipated, as it had been a big arcade hit. The 2600 version was a faithful reproduction.

Other things have fond memories for me. The original joystick. I really like the simplicity of the joystick and the red button. The Nintendo Wii brings back some of the simplicity. I also loved the little manuals that came with each game. Fun graphics, and little hints for the game. I loved that was in Sunnyvale, CA. “Sunnyvale” sounded funny to my Virginia ears. There was an Atari gaming magazine I used to read, Atari Age. It would include playing tips and reveal the “easter eggs” planted in the games.

Atari really was an important part of my generation’s growing up. Eventually, new game consoles supplanted Atari’s 2600. Atari came out with the 5200 (twice as good!). Coleco came out with ColecoVision (played 2600 games and had Donkey Kong with the pie factory!). Mattel had Intellivision.

Today we have some of the most amazing game consoles. Makes the Atari 2600 look so quaint.

I never had another game console after the 2600. I lusted for the ColecoVision, but alas never got it for Christmas. I moved on to other pursuits (TRS-80 anyone?). But the Atari 2600 had a permanent home in my memories.

I got the Atari Flashback II as a gift a couple Christmas’s ago. It’s got a few of my favorites: Adventure, Asteroids, Haunted House, Yars Revenge. It’s still a satisfying experience.

And still sitting in my storage closet? My original Atari 2600. Old faithful. I play it from time to time, and it’s still fun. That’s going to be someone’s inheritance one day.

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Slide, RockYou = Live By The Hit, Die By The Hit

February 28, 2008 2 Comments

A couple of recent posts discuss the new world of Web widgets, which are small programs which can be installed on a web page, and run independent of that web page. Jeremiah Owyang writes about The Many Challenges of Widgets, while GigaOm believes that Companies Can Make Money with Widgets.

The two best known widget companies are Slide and RockYou. Both have grown exponentially via the social networks, Facebook and MySpace in particular. Their bread-and-butter offerings let users post pictures in slide show formats. They’ve expanded beyond that for other hits, like SuperWall and FunWall.

There’s a quality to their business models that seems to require a regular stream of hits. For the sake of argument, let’s say there are two business models. One is to create products that are enduring, and have an established place in the market. Microsoft Office. Tide detergent. USA Today. Margins (non-software) may be lower, but the stability represents good cash flow.

The second model is to create a regular string of hits. Disney Studios, EA computer games, Donna Versace. Margins are higher, and when you’re on a roll, the money pours in. But it is hard to always have a hit.

Slide and RockYou do have some established hits. They have great install numbers for several of their widgets. But to truly be huge, they’ll need more. I see them as more similar to movie studios than anything else:

  • They need releases that people will want (mega-hits, niche successes)
  • They need distribution of their product (like movies need theaters, DVD distros)
  • They need to monetize (OK, this is where they fall down a bit. People aren’t paying $9.00 to use the widgets).

Slide and RockYou need to be tech savvy. Jeremiah’s post lists issues they have to deal with: multiple APIs (Facebook, MySpace, etc.); changing APIs. They need to have a flair for creating great interactive experiences. And they need creativity to come up with new ideas.

This isn’t to say that they won’t build up a list of hits that transcend the up-and-downs that mark creativity-driven enterprises. EA has a great set of franchises in its sports video game collections. But the pressure to create new stuff is always there.

Slide recently raised $50 million, on a valuation of $500 million. Nice valuation, but the company has some challenges ahead of it. There’s that annoying need to monetize its widgets. Also, unlike reliable movie theaters that need releases, Slide and RockYou are depending on consumers to install their widgets. I imagine they’ll target websites as well – a bit easier and more stable than those fickle consumers.

And just as important, both Slide and RockYou need to set up their creative shops and processes such that a regular stream of potential hits are rolled out. They’ll make their lives easier by partnering with other companies that have “widget-izable” content. Touring through the Slide site, I see TechCrunch, Engadget and HotOrNot with widgets there.

There’s a real opportunity in widgets, but it takes more than throwing sheep at people.

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In Praise of Inertia: MyYahoo Still #1

February 25, 2008 2 Comments

Over at TechCrunch, they’ve got a post up discussing the top six personal homepages. #1? MyYahoo. MyYahoo has been around for quite a while. 6-7 years? It’s an oldie, but still a goodie. It’s my homepage.

There are others on the list. #2 iGoogle looms as the big scary challenger. Given Google’s success over the past several years in other arenas, it’s surprising they haven’t taken the #1 spot here as well.

It’s a testament to inertia. Not inertia in any negative sense, like laziness or user ignorance. Rather, inertia as a reflection of human sensibilities and value systems. Something called the “9X problem“.

Harvard professor John Gourville put forth the idea of the 9X problem. The gist of his thesis: “a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want.” The mathematical term “9X” actually does have a little math behind it. And that math is key to understanding the 9X issue.

First part of the 9X equation is based on our comfort with what we have. Things we already know, things that we have invested time in learning and using, have a high psychological value for us. They satisfy some need. We’ve learned their strengths, and live with their weaknesses. When we compare something new to something we already have, we tend to overweight the value of what we already have by 3X. It’s a little scary to give up what you know.

Second part of the 9X equation is based on our natural skepticism about claims made for new things. This probably resonates for most of us. I know I tend to dismiss most commercials and advertisements. This is a healthy trait of people – otherwise we’d all be getting duped left and right. But it also means that we underweight the value of features for something new by a factor of 3X.

Multiplied together, this gives us the 9X factor.

This is powerful stuff. It means new things really have to deliver healthy gains in benefits. Some examples of “9X masters” come to mind. Google was such a leap forward in search relative to its competitors: very relevant results, clean interface. Apple’s iPod just blew the doors off other music players in so many ways. Honda’s reliability and fuel efficiency were miles ahead of Detroit in the 1980s and 90s.

But there are plenty of other cases where good products failed to dislodge incumbents. Supposedly, many other search engines have attained search results parity with Google. I wouldn’t know…I still use Google exclusively. And so do many others.

So there’s the 9X problem. It’s actually a really interesting concept. If you’re doing a startup, can you do in it a way that does not force someone to give up an existing “thing” they like? That way, you only have to deal with the 3X new product benefits underweighting problem?

9X is really about inertia. MyYahoo fulfills a personalized homepage need: news, email, stocks, sports, weather, etc. iGoogle, Netvibes and others have really nifty options for their pages. But have they delivered 9X the value?

The key is to hook your users. Once you get them, it’s hard to lose them. On that note, how about adding my little blog to your RSS reader? You can remove it any time you want… 😉

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Facebook Fatigue: Ten Reasons

February 22, 2008 4 Comments

TechCrunch has a post up, “Facebook Fatigue? Visitors Level Off in the U.S.” It appears the number of visitors to Facebook has stopped its inexorable growth, and even declined in January. This is newsworthy because that’s a real change in the trendline. Facebook has been on a tear the past couple years.

I personally enjoy Facebook very much. I check it a couple times a day, and I have activities and apps I like there. But I see some of the issues that afflict the site. Below are ten reasons for Facebook fatigue.

1. Friend activity junk mail: I love seeing all the things my friends do. I hate seeing all the things my friends do.

2. App invite spam: Yeah, too much of this. There are apps you really like, and apps that force invites. More of the former, less of the latter.

3. Lame apps: I got an email from “Compare Friends” detailing my “highest rated friends”. Inane.

4. Non-friend friends: LinkedIn is great for professional networks. Facebook is really best for friends. Adding non-friend friends reduces your interest in “keepin’ it real”. [UPDATE: Robert Scoble, with 5,000 “friends”, expresses his lost interest in Facebook]

5. Is that all there is? Tons of apps. But the killer activity on Facebook hasn’t yet emerged. Amend that…the killer activity for the new joiners (> 30 y.o.) of the past year hasn’t emerged.

6. Backlash by the under-25 set: For the younger crowd, maybe the growth of the over-30 crowd has killed the cool vibe. MySpace making a comeback? Bebo growing?

7. Backlash on the under-25 management conceit: It’s true that Facebook came from college kids. But too much blah-blah about how they really “get it” sours the older folks.

8. Stop the presses: Is it possible for there to be too much media coverage? Facebook, and its ecosystem get a lot (e.g. Slide’s $500mm valuation). Too much talk about how members are making these companies rich.

9. Inevitable bumps: Beacon. Scoble raising hell over lack of contact portability. Inability to delete your account. Competitors’ responses (LinkedIn changes, MySpace API, etc.)

10. Heat always dissipates: Hard to stay hot forever. Google’s been the closest thing to that.

Let’s remember that Facebook still draws massive numbers of users, and continues to drive a lot of discussion and innovation. They’ve got money and smart folks there. Looking at the list above, several are within the control of the company.

As Mark Twain said, “The report of my death is an exaggeration”.

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Welcome to My ‘Peanut Butter’ Visitors

February 19, 2008 2 Comments

WordPress provides some nice basic stats about activity on your blog. Total number of visits, specific posts clicked, referring websites and search engine terms that caused someone to arrive to your blog.

A couple of days ago, I noticed a significant uptick in visitors clicking on the post, Pay By Touch & the Peanut Butter Manifesto. They seemed to be arriving from the search term “peanut butter”.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that these visitors were really interested in my post. The post uses a Yahoo executive’s exasperated email comparing Yahoo’s efforts to spreading peanut butter too thin, and applies that to Pay By Touch’s situation. All well and good.

But I’m not quite sure that’s what my “peanut butter visitors” were looking for. In fact, I’m not sure what they’re looking for. I didn’t realize there that many people searching for information on peanut butter every day.

And the other confounding thing. What search engine are they using? I’ve tried to search for “peanut butter” on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The post doesn’t show up anywhere in the top 100 results.

So if one of my peanut butter visitors happens to read this post, please leave a comment. Tell me what search engine you’re using, and why you clicked on my blog post for “peanut butter”.

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