SocialStartups.com

Hey folks,

Long time no see! Sorry about that. Been busy with getting waffl launched and all.

I’ve also been completely absorbed into Tumblr and the Tumblr community, so actually I’ve been posting a lot of content, just not here. So I took a cue from my friend Sarah and decided to do a “best of” for the past week on my tumblog. So here they are:

1. I did some surveys – not scientific in the least – of how many people Tumblr users were following vs. how many followers they had and posted the results. As you can see, it interestingly splits into two groups.

2. Made a lot of progress mapping out the product roadmap for waffl. The image is intentionally a bit small,

3. Bijan Sabet, the excellent VC from Spark, wrote a post about how to get a job. Here it is:

There is no doubt that we are in a tough market. Lots of people have lost their job and many others are facing the risk & reality of losing their job. That sucks on so many levels.

Like many VCs, I am getting a ton of resumes and inbound interest for a variety of our portfolio companies that are hiring right now. I am doing my best to read them all.

The best way to stand out is to be helpful.

Be helpful to yourself and to your persective employer.

Bring thoughtful ideas to the table on how you could help the company or product. Tell us what you could do that is beyond the specific role if you want. Or tell us why you love the product. Or what’s broken. Do your homework.

I really don’t want to know what you did 20 years ago. I don’t want links to other people’s ideas. I want to know what you want to do, why you want to do it and how we will all be better off because of it. And I want to know what you are like personally to make sure the fit will work. Show me your work, your product, your blog, your tweets.

The same is true when we were hiring at our venture firm last year. When we were talking to Mo, he told us exactly what he thought about our companies and investing approach. He told us what startups he loves. What entpreneurs he respects. How he could help. What he would work on. He showed us a bunch of deals even before he officially joined Spark.

That’s the way to do it.

5. Two fun posts. Here’s a staircase I’d love to have:

and a video of a cute cat:

I am giving a talk tomorrow at LaidOffCampNYC called “From Layoff to Launch: Tips and a Story” and I’ll blog the content of the talk for you all.

It’s been silent on this blog for a while, as I’ve been working pretty hard on my new venture, which is called waffl. waffl is a site for travelers who love Bed & Breakfasts and for the innkeepers who run them. We’re launching March 31st.

We are @heywaffl on Twitter, so give us a follow and we’ll share lots of B&B goodies with you.

Cross-posting from my Tumblr.

It seems to me like the introduction of Likes would have two effects – higher user engagement (because it’s so easy to Like posts) and reduced reblogs. Reduced reblogs, I hypothesize, leads to reduced follows, which leads to reduced discovery. I’m only guessing, of course, and I wish I had access to data to verify (David? John? Marco?).

I’ll explain a bit more. Likes increase user engagement for both
content producers and consumers. Content consumers, I imagine, find it
easier to Like posts than reblog, if nothing other than it’s 1 click
and 0 page loads instead of 2 clicks and 2 page loads. Content
producers, seeing an increased responsiveness from their followers,
produce even more content than before. So in that way, Likes are great.

The flip side to increased Likes is the reduction of reblogs
because, you’d imagine, some percentage of Likes had previously been
reblogs (before Likes existed). What makes reblogging the best social
design pattern of the last several years is how, coupled with
asymmetrical follow, information propagates through social networks in
the form of both the content being reblogged and the chain of people
involved in the (re)blogging process. So reblogging introduces me to
new content producers and new content. Every new person I follow
increases the chances of me discovering valuable content worth
reblogging, which increases the quantity of quality content flowing
through the Tumblr ecosystem.

All of that is to say that reduced reblogging reduces social network
connectivity and reduces the propagation of quality content. Without
metrics, I can’t judge whether the increased user engagement offsets
the effects of reduced reblogging, but it seems to me Tumblr could very
easily get the best of both worlds by publishing Likes. In this format, Likes become a 1-click reblog
with no added commentary. These Likes would default to being publicly
viewable with the option of being marked as private. Plus, your Likes
would now be searchable and search engine indexable.

I’m curious to know what people think (plus, this is my first full-length post on Tumblr).

In the last 2 years, a few different sites have implemented some very successful social designs. I’ll lay out 5 social design patterns here and then follow up with case studies in subsequent posts. These apply to sites with user-generated content where the content is the primary object.

Public Timeline

I’m starting with the public timeline because, while it’s not the sexiest thing on this list, it’s critical for new users as a solution to the cold start problem. The public timeline is the first place new users will look for new content. It’s also how they will determine if they wish to join your community – the size, the tone, the cultural-norms, and the freshness of your community is easily communicated via the public timeline. And, of course, it’s also where new users can find other interesting users, which leads me to my next pattern.

Asymmetrical Follow

This has been written about before, so I won’t say much. Asymmetrical follow means I can follow the updates of a user without their permission. They, in turn, could follow me back but it’s not required. This allows for the kind of preferential attachment characteristic of scale-free networks, and it’s scale-free networks that are primed for viral propagation. When the goal is content distribution powered by network effects, it just doesn’t matter if you actually know the person or not. All that matters is if the person if a reliable source for interesting content. This is why social networks have failed to become anything more than social networks. Remember this graph from Brad Horowitz?

Only 1% of a community are content creators

Most people’s social networks aren’t large enough to contain more than a handful of super-star content creators. I believe the average Facebook account has 300 users. 1% of that is 3 – not enough to be a valuable source of content. If you think Dunbar’s number is a more accurate group size – which I do not with regard to online communities – then you’re only left with 1 or 2 people (1% of 150 = 1.5). Yes, you can argue that Facebook has done very well for itself living off of soap-opera like content – who is dating whom, who got drunk at what party, what was she wearing?!?) but there are natural limits to that growth. Their commenting feature will help drive page views, but there isn’t a whole lot of new value being created there.

Newsfeed

Nothing shocking about this. Now that your users have gone out and followed their friends and other interesting users, their homepage should now be the newsfeed that aggregates all of that content into one place. But it’s not sufficient just to include the stream of content. You need to also show who contributed that content (and, in the case of re-blogging, the other hands it passed through). Why? Because that’s how you can evaluate the people you are following (and, with re-blogging, discover new people to follow).

Re-blogging

I’m a huge re-blogging fan. It’s the engine that drives the content diffusion through the network. The concept is simple: if someone I’m following shares something interesting, I can easily push that same interesting piece of content out to everyone who is following me while providing proper attribution. Someone who follows me can do the same, and again, and again. This is really powerful, as the people who follow me are most likely not the same as the people I follow. Re-blogging provides a transport device for great interesting content to travel through connected components of the network (which are generally much larger than your immediate social network).

Social Proof

While judging the content someone shares is a decent proxy for evaluating whether or not to follow that person, social proof can help. Show how many followers the person has. Better yet, calculate their influence (like PageRank does for websites). Or, show how many favorites their posts have accrued or re-blogs their posts have had. It’s a quick and easy way for users to ascertain the reputation of a user in the context of your site.

Bonus: APIs and RSS

I promised five, but here’s an extra. Use APIs and RSS to amplify your power. Provide APIs so that others can build tools that extend your reach. Publish RSS feeds so that users can incorporate your interesting content into their existing routines. Make use of other companies’ APIs to publish your content out to them (like publishing to Twitter). It’s very difficult to create new habits, but it’s much easier to go where your users already are (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader in my case).

Like I said at the start, I’ll be back soon with some commentary on how well (or not) various sites are implementing these ideas. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about Blip.fm, bit.ly, and Soup.io. I’d love to talk about Etsy, but I feel like it wouldn’t be appropriate.

Someone wanted to know what my thoughts on PeopleBrowsr were, so I’ve copied the email I sent to them in reply to their request for a review.

(Now that I’ve finished writing this, I realize this might come across as a bit harsh. I apologize in advance and I appreciate all the work that went into building this. It’s a lot easier to criticize than to actually go out and build something yourself.)

I’ll start with the initial set up process. The homepage itself wasn’t clear – what does PeopleBrowsr do? How will it help me? Then, if I’m ready to take the plunge, it’s not obvious that I’m supposed to click the Twitter icon – it looks like a graphic, not a “click me!” button. 37signals does a great job with their homepage. Once you do click the Twitter icon, you are presented with a login form, which is fine, although it’d be better if you explained why you need my private Twitter password and why I should trust you with it. The form submit buttons are also not very clear. First, there are two of them, and they both look like they might be video players or something. Second, clicking on them without filling in the username/password info leaves you with a javascript alert box error, which is tacky design.

So then I am presented with the following screen (which I got to by clicking the rightmost Go button – the one that I thought would give me the three column view):

Now what do I do with this page? How is it helping me? I use twitter to read people’s tweets, but this page has no text on it at all. Some of these avatars I don’t even recognize. Where is the content? At best, Twitter is a conversation. At least, it’s a stream of status messages. This grid, however, is just static. Imagine I’m at a conference or there is a major world calamity – how will this view give me “more power for twitter”?

Smaller nitpicks about this page – I don’t think the Search tip is necessary. Search boxes are so common these days that if, in your user testing, you found people were confused, then a redesign of the box should clear things up. Apple does a good job by simply including the magnifying glass icon. The icons to the left of the search box are opaque. What do they do? I should be able to have some intuition on what something is before I click on it. Otherwise, a majority of people just will ignore it. Also, the Search tip obscures the input fields when you do click on the icons.

OK, so let’s assume that I’ve managed to discover the small blue icon in the bottom right corner of the window and I’ve figured out that “Go to Stream” (the tooltip) will give me what twitter.com has always shown me: the tweets of the people I follow (that is the point of twitter, after all).

First, notice the vertical alphabetical index bar. 1) I don’t know how it got there. 2) I don’t know how to get rid of it. 3) It’s obscuring the only way I can interact with people (reply, DM, retweet, etc), because that functionality is hidden behind the click of an arrow. Second, these tweets are old. There is a 30 minute gap between the latest tweet and the one before that.

I do really like the Followers column. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s a really nice stream, especially for those of us who have more followers than people we are following. I also like that you can tag your friends, although illustrating the public/private distinction with a padlock is a little unclear.

I think I’ll stop here, as this was the point I got to yesterday when I just gave up on PeopleBrowsr and went back to TweetDeck (fast, easy to use, groups). One feature request I do have which I think would be powerful is the addition of my Facebook friends’ status messages, as a majority of them are not using Twitter. If I could have one dashboard for all of my status message needs, I’d find that very useful.

Thanks,
David