SocialStartups.com

Customer forums are always interesting, particularly for e-commerce sites. There is something about staying at home and being bored that ultimately leads people to “window shop” online, which leads them to socializing with other people who are doing the exact same thing. The range of personalities is wild and wildly interesting.

Four hundred and twenty eight posts ago, I started a thread on the Etsy forums. The thread was intended to have two purposes. One was to simply get a sense of the community and introduce myself to them. Second, I wanted to get some better intuition as to how sophisticated Etsy sellers (the majority of forum posters) are about running their business and the e-commerce business generally. So I asked a basic prioritization question - would you rather us make search better or fix a bug that would occasionally reset the page views counter on your item listing pages? (For those curious, the views system is stored entirely in a cache, and when the cache gets full and a record gets evicted, the page view number resets to 0. Clearly, the system was not engineered to be used in this manner.) My follow up was, if fixing the view system is not a priority, would you rather we get rid of it entirely or keep it broken.

The danger is to get lulled into an urgency to please. When hundreds of users are demanding a feature, you may feel compelled to acquiesce and build the requested feature. Before you do that, stop and consider Henry Ford: “If I did what people said they wanted, I would have built a faster horse.” (or something like that.) Customers are excellent gauges as when something is wrong, but can be extremely misleading about both what exactly is wrong and how it should be fixed. Furthermore, customers do not (or should not) have better visibility than you do into strategic goals, key business metrics, engineering resources, etc. They don’t have your long-term vision nor your understanding of complex dependencies. So don’t jump the gun. Listen, follow the comments to the source, and solve the root of the problem.

While on the subway heading back to Brooklyn - I had gone to see Iron Man at Union Square, it was great - I was thinking about Microsoft. I was trying to imagine what exactly Microsoft could do that 1) doesn’t have an entrenched player, and 2) they might be able to be successful at. Search the Google way, in my opinion, does not satisfy either requirement, even if they bought Yahoo. So what else?

I considered Tim O’Reilly’s suggestion of investing in pieces of an “Internet Operating System”, which could be the answer although they’d have to fight Amazon, Google, Cisco and others for the bragging rights. Requirement (1) no, (2) yes.

I considered gaming, hardware, healthcare, social networking, and others…. but Microsoft is always involved there with mixed success. Is there anything left?

I’ve got a crazy suggestion. And yes, your own personal blog is the perfect place for crazy suggestions. So here it is - Microsoft should work to be the #1 destination site for vertical searching of the “organic web” (I just made that phrase up). The organic web would be defined as information that is continually changing. One example is airline ticket prices. Another is real estate, and another is classifieds. Microsoft should go out and develop / acquire any company who currently has the following properties: (1) The relevant data changes continuously, (2) The site is a leading player in their vertical, and (3) search is the main user activity on the site. Examples I can think of are Farecast (they bought this one), Craigslist (good luck there), and Redfin. With insider access to the data, Microsoft could provide superior search experiences to Google. Microsoft could then create a search portal that would be the first place everyone would go to search for data in these areas. Google’s crawlers can only go so fast - if Microsoft could provide a “real-time” search engine customized to a particular vertical, they could differentiate themselves in a very powerful way.

That’s it, keeping it short tonight since I’ve got a meeting in 10 hours with the CEO, COO, a few others.

How Thinking Costs You - washingtonpost.com

Found this via Paul Kedrosky’s Weekend Reading post.

Really interesting stuff - given that people are really bad at making correct stock market predictions, the more information they know, the worse they perform.

Behavioral economics studies these phenomena, and firms are counting on it.

I wonder if this is true in other areas as well, like deciding on how to price items for sale on Etsy.

Tags: behavioraleconomics, pricing

Google’s Response to Facebook: “Maka-Maka”

Amazing, I was just writing up something like this yesterday. I said:

For good measure, you could also add in GPhone data - who is in my address book, what I’m saying over SMS and phone conversation (transcribed into text via a service like Jott), and my location. The only part (and I admit it’s a crucial part) that I don’t understand is how Google will benefit by “out-opening” Facebook. My guess is that more data = googly goodness. Google will know more about you if you take Google with you, or bring the places you visit to Google.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Google, social networks, platform

Web Warrior - Forbes.com

This article reminded me that the Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google platform wars may be a little premature. The biggest platform, outside the OS, is the browser. Everyone uses it, and through the browser, everyone accesses all other sites. Your browser stores your account information, commonly submitted form fields like email address, street address, credit card numbers. There are already a multitude of extensions.

This article reminds me that Google is working on a Google-branded Firefox browser. My guess is that this ties right in with Google’s claim to release a platform that is more open than Facebook’s. What if they centered it around the browser?

Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut (if I use Orkut). Google knows all of my login credentials for all sites on the internet because every time I log into a new site, Google asks me if I’d like to save that information with them so that I don’t have to be bothered with logging in to Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. Google has access to my areas of expertise by applying semantic analysis (like what Twine does) to my emails (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets/presentations (Google office suite), and local files (Google Desktop). Google knows my financial portfolio (Google Finance). Google knows what areas I’m interested in (Google Reader, iGoogle, and my browsing history).

Mozilla could do this too - Combining Thunderbird (email) and Sunbird (Calendar) with Firefox  would get you a social network, areas of interest, and login credentials. Various extensions have been created for RSS aggregation, messaging, bookmarking, etc. I think it would be a hell of a bold bet, but an interesting one.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: facebook, google, firefox, platform

Facebook Wish List: Five Apps I’d Actually Like to See

Sorry, but I think there is a serious disconnect between what Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins wants and what most Facebook users would want.

A podcast client? How many people know what a podcast is?

A Top 40 list? We know now that most adds are from the Profile box. So again, most users won’t care what’s in the app directory.

A PR Connection Tool? Right, because everyone needs to initiate a little PR.

IRC and FTP clients? How many people still use those? Way back when, Facebook launched a P2P media sharing client named Wirehog, which was a total disaster. I’m not convinced an FTP client would do better.

I admit I actually have no understand of his 5th wish list idea, so I won’t comment. I think he’s trying to describe Ning.

My top 5 wish list

1. A personalized version of Google News, taken from the shared items posted from your Friends.

2. Tagging of friends. This is something suspected is in the works. I want to be able to send messages or invites only to certain friends.

3. OpenID for all facebook users. Every facebook user should be able to easily link their Facebook account with their Amazon or eBay or Paypal or Skype accounts. E-Commerce has a large role to play in Facebook, and lining up who you are in facebook to who are you in Skype is crucial.

4. Stronger integration with local Neighborhoods. So yes, there are a few Neighborhood apps, but Facebook would be well served by growing the connectedness of a geographic community. Want to throw a party for the neighborhood? Find playmates for your kids? Tell your neighbors to look for your lost cat? The internet can help counteract what Robert Putnam describes in Bowling Alone.

5. A real email client. Sure, there is Facebook messaging, but what Facebook really should do is build Gmail right into Facebook. They could easily tack on features found in Xobni and Twine, and you’d get a heck of an email application.

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Tags: facebook

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few weeks now, and have finally decided to do so now that a number of posts are coming out about Facebook replacing email.

Facebook has the potential to replace a lot more than just email.

Facebook could be the next Internet platform. One built upon interconnected social networks.

How about:

• classifieds (Craigslist)
• used and new products (Ebay)
• personalized start pages (Netvibes)
• social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
• video (YouTube)
• news aggregators (Digg)
• search engines, except the one inside Facebook

That scares me. Why? Because it’s a black hole - what goes in doesn’t come out.

Data is everything. If you own it (and have a LOT of it), you have a HUGE advantage. Just look at what Amazon can do with it’s recommendations.

Social networks, because of the network effect, are winner take all markets. Move everyone to the platform, build all of the apps on top, add trust, filter out all of the crap/spam, and you’re left with an Internet sized bundle of content with nothing but good stuff.

Which is wonderful, except the lock-in part. Facebook shouldn’t own all of the data built on top of it.

Do you trust Facebook?

Just saw this via Read/WriteWeb . The topic was the latest Windows Live announcement, as if this one will better explain it than the previous ones. While reading the article, I came across the following two slides, which would make Mr. Tufte vomit:

One would hope that the creators of PowerPoint would have a clue as to what a well-designed slide would look like. Instead, they have way too much text, glaring colors, differing font sizes that do not correlate to importance, and enough bullet points to make your head hurt.

Communicating your thoughts clearly really shouldn’t be this hard.

First, read this.

The Opaque Value Problem (or, Why do people use Twitter?)

Thanks. This is important, and most people over the age of 25 don’t understand this. (Uh oh, I’m not bringing up the age question again, am I?)

Let’s start from a simple statement.

How compelling you find content is directly proportional to how relevant it is to you. The more relevant to you, the more you care.

OK, how about one more simple statment.

The people in your social network are relevant to you compared to those who are outside your social network. For more on that, read this.

Let’s mash the last two statements together.

Given that your social network is relevant to you, content generated from your social network is going to be compelling to you. The more content generated from your social network you get, the better.

It’s going to be boring nonsense to everyone else. So what.

Sites need to realize that if they want customers to visit at least once a day, there needs to be a lot of content available for consumption generated from their social network. This is what Facebook does. This is what Twitter does.

How well does your site integrate with my life?

As a follow up to my last post, check out The Long Now 10,000 year clock project.
They are trying to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. It’s actually more impossible than you might think, and they’re on their way to building it.