Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?Edit

I have some ideas of what could be made out of them, but seeing as I have no time to develop any of them properly, I am opening them up to anyone who has a good idea to develop one of them. Have an idea and the skills for developing one of them? Get in touch.

TalkSend.com

ZipHire.com

ZonkBox.com

There are a number of reasons for this including the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle and Moore’s Law.

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site:forrst.com/people ruby
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In A/B testing, as is the case in the rest of economic life, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

In my experience, most split and multivariate tests are set up to maximize for a certain goal, e.g: registered users or email subs, but often fail to account for the un-intended consequences of such “optimizations”. The problem with changing your ui to try and maximize for one of these goals is that you are failing to measure the dis-utility that often gets created by cluttering or fragmenting the continuity of your interface or landing page.

For example, say I am trying to increase visits and awareness of a new feature of my product by adding a link to it on my homepage. Typically an experiment would be constructed by adding a new ui element and testing it’s copy/color etc that call attention to the new call-to-action that I am trying to optimize for. The problem with this kind of test is that by only measuring click-throughs to my new product page, I miss measuring the missed attention that was not given to another part of my interface.

Since the attention of the website visitor at any given moment is a finite resource, it is impossible to add something without detracting something at the same time. I have yet to see an a/b testing framework that accounts for this by default.

The end result is a bunch of “maximized” local optimums that don’t look or behave cohesively and often appear ugly, as I would imagine is likely the case with plenty of fish.

My answer on Quora to: I’ve noticed that when designs are refined through A/B testing, the res… http://qr.ae/MXiZ

In my experience the problem with the facebook advertising platform is that it doesn’t effectively allow for different types of advertisers to compete on an even playing field.

You could make the argument that since they allow for all different types of interest/demographic bidding, that there are many micro playing fields for different types of advertisers to compete on, but this analysis fails to capture the one most important vector that drives internet advertising, which is intent.

The beauty of Google’s adwords platform is that for any given keyword, a one-man custom boot making shop in Texas can profitably compete against internet retail giants such as Amazon because for certain keywords the intent of the searcher is more aligned with their product offering than Amazon’s.

In a generalized second-price auction such as Adwords, since advertisers are attempting to maximize their ROI on a per-keyword basis, they are not perversely incented to maximize their CTR at the expense of receiving lower CPC’s and an increase in less qualified traffic.

On the other hand, on the facebook advertising platform, different types of advertisers who will have wildly different costs for customer acquisition are competing for impressions and clicks head-to-head. This in turn causes two kinds of major distortions in the marketplace:

1) Advertisers with the highest customer acquisition value will eventually rise to the top, crowding out the smaller guys. e.g: you will see more ads for attorneys and real estate agents then you will for restaurants and dry cleaners.

2) Ad Copy / Images will trend towards becoming more and more attention grabbing in a never-ending arms race towards a higher CTR = lower CPC.

In the long run, neither of these two attributes is conducive to a robust and sustainable advertising platform for facebook.

My answer on Quora to: Is advertising via Facebook as effective as Google Ads? http://qr.ae/4GYA

Example: Compare a search on google for the term ’san francisco chinese restaurants’. Now try the same thing on yelp.

It goes without saying that the result provided by yelp is better on many levels. This is simply a matter of focus. Google clearly knows that it can’t possibly server a result to satisfy every different type of user query, so this leaves room for other sites to specialize their efforts around a particular niche. Since not every search problem is created equally, these sites have been able to focus on building domain-specific functionality and filters to solve the unique search problems in their domains. This poses an increasing threat to the core businesses of google et all as these sites gain in popularity and start becoming the place where people start their searches.

Fast forward to today (November, 2010), and for first time, google et all are starting to get very serious about neutralizing this threat of the vertical search engines. One vertical at a time they are integrating more and more domain specific search results and functionality into their search result pages. Starting with the most high value verticals (in terms of ad dollars spent): Travel, Mortgages, Local Services, they are finally starting to show the will to cut the middle man (the vertical search engine) out of the loop by integrating vertical search functionality into their search result pages.

Travel

Refinance

The “Cram-down”

Historically, the main driver of traffic to these sites has been natural search (mainly from google). As google et all begin to move in on their territory by providing extra listings, at the very top of each search result no less, scraping their content and integrating it into search results, the vertical search sites face a challenge to either build a strong enough brand, so that consumers cut out google entirely for their searches and go direct, or face loosing large amounts of their traffic due to this cram-down effect.

As I am writing these lines I see the following headlines on my Bloomberg: —-+ Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates. —-+ Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus and so on for an entire page. If I translate it well, the journalist claims to provide an explanation for something that amounts to perfect noise. A move of 1.03 with the Dow at 11,000 constitutes less than a 0.01 % move. Such a move does not warrant an explanation. There is nothing there that an honest person can try to explain; there are no reasons to adduce. But like apprentice professors of comparative literature, journalists being paid to provide explanations will gladly and readily provide them. The only solution is for Michael Bloomberg to stop paying his journalists for providing commentary. Significance: how did I decide that it was perfect noise? Take a simple analogy. If you engage in a mountain bicycle race with a friend across Siberia and, a month later, beat him by one single second, you clearly cannot quite boast that you are faster than him. You might have been helped by somerhing.ior it can be just plain randomness, nothing else. That second is not in itself significant enough for someone to draw conclusions. I would not write in my pre-bed-time diary: cyclist A is oetter than cyclist B because he is fed with spinach whereas cyclist B has :2 diet rich in tofu. The reason I am making this inference is because he beat him by 1.3 seconds in a 3,000 mile race. Should the difference be one week, then I could start analyzing whether tofu is the reason, or if there are other factors.

Fooled by Randomness, N. Taleb