this post is about finding meaning and inspiration in the little moments we steal to ourselves
Late in 2008 I came across an article on a hallucinogenic tea called Ayahuasca (I wrote this one), who’s claim to fame was that it was legalized in connection to specific holy rituals. At the time I pondered how individual rights could be expanded by connection to religious freedoms, over and above what less religious folks could legally enjoy. If you look up the polar opposite of organized religion on the web you’ll see me, but this doesn’t imply a lack of spirituality. What resonates most with me now is the spiritual nature of consuming certain foods or beverages, and the rituals we practice when doing so.

This morning I reverently listened to the sounds of machines percolating, in an otherwise silent 7-11. As I gazed over the eyes of a half dozen other patrons, something simple yet miraculous dawned on me. Each of us was taking part in a deeply comforting ritual. The pure act of preparing our morning coffees and teas contained a chorus of meaning. After experiencing a dozen or two books on Buddhism I feel confident recognizing meditation, even in a tiny guarded moment of our overloaded lives. The act of pouring and mixing our morning beverages is something Starbucks can’t quite mimick (baristas pour, we mix – and it’s always in a rush). In the depths of our busy culture we’ve liberated precious moments to serve our spiritual needs. Nearly all 7-11s, Dunkin Donuts, and Starbucks in my area know me on a first name basis, but I’m not just a coffee junky. The act of preparing and drinking it brings meaning to my existence, and a calm reverence to my days.

It’s Not Just Coffee

Tea time echoes throughout the British isles, India, China and Japan. Friend and cofounder (Chief Hacknical Wizard of Victus Media) Tyler Gillies began exploring the depths of meaning in tea just a few months back (he even made oatmeal with it, my coffee won’t go there). Friends I met on Fredland (avc.com) Arnold Waldstein and Andy Swan have professed meaning in consumption on numerous occassions. Arnold takes great pleasure and satisfaction in his wine, and shares his reverence and discoveries with others. Andy is an outspoken champion and shares his exuberance for Pappy (Van Winkle Bourbon, his favorite 23). He describes the experience as a victory lap.

How and where do you squeeze spiritual into each day?

Growth, Retention, and Traction

The metrics that signal developers to early adoption are fuzzy. In addition to low cost analytics tools, we can monitor web page heat maps that track activity for different content areas. While this can teach us which parts of a page draw the eyes of a large group of browsers it’s less intimate then the tried and true method of Q&A. The alternative is my preferred approach: talk with folks who are generous enough to try out the software we build*. Web programmers have a good understanding of their own preferences and interests. For one we like hacking on new stuff (admittedly I’m a noob). But determining how a new application best translates into a sustainable market, takes more than hacking, it takes marketing intelligence, trial and error discovery, and copious truckloads of luck! When the stars align, and the market begins moving towards the hard earned tools you’ve crafted you’ve struck value gold.

Satisfy Existing Needs, or Conjure Novel Behavior

There’s a couple of primary methods for growing an application to meet the needs of a consumer market.

• Concentrate on current behavior by providing utility that is both enjoyable and memorable (odd how those two aspects are separate). The target issue is either an existing challenge that is handled with a new technique, or a new resultant challenge (information overload). Either way the problem focus exists in the market already
• Create fresh opportunities by introducing new user behavior. This can be accomplished through a combination of game psychology and by offerring adjacent business value for adopting the behaviorial pattern (Foursquare deals for checking in). Startups that excel in fostering the spread of a social pattern (meme) can alter the foundations of the web ecosystem

Businesses can grow to leverage both methods to satisfy user and customer needs, but for starters it’s a smart bet to focus on one or the other. The focus will empower you to trail blaze a bright future for your community that others are sure to follow.

* special thanks to Vladimir Vukicevic, Bostjan & Andraz, Shana Carp, Fred Wilson, Dave Pinsen, Mahendra Palsule, David Semeria, Jim Dwulit, Arnold Waldstein and Howard Lindzon for all their superb feedback, brilliant suggestions, and incredible support.

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• RocketHub Liberates Creativity via Crowdfunding (prweb.com)

Pardon the brevity of yesterday’s post, my cylinders were running on a foggy four hours of sleep so I kept it short. This one has more heft

The biggest examples of social data silos today are Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. Social media platforms create business value from large user membership, attention, social link sharing, and the healthy ecosystems of apps that improve user and network value. While Facebook and Twitter support methods for exporting data, they have limited access and closed formats (I can’t hack a new twitter API, their data is closed). Social silos write their own rules for how to access and potentially move their data. It’s all good, they created the infrastructure and software, so why shouldn’t they control the faucet to their data stores?

Savy users have known for a while that there’s a data portable way of accomplishing nearly everything with a distributed open social web (search is tricky) . The hard part is setting standards to enhance interoperability. The idea is to shape user social data so that it natively has the ability to migrate to any servers who support open standards. The standards provide a common language between (self hosted) social hubs. This natural extension of the net is becoming the defacto social web. With high likelihood Facebook, Twitter, and other portals will follow suit but not until they have to (distributed monetization takes some work). The social web has already lead to a diversity of social communities where users converse with folks on other networks without worrying about which service is most popular today (non roach motel/data silos). As technology advances, it approaches invisible. At any time users are free to walk away without losing links to friends or business contacts (speaking of which, its time I move my gmail and phone contacts into an open format I maintain and copy, and maybe my gmail data too).

If you think of Google as just another silo, you’re partially right. I should be able to easily migrate my email from gmail (I haven’t tried). And Orkut is an older social network popular in Brazil isn’t built on open standards, but DeWitt Clinton and his colleagues are working hard to make all our Buzz social data portable (many of the standards Buzz is built on are part of something we’re working on at Victus Media, which I’ll cover below).

The Push/Pull of Streams & Feeds

There’s a mad scientist cooking up something wonderful at Victus Media, and it’s not me. Well I’m cooking up stuff too but it’s not as awesome (front end, link tagging stuff). Tyler the chief Hacknical Wizard of VM, has concocted a master plan of great vision. I helped a litle as we hashed it out Thursday, but the architecting is his responsibility. We decided we both want to move away from a limited service format (twitter tool) to a web service and we have a groovy way to do so.

To accomplish this while maintaining relevance is no small feat. An example of relevance lost from mixing social feeds is the @ symbol. In Twitter it maps directly to a user account, but that user may be someone else on Buzz (they use email as a unique identifier). Fortunate for us, semantic entities are service agnostic so we can link information and people among many services. Also certain services have dedicated functionality so we’ll use a meta tag (bit string) to activate other functions on our side. One example is link scraping from microblogs and semantic tagging those urls. Another example is using oembed to show mini video clips from sites like YouTube. I believe Disqus has implemented something like this in their comments. I’ll try to convince Tyler to writeup a guest post on the push/pull architecture he’s building (woman getting angry at my ignoring her). We may even open source the feed juggling if it makes sense.

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• The User Service Bargain, Social Web Services (victusspiritus.com)
• Centralized versus Distributed Web (victusspiritus.com)

An abstraction of all markets is one great information and industrial network. Businesses and individual decision makers are responsible for moving and transforming resources as efficiently as possible. The rules of game theory are readily applicable for link creation (partnerships) within this global network. Tit for Tat is a favored strategy for identifying beneficial and harmful member nodes.

Deception once discovered, is punished through alienation. Any business representatives who act one way, but make their decisions another are quickly identified as agents of distrust. The network is relentless in identifying facades and ulterior motives, evidenced by the flow of resources. Business leaders that can be relied upon gain strength by the ultimate act of trust, channelling resources through a connected network node.

Strategies of Generosity and Self Interest Overlap

It’s selfish to be generous to the right partners. Each new business is first identified by it’s more well known associations, so early partnerships are signals to the rest of the network. Businesses blend at the edges with complimentary strategic partners, and likely trusted friends (accounting records are always separate!). The entire market area grows as it earns value from the global network, benefitting all members who share in the network of trust.

Sometimes, the best action to take is to be generous to a person or group that appears to have to no relation at all to your business. The power of investing in communities in need creates a powerful bond of trust that may payoff in ways that are not fiscally measurable.

Early this morning I read and shared a post by Zemanta cofounder Bostjan Spetic. Bostjan reveals his findings that most Zemanta users are for more interested in relevance over popularity. After sharing the message, I received an instant reply from a good friend Mahendra Palsule:

It made sense to Mahendra that the community of Zemanta users (bloggers) is biased towards content relevance over popularity. Mahendra just happens to be one of my favorite social web/tech bloggers* and I rely on his perspective to enrich my own views based on trust.

Consider the correlation of social web users who prefer relevance over popularity, and how the Internet is made up of many threaded subnets, not just technically but socially. Many users may mix the definition of popularity and relevance, but to me these are two drastically different concepts. For most information (outside of major catastrophes, breakthroughs, and war) relevance is highly personal. A community which shares interests, can also share a feeling of relevance for content. Popularity is powered by raw numbers, with no consideration for individual preference. Imagine the entire world dominated by averages. Average art, pop music, average companies, average style, and average startups. It would pale in comparison to the wonderful diversity that exists today.

I wondered if there is correlation in those who prefer popularity over relevance to the number of browsers who only skim articles (85-90%)? This group would define a large surface browsing web. Of course there’s an entire sub-web with content specifically targeting that behavior. There’s also another web, where the community both publishes and consumes content more deeply. And there are many networks between and surrounding these examples. The Net continues to surprise and fascinate me as it evolves, and we change with it. Where do each of us belong in the continuum of layered webs?

Although I appreciate the global convergence of like minds, I’m terrified by the plague of group think. My interests and the nature of the web allow me to move effortlessly between communities without fear of excommunication.

*note, Just a few of my favorite web tech bloggers: Louis Gray, Mahendra Palsule, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Fred Wilson and many more.

Lossy data compression methods have captured my attention and imagination from orthogonal sources (day job and Victus Media)

A Curious Coincidence: Photons, Neural Compression, and Perception

Long have I wondered how our minds perform the enormous processing task of transforming incident light into a 3 dimensional reality, while triggering memory and understanding. After a great deal of reading and many years working on sensor simulations I have only a laymen’s understanding of the process. Join me in a journey that crosses thousands of light years to illuminate the magic of our minds.

Photons from Distant Galaxies Become Information to Our Minds

Let’s begin by tracing photons from a distant quasar* at the edge of the universe all the way to a human observer looking at telescope data. The photons first leave their energetic home and traverse space and time over billions of years. Their course may bend many times as the photons near other galaxies and eventually pass close to our own sun and encounter an enormous aperture. Let’s gloss over the complex signal processing that transforms data and imagery, and instead follow the newly made light from a human readable display. The light finds it’s way to curious human eyes. For the next step in the information chain, I’ll borrow from an earlier post on digital and optical Images:

Our optical system quantizes measured photons in a similar manner to a digital focal plane. While rods give us black and white vision in low light conditions, our cones spatial orientation uniquely captures incident photons. While the majority are sensitive to red light (64%), some to green (32%), and only a tiny minority to blue light (2%). The proteins in the cones help trigger a nerve response which is channeled down the optical nerves to the part of brains that transforms these signals into three dimensional representations of our surroundings.

Local light that comes from sources closer to home, like this blog post or your display, are raw data that your senses use to compose a conscious image of your surroundings. But how do these incident photons become a human concept? One vital piece of the puzzle is massive data compression.

Biological Optical Data Compression

The investigators calculate that the human retina can transmit data at roughly 10 million bits per second.. That data rate matches the older Ethernet cable speed of 10mbits/second.
What data rate is available at the visual cortex?
article in scientific american (behind a paywall)

Visual information, for instance, degrades significantly as it passes from the eye to the visual cortex.

Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion bits per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex.
After further processing, visual information feeds into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious perception.

Surprisingly, the amount of information constituting that conscious perception is less than 100 bits per second. Such a thin stream of data probably could not produce a perception if that were all the brain took into account; the intrinsic activity must playa role.

Yet another indication of the brain’s intrinsic processing power comes from counting the number of synapses, the contact points between neurons. In the visual cortex, the number of synapses devoted to incoming visual information is less than 10 percent of those present. Thus, the vast majority must represent internal connections among neurons in that brain region.

So our optical process distills billions of potential bits of light into 100bits per second. Although the compression is lossy, it’s good enough for us to interact with our surroundings and respond to motion rapidly (reflexes & frontal cortex). My hypothesis is that our mind continually estimates our surroundings and updates that state with a miniscule fraction of the raw input data (the ultimate change detection). I can only guess that massively parallel pattern matching is taking place to compress vital data differences at each moment. This compressed collection of neural signals updates our perception of reality. We continually track and estimate the world around us.

Notes:
*Quasar: there is now a scientific consensus that a quasar is a compact region in the centre of a massive galaxy surrounding the central supermassive black hole. (from wikipedia link at the start of the post)

^Visualization of data: Purely visual representation of distant solar bodies has been a challenge to artists and masters of scale (exaggerating structures for display), and this is how the non-experts experience the data

Pardon the brevity of this post it’s 38F and my fingers are fricken freezing (couldn’t find a good frozen Dr. evil image). It warmed up while I typed

The Bargains We Make to Communicate

Over the past year and a half I’ve been part of a wonderful information sharing expedition. Much of the journey was opting in to new darling social networks, searching for folks just as wild about information and expanding (net) opportunities as myself (there’s just something about startups). Visit my friends and influencers page to learn more about the wonderful folks who influence me, their generosity is a precious gift.

My attention has settled on the more technical friendly information flow sites (Twitter, friendfeed, wave, Buzz?) and shyed away from the Facebook relationship model (I pop in to say hi). One of the hot button topics around the social web is open distributed social networks, where data portability is a fundamental requirement. This way individuals own their data and who they wish to associate with. Current social services have absolute authority to ban or shun you now, disconnecting you from potentially many net friends and associates. A huge number of connections could be lost if the central service fails as a business. I’d prefer a simple data package of my contact data that I can bring with me anywhere I choose to go. A distributed model with portable data jives with my instincts, but is a strict contrast to current centralized financial models (virtual toll booths). The way for businesses to grow with social media is not to own the links between people, but to enrich communication and offer users value. I’m a firm believer in opt in (and easy to opt out) services which provide a clear value proposition (we’re striving to make Victus Media a solid bargain). As an example, this blog doesn’t own your attention (creepy flashback of Clockwork Orange). The value comes from readers such as yourself who choose to return and share your own perspective (comments/links) to broaden my views. Mine is but one voice and vision.

Not long ago we’d laugh at the idea of third party communication services to manage our friendships. But now the fastest growing web business space is connecting people to people, and people to information (Facebook & Google). And this isn’t taking into account the huge opportunities for creative tools that can enrich our social web use. While I prefer a social web where my network and data goes with me (portable contacts list), there are a number of opt in deals I’d consider to save me time when looking for relevant information, or money on service costs. For instance, a “free” phone with voice over IP, with a healthy and expandable monthly data plan  which comes from many competing providers. The creators of the phone can set each device up as an ad-hoc network node (thanks for the reminder Tyler), and serve up targeted ads while we use the device. I see the net transitioning to include more ad-hoc, peer to peer networks to scale and break away from unnecessary virtual tolls.

Dial an IP Address, the Social Web Phone

One concern of any social web service is identity. OpenID attaches our identity to trusted verification sites and opens the door to wide scale adoption of federated networks. For the holy grail of interoperability the trick is services agreeing on standards (protocols) to communicate with each other.

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I suffered a deluge of information yesterday from my compatriot Tyler on the state of open protocols. My first challenge was to get a feel for the nomenclature and understand the differences between protocols, open source implementations, and specific server instances using those protocols. Only then can I help come up with a plan for how to incorporate the future state of the web information flow. Ideally we’d like to position Victus Media to utilize open message formats (Tyler’s on it).

This is by no means a complete list but it captures many of the topics we discussed yesterday (and it’s a cheat sheet for me to look back to):

• Open Web Foundation and the Open Web Foundation Discussion are dedicated towards providing a common working group for developing community specifications.
  

  The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

  The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

  As we work out the fine details of the foundation, we invite and encourage individuals to come and join the discussion. To ask questions please visit our Q&A page. You are also invited to join the community and discuss ideas and specifications you would like to see developed within the foundation.

  I’m attempting to get involved by getting feedback on a couple of protocol ideas I was batting around. One search like status that will attempt to deal with distributed search over federated servers, and the other meta protocols in the hopes of having a description language to generate protocols on the fly (I just found out this morning this idea may be patented)

• Pubsubhubbub or Push
  

  A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.

  Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they’re interested in is updated.

  The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

  An feed URL (a “topic”) declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file, via
  . The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the feed, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (Atom and RssFeeds are supported)
  A subscriber (a server that’s interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed’s hub(s) and subscribe to updates.
  The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL’s declared Hub(s).
  When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there’s an update.
  The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.
  The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.

  To bootstrap this, we’ve provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

• Ostatus
  

  OStatus lets people on different social networks follow each other. It’s transparent to your friends, colleagues and family which software or service you use. They can get your status updates on their own sites and reply, like, or re-post your updates.

  OStatus isn’t a new protocol; it applies some great protocols in a natural and reasonable way to make distributed social networking possible.

  Activity Streams encode social events in standard Atom or RSS feeds.
  PubSubHubbub pushes those feeds in realtime to subscribers across the Web.
  Salmon notifies people of responses to their status updates.
  Webfinger makes it easy to find people across social sites.
  OStatus weaves these protocols together to make an easy-to-implement distributed social network.

  Sites like Google Buzz, StatusNet, WordPress.com, and Tumblr have implemented some or all of these protocols today. We hope that defining the junctures where the protocols work together will encourage adoption of the entire suite.

  The OStatus spec is a first step in this direction. We’re eager to work with other implementers to make it better, to smooth the rough edges, and to improve the overall experience.

• Webfinger
  

  WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them. That metadata might include:

  public profile data
  pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
  a public key
  other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
  a URL to an avatar
  profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
  whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
  or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
  … but rather than fight about the exact contents of that file, WebFinger is about making that file discoverable at all. The community can explore and innovate within that discovery file later.

• ActivityStrea.ms and the mailing list, and wiki. There’s also a high level description.
  

  an extension to the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around the web
  The Activity Streams format has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Opera, and many others.
  An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor with some social object (the object).

• DiSo Project
  

  Silo free living.

  Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards – both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard APIs, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

  Diso (dee • soh) is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web.

  Our first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.

  So what does that mean?

  We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

  microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
  OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
  OAuth
  …and others

• Salmon Protocol, a Google code page and the mailing list
  

  Unifying the Conversations
  As updates and content flow in real time around the Web, conversations around the content are becoming increasingly fragmented into individual silos. Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle. It’s open, decentralized, abuse resistant, and user centric.

• Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool

There’s a flurry of startup interest and social location apps that are working to glue the web to our physical locations. Tech enthusiast Robert Scoble prompted a Buzz discussion (another location capable media) to determine which was the best service, with varied opinions weighing in. Physical location and orientation is but one piece of the puzzle to seemlessly weave the web within our physical world and social lives. Augmented Reality is the channel of opportunity that will enable a rich blending of mobile web, location/orientation, and most importantly social discovery and connectivity.

Far Out Future

Looking further ahead I can perceive Kevin Kelly’s vision of Internet aware chips connecting all things and beings. In his latest work “What technology wants”, which he crafts using The Technium blog, I suspect we share the same conclusion: technology wants to embrace every aspect of the physical world. My expectation is that we’ll have full control over our personal networks (unless Apple & AT&T build them). Nano-technology will empower monitors within our bodies to probe for health risks. Tiny particle size chips will also enable full 4 dimensional mapping (3D space + time history) of our environments and have instant communication to our minds’ sensory processing centers. We’ll literally be capable of seeing through walls (we already can with crude phone camera apps), and sense all around us zooming in our perception to probe for greater details. The utility and creativity of such adaptive augmented reality tools is near limitless. But there’s a beautiful form of personalization that I haven’t yet explored. The implicit adaption of our surroundings to our wishes.

The Present

The trajectory forwards we’re developing at Victus Media is boosted by semantic social “listening” tools. Like caveman paintings compared to modelling the oceans of Europa, I’ve chosen to help make simple effective utilities that can pave the way towards an adaptive interconnected future. The start of our journey is introducing a pattern of web service behavior. Active web services can recognize the presence of a visitor, and use knowledge about a visitor’s interests to personalize the experience. As developers we’re always guessing and modifying tools to appease a large user base while alienating others. The ability to dynamically adapt a service to individual visitors will help familiarize new users and save proficient users time (two way search).

• A visit to a blog or news site could provide you with a list of posts on the sidebar which match your public expressed interests. This trivial to implement search overcomes the problem of comparing two unknown sets by connecting them (your interests with blog tags)
• A visit to a bookstore while travelling for business can be as comfortable as visiting one near home. By sharing your location and interests to approved third parties (businesses will pay for this privelege), the store could suggest relevant new releases that correspond to your socially expressed topics, previous purchases, and public friend recommendations.
• Upon walking into a coffee shop for the first time the barista could begin making your favorite drink with a simple gesture to approve the process
• A first visit to a virtual world like Second Life could place your avatar in a starting location that best matches your array of current interests, or provide you with a more intelligent short list of highly probable matching defaults

The goal of adaptive information services isn’t to remove choice, but to suggest a more rational selection of defaults to new visitors. Personalization is a competitive advantage future businesses won’t have the luxury of ignoring.

*note: we connect user interest tags to social IDs at the moment but the area of user ID is improving rapidly

Human Capital Trumps Monthly Visits

Startup founders and early stage investors are blinded by explosive user growth numbers (user attention). To be honest I can think of little else at this pre-traction stage of Victus Media. Although I know there’s much more that needs to happen after the first signs of user adoption, without it the project is dead in the water. User excitement, utility, and retention are all factors that drive growth rate. The mistake we make as founders and investors is boiling down human capital to a few coarse metrics.

With any early service you’re much better off with a handful of fanatics than hundreds or thousands of apathetic visitors. Uber fans are committed to your vision for the long haul (they’ll give you months instead of seconds) and will be patient as you ramp up revenue, resources, and a handful of brilliantly executed features (tune in to veteran entrepreneur/investor Steve Blank on features).

Here’s why apathetic visitors are death to your early stage startup:

• disinterested visitors are transients and won’t return to your service
• they won’t provide much needed feedback
• if apathetic users do give feedback, it will mislead a startup. Their interests have no concern for the startup’s success, and diverges greatly from the “best” user base. Each startup has to define and understand who is their ideal market
• they won’t zealously get their friends to try out the service
• they consume resources (time more than server costs) that should be dominated by early adopting uber fans

Power of Numbers

After getting your startup laser focused on over satisfying leading edge fans, you can begin to use the metrics. The value that matters is: Traction which for me is (new users X user retention rate). If you get 100 new users and they don’t return, it’s a obvious signal that you haven’t locked into real traction yet. All the hard work for hypothesizing, refactoring, and exploring value propositions pays off as soon as you see a smoothly growing Traction value week to week (last year I would have said month to month, but trends move faster now).

The true strength of human capital is when you have a sizeable level of satisfied users. The threshold population for enterprise applications may be a single satisfied customer. But for web services bigger is better. Numbers like 50 thousand to 1 million users show real impact. At this level your startup can begin influencing large scale social behavior, and disrupting existing markets. The power of human capital is such that embedded market titans like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have cause for alarm. For evidence look how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media is dominating link sharing and discovery. While buying intent is still highly correlated to BigCo search (Google, Bing), a drastic behavior change may be only a feature away.