Vinicius Vacanti

Inexpensive User Testing

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:49:56 -0400

When I talk to startups about the benefits of constant, iterative user testing in product design cycles, many people think that cost is a hurdle.

Booking 10 in-person sessions in a rented listening lab with a one-way mirror and screen recording in NYC can get pricey: $100-$200 per *qualified* candidate, plus ~$1000 fixed-cost of lab rental… or, as an even more deluxe option, an all-included engagement with a user testing consultant can run a startup from $5,000 - $15,000. That kind of bill is not feasible when you’re trying to get ramen profitable. But, cost is no excuse for not doing regular user testing in the early stages of a startup. So, for the bootstrapped startups, here’s five inexpensive ways to start doing user testing right now:

1) UserTesting.com - This is a slightly more upscale solution (relative to the other 4 choices below), but for $29 you can get a user to do a 20-min screencast for you while they talk about their thought process outloud. If this sounds confusing, this demo of a screencast explains the value of UserTesting.com well. UserTesting.com has the advantage of providing candidates that are qualified to your specifications (such as: age, sex, social-economic characteristics) and you can have users do very specific tasks you request.

UserTesting.com was developed by an ex-co-worker of mine at Homestead who did some user testing with me on our site’s splash page. He is a sharp guy and great at iterative design, so I’m glad he’s making a tool he finds useful for user testing available to the public.

2) Camcorders and friends - This is perhaps the most economical solution, but also the most time-intensive solution on this list. Schedule family, friends, or even strangers of craigslist to come in and sit down in front of your computer and record their actions performing tasks with a camcorder and some simple consumer-grade screen recording software. It will take time to schedule, prepare, perform and analyze all these tests, but the value of having testers live, in-person is often underestimated. The best benefit of live, in-person testing is the ability to ask follow-up questions when you see users stumble in order to best comprehend their frame of reference and expectations at the time of the incident. If possible, try to get a friend who does not work at your startup to be an independent facilitator. Users are more honest with their feedback when they don’t think they’re talking to someone who works on the site day-to-day. [Update: wow, forget the camcorder. Chris posted in the comments about Silverback, and it looks amazing. Do that instead!]

3) Feedback Army - Get direct answers to questions about your site. This is a far more low-fidelity solution than the first to options, but it’s simple to setup and super cheap. $10 buys you one paragraph of feedback from 10 people. This type of testing won’t help much with usability (ie workflow issues), but FeedbackArmy is helpful in determining how your overall value proposition to users is received and how users self-report their user experience (ie how much they enjoy the site).

4) PickFu - How many times have you gotten into an argument with a developer or product manager over the size/color/iconography of a simple button? End those arguments quickly with evidenced-based experimentation. With PickFu, you can immediately A/B test stuff like images, buttons, wording, etc with 50 peoples opinions for $5. This isn’t for full-blown user testing, it’s more for making quick, one-off, informed decisions. PickFu doesn’t have the benefit of A/B testing directly in the context of your site, but it’s the ability to run A/B tests without the messy overhead of site integration is a reasonable trade-off.

Side Note: Both PickFu and Feedback Army are arbitrages on Amazon Mechanical Turk, so if you’re an MTurk ninja you could do this type of testing even cheaper by scripting MTurk directly. But, for 98% of tasks/purposes you should just pay one of these services to do the work of creating the MTurk HITs for you instead of re-inventing the wheel.

5) Starbucks - Seriously. Go down to your local Starbucks with two experimenters during coffee rush hour. Go to the person at the end of the line and tell them that if they’re willing to sit with you in front of a laptop and do a user testing session for 7 minutes, the other experiment will wait in line and buy you the drink of your choice. The person at the end of the line has nothing better to do than to wait in line, so they’re very likely to say “yes.” And, a $5 latte for 7 minutes of genuine in-person user testing is a bargain.

Another advantage of the three virtual solutions mentioned above (FeedbackArmy, UserTesting.com, and PickFu) is that they save you time too. Live user testing in-person takes time in preparation, executing the tests, and then creating actionable conclusions and analysis. All these virtual solutions significantly cuts down or eliminates these time requirements. Of course, you sacrifice impactfulness by not doing a lot of this work yourself, but oftentimes this trade-off is appropriate.

I’m sure I missed other useful software and web services, so please add your favorite ways to bootstrap user testing in the comments. So, stop reading blogs and go user test your site.

The Most Helpful Advice I Have Read

Wed, 20 May 2009 16:06:00 -0400

“If you’re not utterly embarrassed by your first release, you’re waiting too long.”

Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn

As a pseudo-perfectionist / borderline-OCD’er, I have the hardest time not spending way too much time getting everything to be just right. This applies to everything: programming, user interface design and even my commute to work.

Now, whenever I get frustrated that I’m not doing something in the “best possible way”, I just say Reid’s quote to myself and move on. I’m a much happier / productive person. I hope his quote will also help you.

How to Get Amazon Books Same Day For Free

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:07:09 -0500

Warning: I’m pretty sure this is wrong — potentially legally, but certainly ethically.

Everyone knows that when you buy a book, you can either pick it up at your local bookstore today or you can save around $10 on Amazon and get it delivered for free in a week or two. But, there’s a sneaky way to get your book that same day while still paying the Amazon price.

Here’s how you do it:

Buy the book at Barnes and Noble / Borders / your local bookstore and save the receipt
Order the same book on Amazon and get free delivery (which should be about a week or so)
When the Amazon book arrives, return the Amazon book to your local bookstore

Note: Make sure to confirm that the ISBN numbers are the same on the version you buy from Amazon and your local bookstore.

Yes, it’s wrong and it’s bad. I don’t think people should do this; local bookstores are struggling as it is. But, if you are in a bind of some reason, a literary emergency, this may be for you.

One last caution: I can’t guarantee this will work for you, but I do know that it works. Also, worst case scenario, you can just return the book to Amazon.

Use Google Latitude To Find Your Missing Phone

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:58:00 -0500

Google’s new Latitude service is a way to keep tabs on your friends, but next time you lose your phone, Latitude will become your best friend - a phone tracking device.

Aside from working on your mobile phone as part of their maps application, Google Latitude can also be viewed from a web browser off your iGoogle home page. So, next time you lose your phone, just log on to Google and see where your phone is currently claiming it is. It’s LoJack but free!

Everyone should install Google Latitude just for this tracking service. If you aren’t comfortable sharing your location with your friends, don’t. Just sign up for the service, don’t add any friends, and you’ll be the only person that can see where your phone is.

Yipit Looking for Experienced Sys. Admin Consultant

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:52:00 -0500

Yipit is looking for help from an experienced system architect / server admin / web developer. The work will be on a consultant / freelance basis where we pay an hourly rate. We need you to be in / around New York and to come to our offices (Midtown East or, more affectionately, Turtle Bay).

This is perfect for someone who has some extra time on their hands or is looking to make some extra money and wants to help a young, excited start-up team in New York.

What we can do for you?

Pay you real money
Pay you on an hourly basis
Give you flexible work times
Be fun, smart and motivated people to work with

What do we need help doing?

Setting up a site to run on Amazon’s Web Services (EC2, S3, SimpleDB)
Setting up development, testing and production environments
Setting up the environments to be able to run Python / Django
Setting up a dependable back-up system for our code and data
Helping us think through scalability issues in terms of database design and server architecture

We are looking for a smart individual to help us do this in person and to teach / explain what he/she is doing. We are quick, attentive learners and promise not to be annoying.

Who are we?

I keep saying we because I’m speaking on behalf of the Yipit team but you will be only working with me. My name is Vinicius Vacanti and I’m a co-founder of Yipit.com, a new New York local search engine. Our prototype is live and we have been very encouraged by its performance so far. Consequently, we are currently gearing up to release a city-wide version in 2009.

For more information about Yipit, please visit Yipit or the Yipit Blog.

For more information about me, please visit my blog, my linkedin profile or my twitter account.

Compensation?

Please let us know what you would like your hourly rate to be. We would like you to get paid whatever amount makes you think the job is a worthwhile expenditure of your time.

If you are interested or know someone who might be, we would love to talk to you. Please comment below or email me at vin at yipit dot com

Not that you need to be bribed, but if you suggest the person we end up choosing, we would love to buy you lunch at Shake Shack (or other lunch place of your choice) to express our gratitude. If you are the candidate and contact us directly, we would be happy to buy you lunch.

Small Business Community Organizer - New York Tech Meetup

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:32:56 -0500

The new organizer of the New York Tech Meetup, Nate Westheimer, had the idea of launching a “Community Committee” which will be “dedicated to connecting information and resources within the NY tech community”. Immediately, I thought of a niche community that I am personally very involved with, New York’s small and medium-sized businesses. The SMB community is in dire need for technology help as it struggles to compete with sophisticated nationwide businesses and online-only retailers. At the same time, the SMB community is in a position to help the New York community as potential clients and providers of meeting spaces. The SMB community should definitely be represented in the “Community Committee” and I would like to volunteer my time to make that happen.

The following is a vision of how the New York tech and small business communities could be working together. The relationship, as laid out below, allows for both communities to efficiently benefit from a stronger relationship.

How do we reach out to the SMB community?

The New York small business community is large (over 50K in New York) and hard to reach. I have setup a new meetup called the New York Small Business Tech Meetup. The meetup will bring together members of the New York tech community to demonstrate popular and emerging technologies to small businesses. In order to populate the meetup with small businesses, we can

Contact chambers of commerce, business improvement districts and trade organizations in New York
Encourage NY Tech Meetup members to mention this new meetup to their favorite small businesses
Through Yipit, I am in constant contact with thousands of small businesses in New York, and will encourage them to join

I am excited to see what a united New York tech and small business community could accomplish together. Please let me know if you any additional thoughts as a comment below or email me at vin at yipit dot com.

Step-up On Behalf of Your Niche Community

If you think you are in a position to represent a “niche” New York community, I would urge you to volunteer. You can do so on by leaving a message on the NY Tech Meetup message board. Nate is looking for volunteers to step up on behalf of all communities that interact with technology including politics, design, video, university, women, VC, government and all other niche communities.

Twitter Should Allow Location Info For Each Tweet

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:00:36 -0500

At tonight’s New York Tech Meetup, I will be talking about performing data analysis based on Twitter’s revolutionary data set. As part of my preparation work, I noticed that a number of interesting location-based services could arise from Twitter’s data set if twitter allowed each tweet to be associated with a specific latitude and longitude.

You are probably thinking that Twitter already lets you specify a location. You are right, but that location is just a default location assigned to each user on registration. What I am suggesting is allowing twitter users to submit updates that have a specific latitude and longitude associated with each update. A third-party client on a iPhone can easily do this by querying the iPhone’s GPS system.

Why would this be helpful?

Here’s a quick example:

During the Atlanta gas crisis, users on twitter started using the #atlgas tag to identify gas stations that weren’t empty. The logical next step would have been to create a map of these tweets. But, since the locations were being written in the tweet, it was a serious challenge to accurately parse the messages and auto-create a map. If each of the tweets accepted lat/longs, it would have become a trivial exercise to produce an extremely helpful map.

Obviously Twitter has a lot on its plate but I continue to believe that it needs to do a better job of making its existing data set more useful to non-Twitter users. Adding more meta-information to each tweet would certainly help those third-party developers build more interesting applications.

Searches For "mcdonalds jobs" Alarmingly Accelerate

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:11:00 -0500

As if there weren’t enough signs the economy is hurting, Google Insights shows us that number of searches for “mcdonalds jobs” is alarmingly accelerating.

In fact, November 9th, the last data point recorded represents the highest number of searches google has seen for “mcdonalds jobs” in the last 5 years (which is as far as the data goes).

Which states are doing this search the most (Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida)? I guess the auto-industry’s bailout isn’t coming quickly enough.

Facebook Users and Sarah Palin Are No Longer Listed in a Relationship

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 01:40:00 -0400

Facebook members used to think pretty positively about Republican Vice Presidential Nominee, Sarah Palin. However, over the last few weeks, they have started thinking 50% more negatively. How do I know? Facebook started previewing the next generation of it’s obscure Lexicon service.

Essentially, the service combs through wall posts by Facebook members and performs aggregate analysis on the data similar to Google Trends. One of the more interesting analysis Facebook performs is “sentiment” tracking. Whenever a certain term is used in a wall post, it identifies whether the term was positive or negative.

The preview version only allows you to review a small set of topics though, fortunately, Sarah Palin is one of them. On August 29th, wall posts mentioning Sarah Palin were 80% positive or 20% negative. Now, wall posts are 30% negative, a 50% increase in negativity.

Breadlines Forming in Manhattan

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:30:24 -0400

Overheard in NYC

Foreigner (walking by): “Wow, I didn’t realize how bad the American economy was…”

Photo of Magnolia Bakery line by gsanjose

You Decide Who Presents at the Next NY Tech Meetup

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:29:00 -0400

Allen Stern, from CenterNetworks, wrote an excellent blog post about how the selection process for the NY Tech Meetup doesn’t seem fair. Well, how about we let the NY Tech Meetup Community decide who gets to demo?

As a quick solution, I have put the companies that have requested to demo below. NY Tech Meetup Members can vote through the comment section of this blog for the demos they would like to see. Please identify yourself so that I can confirm you are a member of the NY Tech Meetup. I’ll update the vote counts as the comments come in.

Update: Some of you have requested to vote but offline, that works. Just email me at vin at yipit dot com

If you would like to be included in this blog, email me at vin at yipit dot com and I’ll update the blog post to reflect your demo.

If we get enough participation, can the NY Tech Meetup really ignore us?

The companies requesting to demo are:

SaneBull | 2 Votes
Presenter: Felix
SaneBull is an AJAX-powered financial platform which provides live stock market quotes, live news, financial widgets and more. We have recently overhauled our entire website with a new look and dozens of new features. We’d love to showcase these new features to the Tech Meetup audience.

FreshmanFund | 2 Votes
Presenter: Jeff Frese
A registry for college savings that helps parents save for college even during tough economic times such as these.

RTP | 2 Votes
Presenter: Dario Meyer
RTP (Right Time & Place) is a location based platform for all GPS enabled cell phones that allows users to obtain and share real estate listings, social events/activities and sales/promotion. My idea is unique due to the fact that it offers the user more features than what is out in the market, most LBS programs remind me of a yellow book with a GPS attached to it.

TurnTo | 3 Votes
Presenter: George Eberstadt
TurnTo enables visitors to e-commerce sites to see what friends have bought there. This makes it easy for shoppers to get advice they can really trust — without ever leaving the site they are shopping on. TurnTo brings together social networks and e-commerce in a new way that’s better for users and better for businesses. In a word, it’s what Beacon should have been.

HabitatMap | 1 Vote
Presenter: Michael Heimbinder
HabitatMap, a Brooklyn based environmental health justice non-profit, builds online tools to support grassroots organizing for livable cities and healthy communities. Below, I’ve included links to a few of the collaborative maps we’ve put together with our partners in the last few months. HabitatMap is a wiki so feel free to contribute to an existing marker or add your own.

Sosauce | 2 Votes
Presenter: Jamie Lin
We’d love to demo Sosauce at the coming (November) meetup. Our demo’s focus will be on Sosauce Mesa, the leading web-based 3D virtual world. Mesa is the only web VW that runs in all browsers and on both Macs and PCs. We’d like to take the opportunity to unveil several awesome new features as well as announce the grand opening of a new virtual tourist destination — Ross Island. For the first time, people will get to explore this mysterious Antarctic island, which is off limits to the general public in real life. A video introduction to Sosauce Mesa can be found here.

Wee Web | 1 Vote
Presenter: Matt Meeker
Wee Web is a service for new & expecting parents to easily share photos, videos, and quick twitter-style updates about their newborns with close family & friends in a private environment.

Why Twitter Won't Go Mainstream But Will Still Succeed

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:39:00 -0400

I’m sorry, but my “normal” friends don’t get Twitter. They got Facebook, they got YouTube. But, when I show them Twitter, they have no idea why anyone would use it. The few of them who are social enough to broadcast short messages like to do so privately and to their friends (i.e., Facebook status updates). So, is Twitter done? Not at all— it’s just getting started. Twitter doesn’t need to worry about getting everyone to start broadcasting messages, they need to focus on making their amazing data useful to everyone else. That’s what YouTube did. YouTube succeeded not because it got everyone to contribute videos but because it took the videos of the few and made it useful to everyone else.

A few weeks back I created a graph, based on Twitter data, that helped people determine what time they should try to eat lunch at Shake Shack. Really simple exercise but I got emails out of nowhere from friends that have never even heard of Twitter saying they were forwarded the chart and how useful it was.

What I did learn from my experience is that making twitter data useful is difficult. It’s not structured or organized and it’s hard to imagine how Twitter will ever get it’s users to structure the data themselves (hash signs will only go so far). In other words, Twitter needs to do it themselves or someone needs to do it for them. Twitter is headed in the right direction, the purchase of Summize to provide a Twitter search engine was fantastic and the new Election ‘08 page is interesting but not incredibly useful. There’s way more to be done.

In terms of practical advice for the Twitter folks, I recommend they talk to the really smart guys over at Pluribo. They are using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to summarize Amazon product reviews. Perhaps Twitter could encourage them to focus their time on the tweets fire-hose. Imagine typing a phrase (like the recent debate or a movie) on Twitter’s search engine and getting a summarized view of thousands of people’s thoughts — pretty interesting.

Are Early Movie Reviews Rigged?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:23:27 -0400

Based on an analysis of movie review data for 26 movies currently in theaters, early movie reviews are 25% more likely to be positive than later movie reviews. All movie critics see the same movie, so they shouldn’t be giving different opinions based on when they see them. That means something smells rotten in movie review land.

The analysis shows that 78% of these “early movie reviews” were positive while total movie reviews were just 62% positive. I based my analysis on movie review data from 26 movies off of RottenTomatoes. I defined early as a movie review published at least a week before the movie was released. The difference may not seem large but it’s the difference between Batman Begins and Hulk or the Royal Tenenbaums and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.

Why are early reviews coming out positive? There’s a classic conflict of interest:

Early movie reviews get many more readers which means more money for their sites / publications
Movie studios and their PR agencies, who want positive reviews, decide which critics review the movie first
If a critic dishes out a negative review, they are probably much less likely to get picked next time around

I hope I’m wrong, but the data is troubling. RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic should both perform this analysis on their full data set. They will be able to confirm my findings and potentially identify specific movie critics that may be giving biased opinions.

Twitter's War of the Worlds

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:34:08 -0400

H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds was broadcast over radio in 1938. Disguised as a regular broadcast, it caused a panic amongst its listeners who thought the events were real.

I’m pretty sure if it had been broadcast through Twitter, it would have gone something like this (read from the bottom up):

Kevin Rose Picks His 104 Twitter Friends Very Carefully

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:14:51 -0400

Digg’s Kevin Rose, Twitter’s second most popular user with 64,572 followers, follows only 104 Twitter accounts. It made me wonder: who’s influencing one of Twitter’s most influential users?

While looking through his list, I noted forward-thinking technologists, in-the-know tech journalists and the Cobra Commander (awesome). But, I also picked up on another pattern:

Top Row: vikkichowney, adholden, Poshy, iphonegirl
Middle Row: MelKirk, kevinrose, Aubs
Bottom Row: leahculver, ericased, arielwaldman, AllieOops

Well-played, sir.

Your Twitter Followers Aren't Real

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:46:00 -0400

Based on a random sampling analysis of twitter accounts I conducted, 6 out of 10 twitter followers aren’t actually following you. That would imply that Barack Obama, who has the most twitter followers at 80K, really only has 30K “real” followers.

I decided to take a closer look at the top three twitter tech-heavyweight (figuratively speaking) bloggers based on Twitterholic’s top 100: Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis (#7, 34K followers), Scobleizer’s R obert Scoble (#8, 34K followers), and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (#13 at 25K followers). Even though Calacanis has a slight edge on Scoble, looking at their “real” followers was a completely different story. Robert Scoble has significantly more “real” twitter followers (13.6K) than Arrington (8.6K) and Calacanis (7.5K). On average, they were reaching 68% less twitter accounts than their follower counts indicated. This isn’t a comment about them, they are fantastic. It’s a comment about how twitter follower numbers are misleading.

Twitter users are pretty proud of their follower counts and they put it on their blogs next to their RSS reader counts. I’m pretty proud of my twitter account and I only have 57 followers. Twitterholic even puts up a leader-board of the top 100. But, the not-surprising truth is that like RSS reader counts, not that many people are actually reading what you are tweeting.

As Twitter continues its impressive expansion and twitter accounts start to become businesses, it will be important to have a more accurate view of the reach of specific twitter accounts.

Several services are making progress on this front (Twitter Grader, Twitterholic) but there’s a lot more to do.

Note: For the purposes of this sampling, I defined a “real follower” as someone who follows less than 300 twitter accounts and is active as measured by having a status update submitted in the last 3 days. It’s definitely not a perfect definition but I hope it was good enough for the purposes of this demonstration.

Shake Shack Without the Wait

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:15:00 -0400

For those not in the know, new yorkers have been relaying shake shack line lengths using Twitter through a shake shack account a.k.a Shake Shack Flash Mob. I decided to take the data created over the last four months and try to answer the question: When should we try to grab lunch at Shake Shack? After all, no one wants to be in a 60-minute or “third tree” line behind 50 tourists.

As a quick disclaimer: While the mob is active, the sample size is too small to time it down to the minute, but the data does seem to point towards the following conclusions:

Pre-noon lunch: Hit-or-miss. You’d think by scrambling down there before noon you’d be okay, but there’s no guarantee. Make sure to check the shake shack webcam
Post-noon lunch: Not much data collected but not surprising. The flash mob knows better than to insult the Shake Shack gods by irreverently trying to grab lunch during lunch-hour
Post-3 pm lunch: This is the ticket. Either starve yourself till then or get a job that allows you to wake up at 11 am
General tip: If it’s raining, cold or really hot, the line will be shorter than usual but don’t be surprised to still find people braving the elements
Funniest shake shack tweet goes to ceonyc: “line very short….swarm! Swarm!”

Who’s graciously tweeting away line lengths?

whitneymcn - Whitney McNamara, wrote the perl code that makes the Shake Shack twitter account work
innonate - Nate Westheimer, entrepreneur in residence at Rose Tech Ventures
fredwilson - Fred Wilson, a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures who came up with the Shake Shack twitter bot idea.
ceonyc - Charlie O’Donnell, CEO of Path101
reecepacheco - Reece Pacheco, CEO of Overtime Media

Here’s the full list of shake shack tweeters:

Update: Eater reblogged this post and pitched the shake shack flash mob. Nice.

Update2: Thrillist reblogged the post referencing the shake shack flash mob as “vigilante nerds”

Hurricane Tracking FAIL

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:37:00 -0400

XTRP is one of the models used for Hurricane tracking. While I agree projecting a hurricane’s future path is complicated, it seems like XTRP has thrown in the towel and just started drawing a line up and to the left. (XTRP is the model with the black triangles and dotted lines).

Most recent models for Hannah:

Most recent models for Ike:

Doing some further research it appears that XTRP is just the Hurricane’s most recent movements projected forward. In other words, a very simple model that takes no future variables into account.

The Mailing List You Need To Join

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:18:11 -0400

Do yourself a favor and join Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s new mailing list.

I know, I also thought mailing lists were dead but, weirdly, Jason retired from blogging. He now sends out fantastic and practical essays on technology entrepreneurism through his mailing list. Despite the list being just a few months old, he’s already sent out some must-read essays including:

PR Strategies for Start-Ups

Rule number one of interacting with a journalist: you NEVER have to bring up what you’re doing
Be in love with your brand; wear a t-shirt with your company’s brand every day
Your office space should be a personification of your company’s mission
Exactly how a CEO should e-mail and speak to a journalist

How to Demo Your Start-Up Company - Part 1

Show your product within the first 60 seconds
Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do
How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to

How to Demo Your Start-Up Company - Part 2

Use inclusive words like “we”, instead of “you”
Four methods to start your demo
Repeat your slogan five times in your presentation

You can find standard advice on these topics all over the Internet, but Jason does a fantastic job of giving you intelligent and practical advice. Get on this mailing list.

Facebook Stalker Tip

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 01:32:00 -0400

If you have been stalking on Facebook lately, you have noticed that the advaned profile search lets you specify what year a person graduated but not what school they went to. Weird and annoying.

But, nothing to fear fellow stalkers, you can actually narrow down by the school people went to. It’s not a facebook feature, it’s a very simple facebook hack.

Perform an advaned profile search as you normally would in your geographic network. When the results come up, and you only want to see people who went to Emory, then you just add “&ed=Emory” (without the quotes) to the end of the page’s url and hit enter. Voila, the results are now filtered by school as well.

If the college you are looking for has a space in the name, like Penn State, then you just add “&ed=Penn+State”.

Get all your stalking done before Facebook fixes this.