Mark Hendrickson

Share frequency

Fri, 12 Aug 11 21:35:05 +0000

When designing a social network that depends on users to contribute content from which they'll collectively derive value, one must consider certain qualities of its supported content types to determine whether those types can provide enough ongoing value to keep users engaged.

Among these important qualities is the frequency with which people are compelled to create and share a given type of content. People are interested in sharing some types on a seemingly continual basis, spacing out contributions mere hours, minutes or even seconds apart. Conversely, there are types that make sense to share only occasionally when unique opportunities or needs arise.

While the suitable frequency of each type varies between individuals, generalizations can be made for evaluation and comparison purposes. For example, status updates, which a given person might find him or herself compelled to produce several times per day, lend themselves to a greater frequency than blog posts, which the same person might publish only every few weeks.

The general frequency of a particular content type results from numerous factors that affect the costs and benefits of sharing it. All else being equal, types that are easy to produce, such as check-ins or one-off photos, enjoy a greater frequency than those that take more time and consideration, such as restaurant reviews or entire photo albums. Types that return more value to the producer, such a thoughtful answer to a question that earns social acclaim, also enjoy greater frequency than less beneficial types that require the same investment.

It also seems clear that people, due to their impatience, have a greater cost elasticity than benefit elasticity, in that a little less effort makes a bigger positive impact on frequency than a little more benefit. This asymmetry might help to explain why we've seen smaller, bite-sized types of sharing emerge, whereas we haven't seen as many new services that target types with higher costs yet higher yields.

It's also possible that with current feedback mechanisms (which provide superficial doses of social validation rather than more impactful, long-standing personal gains), there are simply more apparent opportunities to reduce costs than increase benefits, even if that results in a downward movement of publisher value (and likely consumer value) per share.

Every type of content has its own set of reasons for why it presents people with higher or lower costs and benefits, and a study of each is necessary to understand their resulting frequencies. When choosing one or more types for a new service, it's important to conduct this study to determine whether they'd yield a high enough frequency to engage users on a continual basis.

Higher frequency generally leads to greater engagement if only because it enables the production of more content within a given period of time and, after all, content is the lifeblood of any social network and needs to accrue. If the value of content is also dependent at least partly on its recency (as is the case with virtually all types, to varying degrees), frequency is even more important because there must be enough new content available at any given time that users decide to engage with the service. The depreciation of existing content essentially needs to be counteracted by fresh content at a sufficient enough rate.

The need for a relatively high sharing frequency is particularly acute due to an increasing number of services vying for consumers time and attention. Each additional service drives up the minimum value users demand from the next, either as producers or consumers of content. An important question for social network designers, then, is what are the types of content that will provide enough net publishing value that they elicit frequent contributions from their target demographics, especially as their opportunity costs rise.

Homesteading on the indie web

Sat, 30 Jul 11 00:03:21 +0000

I had the pleasure of attending IndieWebCamp in Portland last month, a BarCamp-style conference where techies get together to brainstorm ideas about how they can help people own and control their online identities.

The so-called indie web movement, a spiritual cousin to the open source and standards movements, is rooted in a desire for digital freedom, primarily from monopolies that threaten to restrict and violate the common Internet user's online existence. It calls for practical means to protect this existence by preventing or disrupting the control that any one company has over a person's online identity, either from a functionality or data point of view.

It's a thought-provoking movement for a number of reasons, not least because it finds itself screaming into the wind, so to speak. Most Internet users, with the proliferation of social networks, increasingly place their digital lives in the hands of proprietary services run by mostly private — and always self-interested — companies. These users don't own the identity and content they publish to these services in a way that insulates them from their vague terms of service and the application thereof. Nor can they continue to enjoy those services (at least in the same manner) if the companies shut them down, redesign them undesirably or fail to improve them. Yet, only a small minority of users actively worry about these problems and usually only once they've been stung by account deactivation, incessant downtime, censorship, privacy leaks, or critical design shortcomings.

There's a moral tone to the indie web movement, not just an insistence that users ought to control their online identities for the practical purpose of avoiding conflicts with their service providers. Proponents argue that the Internet needs to maintain its decentralized nature and resist consolidations of power lest technological progress gets stymied, data gets lost, hoarded or corrupted, and users get disenfranchised en masse. There's a tension here, since private companies that treat their users as virtual sharecroppers are clearly responsible for much of the progress occurring on the web today, and their services are making it dramatically easier for everyone, including the technically illiterate, to participate online.

There were two particular challenges to the indie web movement that struck me while attending the conference. The first had to do with identifying the relevant and recognizable needs of the average Internet user to obtain better control over their online identity. Indie web proponents lodge a disparate number of valid complaints against proprietary services, each with its own merit but none that would be recognized by mainstream audiences as a massive, immediate problem on its own.

Tantek Çelik, the conference's lead organizer and my gracious host, cited the famous downtime of services like Twitter and Tumblr as reason for decentralization, as well as the tendency of acquired services to get shut down. Others cited the desire to more easily export and manage the content they post to services so it can be used on their personal computers and published elsewhere on the web. For others still, it was primarily an issue of personalization and the ability to interact with numerous online services and their respective functionality with more flexibility and fluidity.

All of these are pain points that are best articulated by technologists who take the time to understand them but are surely felt by "normals" as well. They don't, however, seem top of mind enough to compel millions of ordinary Internet users to take concrete steps to address them, at least with today's solutions. Downtime is frustrating but most people learn to work around it; shuttered services disappoint loyal users but most likely faced their demise due to popular disinterest; and most people don't know what else they want out of the services they use, at least substantially enough to seek alternative solutions.

This complacency poses a critical motivational problem for the primary decentralization scenario proposed by those in the indie web movement, wherein users (both early- and late-adopter alike) take the initiative to host their identity and personal content independently of any proprietary service. The idea here is that everyone should register their own second-level domain and put up a personal website of some sort, just as I've registered markmhendrickson.com and centralized my online identity there. This site could be a simple, static presence or advanced enough to exchange information with proprietary services so that interactions can take place with friends or followers. Theoretically, these proprietary services could get cut out entirely over time, and independent personal websites could begin communicating with each other directly, effectively mapping social networking relationships onto the Internet in a distributed, peer-to-peer fashion.

In addition to the marketing challenge of compelling individuals to establish these independent sites, there's the technical challenge of bringing this distributed system to life and making it possible for normal people to get involved. The technical challenge can be divided on one side into the infrastructural issues of decentralizing the real-time communications that currently take place within centralized services (such as forging social relationships, posting content to streams, and interacting with that content). On the other side, there are the technical issues of setting each user up within the decentralized system and making sure they have the tools needed to participate without getting tied to any single provider.

Each IndieWebCamp attendee spent the second day of the conference working on a self-chosen project that would aid the movement. I took it upon myself to devise a tool that would perhaps solve the second half of this technical challenge while also communicating to mainstream users why they ought to set up their own domains. My project was primarily user-centric, since it deferred many of decentralization's intricate engineering decisions and instead focused on motivating users to overcome their default complacency and break ground on their own online homestead.

I established several main requirements for this tool:

It had to simplify for users the process of registering a domain name and a basic web host, both of which had to be treated as commodities and substitutable at any time. While it's not possible or feasible for users to literally own their domain and hosting, the next best thing is to minimize the differentiation power of these services by abstracting them away.
It had to automate the process of setting up an initial website, or homestead, on the newly registered domain and host, as well as to automate the processes of updating or extending it later on. While the software for the website had to be fully hosted by the user and open-sourced for maximum control, it could be assisted by the tool on an ongoing basis through code and data pushes.
The user couldn't be expected to use FTP, a command line interface, a file system, or any other technologies beyond the browser because doing so would severely limit its accessibility. User interactions had to be limited to filling out web forms and clicking on things.
The financial and time burden of using the tool to both set up and maintain a homestead needed to be minimized as much as possible.
Users couldn't be required to reenter their personal information or manually upload content they've already shared elsewhere.

The tool's initial user experience is outlined by the wireframe above. The marketing appeals directly to a person's need for control, since that's ultimately what users are expected to obtain in a decentralized system, it likely resonates with an underlying fear that their current online identity may be in disarray, and it's a vague enough proposition to allow many solution details.

The page then addresses four of the most identifiable needs under the tent of controlling one's online identity. Obtaining a personal URL allows a user to more easily point people to their information online; ranking well-curated personal information highly on Google allows a user to control what people find out about them when searching their name; listing all of a user's social networking profiles in one place brings order to identity fragmentation; and backing up a user's online content from numerous sources provides peace of mind. The area at the bottom that lists other people's websites is meant to provide social validation for these propositions.

To get started, the user needs to enter just their desired URL, an email address and a password (with the desired URL checked against a domain registrar's API, assuming one exists). Requests for other values, such as the user's name, are omitted since they can be gathered from the user later on. The goal here is to have them engage with the setup process as painlessly as possible.

Upon entering this basic information, the user is prompted to connect their new homestead to any number of their online services. A link to each of these services, once connected, will show up on the user's homestead. Content posted to them can also be pulled, either once or continually, for redisplay or simply backup on the user's homestead, depending on what kind of service it is.

For example, when a user connects their Facebook account, they can choose to have all of their photos and status updates automatically republished to their homestead. Not shown are possible options to simply back up these but not republish them. By connecting with any of these services, the tool can also automatically determine the user's name, portrait and any other details to display on the homestead.

The final setup step consists of actually paying for the desired URL, with the assumption that the tool could arrange for free hosting. This part of the mockup isn't fleshed out much, but basically the page would show the appropriate form once the user has chosen their preferred payment method.

The result is a profile page not terribly unlike those you'd find on most social networking sites but hosted on the user's own domain and consisting of information about and from the user from a variety of sources. Their service profiles show up on the left along with their portrait and bio, and content they've decided to import into their homestead shows up aggregated on the right.

This is meant to be just a start. There are a number of ways the design and functionality of a given user's homestead could be advanced. The layout and theme could be customizable. The user could add the ability to post content directly to their homestead and then have it syndicate out to other services. They could even start creating connections with other homesteaders by adding them as friends or the like, all referenced by their own URLs.

Perhaps an open-source ecosystem could even emerge that provided plugins and other modifications to the core software package, eventually enabling social experiences that rival those of proprietary services, with feeds, messages, tags and more. The central accomplishment here would be in enabling large numbers of people to claim independent online presences with the potential to play increasing roles in their online lives. Once enough people have done so, it'll be much easier to weave a indie web between their homesteads and insulate them from the decisions or fate of any particular company.

Content

Fri, 12 Aug 11 18:20:24 +0000

People are particular about the forms of communication they employ when expressing themselves, through social networks or any other media, because different forms possess different powers of conveying information.

When in the physical presence of others, we can communicate verbally, visually or tactilely with our words, gestures or touch. Words are usually chosen to communicate abstract concepts, finger pointing is best suited to convey direction, and hugs provide the quickest route to imparting fondness.

When afar, we can send each other letters, speak to each other over the phone or route a message through a friend. The message might ostensibly be the same despite the form it takes, but a letter will likely impress a greater sense of consideration, a phone call will impart nuances by way of intonation, and a routed message will include the implicit validation of its intermediary. The transmitter must choose their form carefully if they want to get the intended message across because each form has its own abilities and disabilities to deliver information.

Likewise, social networks are constructed around particular forms of communication and consequently limited to the characteristics of those forms. The various forms can be considered types of content, because shared information persists within a given network and is intended to benefit its consumers by entertaining or edifying them. As such, it's important to consider the types of content people can share within a network as key to its communicative value.

All social networks collect identification information from their members and publish it back out as static content. Usually this consists of a member's name and portrait as well as their location and one-line biography. Particularly identity-centric networks collect a lot more static, or evergreen, information such as employment and educational history, music and movie interests, and contact details. The sum of this content is displayed primarily on a single page, which serves to anchor the user's identity within a network and provide a reference point to others. Therefore, networks share the profile as a fundamental content type.

Social networks almost universally publish some manner of relationship content, too. Friendships, follows, subscriptions, and the like indicate that pairs of people have a relationship between each other that's worth recording and making known. And the types of relationships that can be captured depend on the model a given network has implemented and how that model has been communicated throughout the service. This content – which is often showcased on profile pages but importantly delivered through notifications as well – constitutes yet another fundamental type that varies only in implementation.

The content differences between social networks, however, mainly come from the types of information that users are able and encouraged to submit as discrete objects. These types are manifold: photos, videos, graphics, status updates, blog posts, articles, documents, books, events, travel plans, travel advice, questions, answers, bookmarks, pokes, reviews, deals, goods for sale, money, vital stats, purchases, gadgets, badges, check-ins, short-form messages, gifts, songs, audio clips, polls, webpages, brands, applications and more. This content is posted proactively by users and its immediate destination is often a feed or profile page. It will likely be repurposed for other consumption points, such as search or syndication, too.

There is also a host of reactive content types that social networks variably support. These include, most commonly, comments or replies and gestures that indicate approval or disapproval of shared content, such as likes, reposts, favorites or votes. These reactive types are designed to permit direct interaction around pieces of content, allowing the publisher and any other established participant to garner feedback and increase the impact of their contributions. Furthermore, reactive content can be generated in response to other reactive content, thereby extending chains of interaction to deeper levels.

Some social networks support many of these proactive and reactive content types while others specialize in just one or a few. Support may also differ in subtle yet important ways between two or more networks, allowing those networks to convey substantially different information and consequently present dramatically different value propositions to their members.

Comparisons aside, every network must be designed around a combination of content types that can be used to fulfill the identifiable communication needs of its producers and consumers. On one side of the equation, a sufficient number of people must be interested in producing a given type of content because it allows them to express themselves in a way they find valuable. On the other, a sufficient (and most likely larger) number of people must be interested in consuming that content because it benefits them in a recognizable way.

Social network designers must identify not only certain communication needs and their corresponding content types but the frequency and size of those needs as well. Network participation requires commitment on the part of its members, lest they forget or resist leveraging it when their needs arise. And the only way to earn that commitment is to satisfy members' content needs either frequently in small ways or occasionally in big ways.

Relationship

Fri, 17 Jun 11 23:49:04 +0000

When people connect with others on a given social network, they are conscientious about whom they will connect with, because an exchange of information, both immediate and ongoing, will result from the connection.

Just as in offline life, people don't like to send and receive information to and from random people; their relationship with those people is crucial. The things you say to those you encounter on the street will differ from the things you say to familiar people in your own home. Conversely, your interest in what strangers have to say will differ from your interest in what your friends can tell you.

The types of relationships that people experience aren't simply divided between friends and strangers; they are manifold and impossible to label with complete precision. Strictly speaking, no particular relationship gets formed between two pairs of people because nuances invariably come into play. You may be office mates with both Tim and Joe, but you're a bit fonder of Joe because he invites you to lunch.

Relationships also aren't perfectly symmetrical. While you think warmly of Joe, he might think you're kind of a jerk and only asks you to join him because he's interested in your sister. Consequently, any label and assumption of symmetry you assign to a given relationship will constitute an approximation at best.

However, approximations are useful when trying to identify the type of relationships a given social network should or does facilitate, because individuals themselves map their relationships to approximate groups. And despite the efforts of designers to diversify the types of relationships that thrive on their networks, consumers tend to view each social network as primarily suitable for only one of their groups.

Understanding a group to be simply a set of people who share the same approximate relationship to each other, we can identify an array of such groups that might be facilitated by social networks. On a high level, there are expansive groups of people you've met and people with whom you've simply communicated. There are also people you admire and people you want to impress.

More specifically, there are acquaintances from colleges, companies and organizations. There are peers in your industry and collaborators on your specific projects. There are close friends whom you see weekly as well as old friends from high school you see once a year. There are family members and teammates. And there are folks you may or may never have met but who share the same interests as you.

Whatever the group and however specific, it needs to have enough members who both find the group important and desire better ways to share information with each other to warrant a dedicated network. And its importance is often tied to the group's size and its predominance in members' lives. Facebook initially took off among college (and then high school) students because it intensified the already intense relationships that existed within academic communities. Likewise, Twitter and LinkedIn initially thrived by bolstering professionally important relationships within the Silicon-Valley-centric tech scene.

Furthermore, when someone encounters a new network, it's important that they can actually identify which of their relationships it will facilitate and how they will benefit as a result. Otherwise, they are presented with the communications equivalent of a hammer without a nail; they won't know what to do with the social network and it will seem pointless. Similarly, if you signal that the network is meant for a particular type of relationship they don't have, want or care for - or if they feel as though they don't have an unaddressed communication need for that relationship - they won't feel compelled to participate.

Three pillars

Thu, 07 Jul 11 20:34:22 +0000

Social networking is a precondition for new modes of information exchange, not an end in and of itself.

By definition, a social network is simply a set of connections between different people represented by a computer system. These representations wouldn't provide value to anyone if they didn't enable the exchange of information in novel ways. When you friend someone on Facebook, connect with them on LinkedIn, or follow them on Twitter, you aren't doing it for academic purposes; you're doing it to communicate. You don't care about the improved integrity of the social network; you care about the ways in which you can use it to interact with people you care about.

These networks share important characteristics with one another but crucially differ in even more important ones. The differences are more important, if also more poorly understood, because they allow each of them to present unique ways of exchanging information. If that weren't the case, society wouldn't need more than one social network.

There are three categories into which these differences can be broken down to better understand market demand for various social networks. First, there is the question of relationship, or the significance of the people forging connections to each other on a given network. Second, there's the question of content, or the type of information that can be shared across the network. And third, there's the question of mechanism, or how that information can be published or consumed, which affects not only its production and distribution but its meaning as well.

These categories form three pillars of effective social networks. Weaknesses can and inevitably will be tolerated within any given pillar, but each must be strong overall or the network won't constitute a compelling way to exchange information. Additionally, new social networks must differentiate themselves from existing ones by establishing at least one (but not necessarily all) of these pillars differently, thereby giving people a reason to adopt another network.

How to pitch a tech blogger

Sun, 19 Jun 11 22:29:27 +0000

I've been asked privately quite a few times over the last couple of years how one should pitch their startup to a tech blog like TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat or ReadWriteWeb. So I've decided (quite selfishly) to write a post about the subject instead of repeating myself or re-forwarding emails.

This comes from my experience as both a tech writer (for TechCrunch, ~1.5 years) and internet startup entrepreneur (for Plancast, also ~1.5 years), so I've been able to see things from both sides of the table, particularly when it comes to PR for newly founded startups. As such, these are principles that I primarily recommend to unproven entrepreneurs with unknown companies who want to launch publicly for the first time. Once an entrepreneur or their company gains visibility, their approach to PR will evolve and the press may end up coming to them for news instead of the other way around.

The Story Is Key

When you pitch a blogger -- or any writer for that matter, whether they work for The New York Times or your local paper -- it's crucial to recognize their desire to identify and then write a story. And by story, I mean something that starts, continues, completes or encapsulates a narrative. Bloggers have no interest in merely reporting facts detached from meaning. And they certainly don't want to report facts that actually have insufficient significance to their readers. Bloggers dread the idea of someone coming along and justifiably saying "so what?". Good narratives prevent that. Great narratives are thought-provoking and get further developed in readers' minds.

Now, you obviously don't have the power to directly dictate which narrative a blogger will craft as the result of your pitch (no matter how many pay-for-publish conspiracies you've heard). But it's important to think about a narrative for your company or product, because you can and should steer the blogger towards it. Why? Because bloggers are strapped for time and don't possess the same depth of domain expertise as you. Lay out a narrative that jibes well with their preconceptions and they'll likely run with some form of it.

It helps to recognize some of the more common types of narratives. If you read through the headlines on Techmeme, you'll find that most fit into at least one of the following:

Competitive or Political Drama - aka "company X releases product Y to kill company Z"
Gossip - "CEO of company X gets tangled up in Y"
Insight - "trend X will change the world because of A, B, and C"
Evolution & Confluence - "service Y is like X for Z, capitalizing on the recent developments of A and B"
Success - "company X has created super impressive technology Y, is growing fast, or has made lots of money"
Failure - "company X is dying or has messed something up"

The idea is to figure out which type you want to adopt and then craft the facts of your announcement into a compelling and succinct narrative that conforms to it. You'll likely opt for type #4 or #5, but don't hesitate to spice it up with a bit of #1 or #3 (the story can have sub-narratives, but expect the blogger to lead with only one). This isn't an exercise in stretching the truth or making stuff up; there's a reason why you've built what you've built or done whatever you're announcing. Weave that reason into a bigger story while avoiding as many buzzwords as possible.

When framing your narrative, you'll do well to remember that bloggers are creatures of comparison. They'll immediately try to compare your product or announcement to another they've already seen, and if they find a close match, they'll pass on it. You should get out in front of this reaction by emphasizing the characteristics of your announcement that make it unique. But don't insist that it is incomparable; on the contrary, be forward about drawing comparisons that will highlight the significance of its uniqueness. The writer should come away from your pitch thinking "I've seen cows before, and this is indeed a cow, but it's purple! All of the other ones I've seen are only black and white" not "This guy insists this purple thing is not a cow but it obviously is. It might be worth writing about the fact that it's purple but I'm not sure; it feels as though I'm being pitched another cow".

Relationships Matter

This may sound like psychological manipulation directed towards selfish ends (i.e. sales) but if that's how it feels, you're doing it wrong. The goal here is to help the blogger, not exploit them. When you help them (with well-articulated material for a story), they help you (with a story that will publicize your business). As with all transactions, it relies on a relationship, however temporary. And the success of that relationship will depend on how much trust and rapport you've established.

A lot of times when entrepreneurs are ready to pitch, they go looking for a friend who knows and can refer them to a writer. The idea here is to leverage someone else's relationship to validate themselves transitively. This is all fine and good, and it's certainly better than submitting a story to a writer cold. However, it's much better to begin building a direct relationship with them well before the pitch.

One of the beautiful things about the internet is that you can develop relationships with people without ever meeting them. Get on your favorite bloggers' radars by commenting thoughtfully on their posts, retweeting and replying to them on Twitter, and submitting promising tips to them for stories that have nothing to do with your company. If you blog, take the time to write pieces that link to their pieces; they'll most likely read them and take note of your name. If you happen to live in their area, introduce yourself and chat with them casually at an industry event without giving an elevator pitch unless they ask.

The point is to achieve some level of familiarity and validation before ever pitching them on a story, not to become their best friend. In fact, you don't want to be too overeager or complimentary, otherwise they'll perceive you (rightfully) as a suck-up.

When you're ready to pitch, make sure you're not wasting their time with material that can't be delivered as an interesting story. A litmus test is whether you'd honestly be interested in reading about your announcement if you weren't the one behind it. And when presenting the story, keep it real. Certainly don't embellish or lie about anything. Build trust by throwing in a few facts that, if published, might not make you look so good. If you must, just ask the blogger to please not publish them and they won't, but you'll gain credibility in their eyes.

A Straightforward Procedure

As far as the mechanics of delivering a pitch, it's best to ping a blogger about the announcement you'd like to make about a week beforehand. Describe it in one paragraph (no more, no less), suggest the time you'd like them to write about it, and ask them if they're interested and want to hear more. If they respond in the affirmative, send them a few more paragraphs with details and some visuals (e.g. screenshots or demo video) or private access to an alpha product, if relevant. Do not send them a press release; it will only insult their intelligence.

Try to be flexible on the timing if they're busy, and if you must pitch the same announcement to more than one blogger (not advisable for unknown startups who should bolster the value of their story with exclusivity), be completely forthright about it and your reasons for doing so. Resist the urge to propose an embargo; they only cause frustration.

Once a blogger has written about you, don't embarrass them by being the first to comment with "thank you for writing about us!". Do your part in promoting the piece by getting friends and family to retweet, post to Facebook, etc. And space things out before pitching them again so they don't grow tired of you or the subject.

Your Company's Best Representative

If this procedure sounds simple enough, you can craft the most compelling story for your company or product, and you have the time necessary to build these relationships, then you shouldn't hire anyone else to handle PR for you. It'll only be a waste of money, and you'll get less than optimal results. In any case, bloggers much prefer to work directly with executive-level representatives than PR firms, so you'll be doing them a favor.

As you scale your business, or if you find any of this particularly daunting, then perhaps you should seek professional guidance. But otherwise take this as an opportunity to develop a new skill set and relationships that'll serve you well even beyond your current startup.

Good luck!

Some late-night ideas for Blippy

Sun, 19 Jun 11 21:38:26 +0000

I feel a certain kinship towards the founders of Blippy. Not because I know them well (I've met Philip Kaplan aka Pud only once) but because they're pushing the limits of what people are willing to share about themselves online. While we at Plancast are encouraging folks to be more open about their future whereabouts, the team behind Blippy is hoping that people are ready to share their purchases with the world.

Both of our services are also very new, and as to be expected with new web services, there's still lots of work to be done on both. In the spirit of tech camaraderie, I thought I'd offer up a few (unsolicited) suggestions for Blippy.

Give us digests. The current user experience is primary centered around a mostly reverse chronological, FriendFeed-like stream of purchases. This is okay but I'd prefer to check Blippy as often as I check Mint (which is to say, once a month). And when I do, I'd like to see an overview of sorts that breaks my friends' spending habits down. Tell me what their biggest and smallest purchases were; their strangest purchases; their spending habits (have they been splurging on clothes? buying a lot of airline tickets?); and overlap in their spending (who's buying the same things? what are the trends among my friends?). Pretty graphs might help. Maybe incorporate some maps so I see where about town people are spending their money. Who knows, I might visit once a day if the data updates constantly with new trends.
Provide more info about the purchases. Right now each purchased item is displayed in tiny blue type. Blow that up if it's available and give me context (a URL to where I can buy/view more info), an image, and a description. Show me who else I care about has also bought it.
Let us condense/hide comments. I realize that much of the interaction onsite right now is around the comments people make on purchases. But I'd personally rather locate an interesting purchase then choose to view the comments around it.
Add a "Want" button. The "like" button is a step in the right direction, but perhaps a "I Want This" button would be more valuable. It signals a higher level of interest in the purchase, leaving simple "oh that's cool" expressions for the comments. You could have profiles list not only purchases users have made but the items of their friends they want. Analyze this data in aggregate to see who starts purchasing trends (fashion being an obvious area).

My 2 cents.

Plancast in public beta

Sun, 19 Jun 11 22:04:08 +0000

I'm happy to announce that the site I've been working on for the past half year or so - Plancast - is now available in public beta. If you haven't tried it out yet, please give it a whirl and send us your thoughts. I suggest you get started by posting a few plans that may be tucked away in your personal calendar. Share them on Plancast and you'll be surprised by how positively other people respond after hearing about them.

What does Plancast do, you ask? It helps you share your upcoming plans with friends and learn about what others will be doing in the future. Imagine how awesome it would be if we all had a better idea of what everyone was up to in the next few hours, days, weeks, or months. Thinking about grabbing drinks with friends tonight? Going to a concert tomorrow? Heading to a conference next week? Taking a trip next month? Great, it takes just seconds to share each of these plans. Your plans will reach not only your subscribers on Plancast, but your friends on Twitter and Facebook as well, if you so desire. The service a great way to spread the word about the informal social activities you do every week, whether or not you're looking for people to join you.

It's been an amazingly fruitful journey getting to this point, and things are especially exciting now that the site is finally live and in such good shape. I launched an "alpha" version at the beginning of September, but since it was so rudimentary, I only sent it to a handful of people for testing. With this more functional beta version (released just this past weekend), I'm encouraging everyone to check it out and invite some friends along. We're already seeing a broad range of people take a liking to it.

I'm also happy to announce that I've brought aboard Jay Marcyes as a co-founder. Jay is a programming beast, not to mention a thoroughly nice guy, who was previously working full-time on another consumer internet app called Noopsi. I'm truly lucky to have him, and I encourage you to get acquainted on Twitter. For ongoing updates about Plancast in general, you can follow the official Twitter account as well.

Facebook's social graph

Sat, 18 Jun 11 04:05:15 +0000

The social graph on Facebook has been the company's biggest asset, but over time it has become perhaps its biggest liability as well.

When users want to find their friends online, they think of Facebook first. For many users, "Facebook" is nearly synonymous with "social networking". They wouldn't think of using any other "social" service because, after all, their friends are all on Facebook. As far as the social networking industry is concerned, this dedication constitutes a massive customer lock-in, because no matter how much better you can make a social application, you'll start off not only without the preestablished connections enjoyed by Facebook; you'll also be fighting against the reluctance of Facebook users to try an application outside of the Facebook ecosystem in uncharted territory where most of their friends do not exist.

The Facebook developer platform (which includes the ability to write widget-like applications for placement on Facebook.com, as well as the ability to extract data about users for integration into applications on other domains) narrows this gap only slightly. For all of Facebook's talk about wanting to open up, its platforms APIs and policies empower third-party developers with only so much data and user access. Compared to the power that Facebook wields as chief overseer of its data and users, outside developers can query just a sliver of its social graph. And of that sliver, they can only store certain data in certain ways for certain periods of time. The restrictions add up so that Facebook integration delivers but minor, complementary benefits to most third-party sites.

To break things down a bit, the platform can be divided into push and pull components. Many of the APIs are designed to let you pull data about Facebook's users and leverage that data in your applications. Others are designed to let you push data from your application back to Facebook, usually for sharing user activity with friends there. These push mechanisms are the most critical for most third-party developers, because users want to retain contact with their Facebook friends and share activity with them. The data you pull from Facebook about users is generally less interesting, if only because it's pretty generic. Unfortunately, the push mechanisms are pretty weak since they don't let you reliably send data to individual friends of users, whether through Facebook's proprietary messaging system or email notifications. Your best bet is to rather bluntly dump something into the homepage stream and pray that it catches enough friends' eyes to make an impact.

All of this is to say that Facebook still has a huge competitive advantage over other social networking companies (whether on-platform or off) because it controls a valuable social graph -- and particularly the email addresses that come along with it. However, the social graph is not a divinely produced thing. And it's not a permanent, exclusive good. On the contrary, I believe the social graph is deteriorating on Facebook and starting to be reproduced elsewhere in better form.

The main problem is that people's real-world social graphs change often and automatically, while their virtual representations on Facebook change mostly uni-directionally and manually. In other words, friends come and go in real life; but on Facebook, they usually just come. Friend lists tend to get bloated over time because users have a harder time defriending each other virtually than in real life. And even if they are going to defriend each other virtually, it has to be a deliberative effort, unlike in real-life when you just stop seeing certain people.

This problem is particularly acute for Facebook, because its earliest adopters were college students or high school students who have undergone significant changes in their lives over the last few years. They no longer see many of the people who they once friended in school. And they aren't inclined to remove these friendships from Facebook because they're lazy, fatigued or simply too polite.

The ill effects of this discrepancy would have been tempered had Facebook stuck to its original value proposition of static profiles. However, Facebook has undergone a major shift from a static directory to a dynamic communication channel. This shift is embodied by its decision to remake its homepage into a Twitter-like stream of directly published content. When you open up Facebook these days, you're bombarded with little bits of information about your Facebook friends' lives. It's no longer primarily a place to browse people's profiles (and associated photos) like Wikipedia pages.

Don't get me wrong, I love the "real-time web" as spawned by Twitter and advanced by FriendFeed. But Facebook has hoisted this dynamic paradigm onto a user base that didn't expect it, didn't ask for it, didn't prepare for it, and perhaps doesn't want it.

I've already discussed why this last factor is such an issue. But assuming the idea of micro-sharing does grow on Facebook users, they haven't established the right audiences for it. Friendships haven't been made on the basis of content consumption; they were made first to simply acknowledge your friends and later to gain access to their profiles (once Facebook opened up for non-students and became a less trusting environment). Sure, the news feed was introduced rather early on and aggregated information about those who users decided to friend. But the inability to post content directly and immediately to all of your friends' news feeds created an important sense of distance between you and them -- and made it easier to coexist on the site with those friends who weren't really your friends anymore, or those who you didn't ever care to hear from much.

As a content producer, my predefined social graph on Facebook makes me reluctant to publish there, because I don't feel as though my friends have indicated an interest to see my constant updates. The problem I have as a content consumer is just the flip-side: when I load up Facebook, I see content produced by people who I don't particularly want to hear about or from.

Facebook has provided various ways to sort friends into lists and hide individuals from your stream, but these tools are daunting and perhaps ultimately futile. I spent 20 minutes alone last night organizing just my friends with first names that start with letters A-C. With almost 800 friends, I'm reluctant to keep going. And I imagine that most Facebook users don't even have the wherewithal to try in the first place.

Facebook may try to address this content audience problem by introducing a Twitter-like follower model. The site already asks you when friending someone new whether you want to see that person's updates in your home stream. But users won't be doing this retroactively, and it adds complexity to an already complex site. Privacy and distribution controls simply aren't going to solve the problems of an over-encompassing social graph.

What does this all mean? Well, Facebook's golden goose (the social graph) may not be so golden after all. It changes as users change. And it's not really even a singular thing. People have multiple social graphs; Facebook just tries to roughly represent them all by clumping them together. When it comes to profile access, you may want to leverage a different set of connections than when it comes to status message streams. Facebook may have to make a decision as to which particular social graph it wants to represent for its (constantly growing and diversifying) user base. It may not work for the company to be all things social for all people.

It also means that there's a massive opportunity for other social sites to give Facebook users a fresh start with fresh new social connections. I'm biased here, of course, since I'm working on social software. But this opportunity is seen in the rise of Twitter, which can attribute much of its success to the mere fact that it's not Facebook. When you sign up for Twitter, you can determine anew who you care about - whether that's your new friends or coworkers, or celebrities, businesses and media outlets. Facebook will no doubt remain a dominant social network for quite sometime, but it's dominance does not preclude the rise of other, independent social applications and services.

Worldly Developments

Sun, 19 Jun 11 22:07:05 +0000

I'm happy to announce some exciting news regarding my startup. I've officially incorporated as Worldly Developments (yay for Delaware). Just a teaser of a website currently, but something I can print on my new business cards.

The reason for incorporation? I've raised some (micro-)seed funding from fbFund. Since that requires a legit corporate bank account and the filing of other important paperwork, my mom has also assumed the role of Chief Financial Officer (employee #1! thanks Mom).

FbFund isn't just an investment vehicle; starting this summer, it's also an incubation program in Palo Alto. So while I planned on moving to San Francisco earlier this month, that's been put off until the end of summer so I can enjoy the office space they've provided for us just off University Ave. It's one of the old Facebook offices, and all of the participating startups (~20) started moving their stuff in there just a few days ago.

From now until mid-August I'll be participating in the fbFund program, which basically means hacking away at my application as I would anyway, except with additional support/mentorship/resources provided by Facebook and others. I've already met a fair number of the participants and organizers, and I must say, it's a refreshing change of pace to work around like-minded people again instead of coding solo in my bedroom or at the cafe.

I also just got back from a quick trip to Japan and China as part of GeeksOnAPlane. Thanks to Dave McClure for bringing me along as a media partner of sorts (I relayed what we learned as a return guest writer for TechCrunch; see these posts in particular). The people in the traveling group were amazing, both personally and professionally, as were the people we met along the way. If you haven't visited East Asia, I highly encourage you to do so.