Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ category

Building a Community

March 11th, 2007

Iv’ e ran into an old article/interview with Catrina Fake and Meg Hourihan the founders of Flickr and Blogger. This is a short article that I really liked because it talks about how both projects were never meant to actually see daylight.

I particularly loved what Catrina said about the early days of trying to build the Flickr Community:

The Flickr team spent a lot of time greeting every user that came to the site, offering them help on how to get engaged with the rest of the community. Through this, they discovered that online community-building is just like being the host of the party – if guests come to a party, and they don’t know anyone, and no one shows up to take their coats and introduce them around, they’ll leave

This is exactly what I’ve been saying for some time. In the end of the day, the people behind social networks are the same people that goes to bars and clubs hoping to meet other cool people. The Internet just give them a different way to do their socializing.
This has profound effect on the future of social networks. I still believe that we will see two new themes in this world:

Localization – Yes, it’s very cool that I can meet with people from all around the world and discover new cultures via the net. But in the end of the day, most of us still want friends that we can meet, see and touch. Social networks that will succeed in bringing local communities together with thrive.
Private parties – Most social networks were built behind the notion of trying to bring together as much people as possible, but I think this will change over time, and we will start see communities goes back to the old Facebook model of closed communities.
Think of the life line of a new bar in your city. In the first week just the people who were invited knows about it and comes. Than, if they enjoy it, the start telling about it to their friends, and they start to show up.
If it started with the right crowed, the bar now hosts the “cool” people, so everyone starts to hear about it and want to also come there. After a few months, everyone is going there. Suddenly your crowed is mixed with all ages and kinds. The original crowed feels it’s not special any more, so they start to look for the next thing. After a year the bar closes down.
The bars that actually survive the second year are the ones that were able to keep a closed loyal community. A bar that when you will go to, you will know exactly what kind of people you will see there.
People prefer to go to a invitation only party than a open to all, no selection, all ages parties.
So why not doing the same also in social networks?

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Posted in Internet, Web 2.0

Encarta AI

February 14th, 2007

One of the more cool features Microsoft ever released is the Encarta Instant Answers.
What it is?
Basically it is a Messenger you add to your contact list, and than you simply start asking him questions.

For example, I’m planning a dinner tonight, and I got some recipe from a cooking site. All the ingredients in this recipes are in ounces, so instead of opening Google, do a search, go to a web site and look for some conversion calculator I simply asked Encarta – “how many grams is 8 ounces?”
And the answer was –

Eight ounces are 226.796185 grams.
(8 oz = 226.796185 g)

What do you need more?

This is one of the more cool user interfaces I’ve seen. It brings me to think that IM is still heavily under utilized. You can take this concept to so many other places, I wonder how we didn’t hear on any major start up that went to this direction.

What will be the future? Combine this capability with the amazing new speech technology in the new Exchange Speech Services and you got a winner!

By the way - if you want to use this service, simply add encarta@botmetro.net to your Messenger contact list.

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Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Web 2.0, Web/Tech

The Online Calendar Wars

January 4th, 2007

IN his latest post Michael Arrington wrote about the great traffic Google Calendar gets compared to Yahoo and Microsoft similar services.

I just can’t understand Microsoft.

I use MS Outlook 2007 as the main mail and calendar application. No doubt that it is one (if not the) best applications in this category.
I don’t use Google calendar because it can’t synch well with my Outlook.

There are millions of other Outlook and Outlook Express users around the world. All Microsoft needs to do is to open a web site where all those users can view and share and synch their Outlook calendars.
Add some integration with other Live services and events start ups and you have a winner!

They even already have most of the technology as part of Outlook Web Access that comes with Exchange. So my question is – Microsoft, what are you waiting for???

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Posted in Google, Internet, Microsoft, Web 2.0

First Incentives Platform for Web Based Businesses

November 11th, 2006

Last week we revealed our first public beta of our platform – NuConomy Studio.

NuConomy Studio is probably the first ever developed incentives platform for the web. We worked very hard to develop an innovative solution, that specifically answer some of the most urgent problems of the new Web 2.0 era.

You can find a lot of information in our company web site or in our company blog (including the official press release), but I’ll try to explain it a little in my own word here:

Our vision is that in today world, in the end of the day, its talent that wins. The web sites that will attract the most talented people, will be the ones to triumph.
We also believe that talented people should be rewarded for their contribution. The situation where people are contributing more and more hours to web sites, and those web sites keeps all the advertising money for themselves can’t go on. The Internet opened a huge opportunity for talented people to show their talent, and they should also be able to earn and live from it.

But how do you do it? How do you know what users should be rewarded and how much?

Until today, it was very hard to answer this question.
Let’s look at the web sites that already operate a revenue sharing program (like Reever.com for example).
Basically, all those web sites ask the user for his Google Ads ID and Password, and 50% of the time they will show advertisements with the user ID. This mean that if someone will click on a banner when you user ID is used, you will get the money.
Although in first look this system sound great, it has a few inherent problems. Probably the most obvious one is that users are not rewarded on their contribution.
Let’s take for example a case where a blogger at blogger.com would have exposed some huge scandal in the Bush administration. This blogger post will result in millions op people going to blogger.com. But how many of them will actually click on advertisers links? Statistically, technology blogs create much more clicks than political blogs.
So in this case, another blogger that will write a review on the latest Dell laptop has a chance to get a higher revenue share from blogger.com.

Is this how it suppose to work?
Does the user that wrote about the Dell laptop is the one we really want to reward and make sure he stays with our brand?
Of course not.
The problem is that we don’t measure users contribution. The current revenue sharing programs are simply don’t base on performance.

So to wrap it up, by using NuConomy incentives platform, you will gain the following advantages over current way of operating revenue sharing programs:

Operate incentives programs based on exact users contribution to the business (performance based)
Give users incentives to promote your all brand and not just their personal page and content
Measure users by long term commitment, making it more profitable to be loyal and not go to one of your competitors
Use and combine any advertising network you want and not just Google Ads
Users do not need to have a Google Ads user ID

I would love to hear your opinion about this. Are we right in our approach? Do you have any suggestions how to make it better?

In order to make all of this work correctly we used some innovative approach to web analytics, and how we measure users contribution. In my next post I will talk about this in further details.

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Posted in Finance, Internet, Marketing, Web 2.0

Click Fraud

October 28th, 2006

Business Week published last month an excellent cover story about the subject of Click Fraud.

Click fraud is probably one of the biggest problems we face in the web world. No one can say exactly how extensive is the problem, but we are probably talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that advertisers pay for nothing.

In the heart of the problem lies the fact that it is quite easy to fake clicks. Simply pay for someone to click randomly on links in your site. I had a friend who opened a dummy web site, put some dummy content, added google ads and asked his brother to click the ads every now and than. He got about 20$ from Google every month (which mean the advertiser paid a lot more for those clicks).

The problem gets even worse when companies are using click fraud as a way to fight the competition. For example company A that competes with company B, pay people around the world to click ads of company B, thus making company B waste all of her advertising budget.

Sure, you can check IP addresses and click patterns, but in the end, there will always be people who will write a better click fraud bot engine.

The other side of the problem is the fact that neither Google, Yahoo or Microsoft explain what they are doing to fight click fraud (or how they decide to reimburse advertisers that complain about being robbed using click fraud).
Although they have a reasonable reason (stating that if they will disclose their methods, it will just help hackers take advantage of the system) for doing that, the situation simply leave the advertisers in the dark.
In the end of the day you simply don’t know how much money you lose for nothing. Worse, in order to complain to Google and demand money back, advertisers need a great deal of resources to inspect and explore the raw data given by Google. Many small advertisers will never have the time or resources to do that.

So how can we solve this problem?

There is no easy answer. Lets assume that as long as we will improve fraud detection algorithms, there will be hackers that will improve fraud techniques. So the answer should not be to simply improve our systems.
Probably better is to find other ways to measure the effectiveness of advertisement. Find some ways that are harder to fraud (Note. There will always be fraud, like in any other system. Our target should be to minimize it as much as possible).

Instead of simply measure clicks and impressions, a better way will be to measure actions. Legitimate users that clicks on ads and go to a company web site will probably do some actions on that site. There will probably look for some information there.
We can measure those actions. We can determine the effectiveness of the click. We can demand more money for more effective clicks, and much less or none for clicks that didn’t end in any special actions.
This will require much more participation and time from non legit users, and thus will reduce the amount of click fraud significantly.

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Posted in Internet, Marketing, Web 2.0

Gaming YouTube

October 17th, 2006

Pete Cashmore (Mashable!) has an excellent post on how easy it is to cheat YouTube ranking system.

It seems that by simply refreshing your video page every few seconds/minutes, YouTube logs it as a new view.
I got to admit I’m surprised they don’t even do a simple IP check (although this is also something you can overcome with some basic free applications) to make sure it’s not the same person who watch the video again and again.

When looking at this you got to think again on the 100 million videos per day figure that the GooTube deal was based upon.

This all thing brings me back to two important concepts I would love to see emerge:

One statistical platform to rule them all – When you look at Hitwisw and comscore (not to mention Alexa) data, you often find some large discrepancies. How better it would be if all the major sites would have used on objective independent statistical platform?
Of course I don’t see this happen any time soon. When there is misinformation, there is room to say you are much better than you really are. This kind of platform is in the best interest of the advertisers but not necessarily of the publishers (besides the ones in first place of course).
Better ranking algorithm – Why rank the top videos just by number of views? Why not combine a few criteria such as views, number of talkbacks, comments, spread of views among different users, locations and over time and even more in order to create the rank? Simply put it, why not use a similar concept to the Google Page Rank in order to rank site content?
If a content rank will be determined by multiple criteria, it will be much harder to game the system. Especially if each criteria will get a different importance factor.

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Posted in Internet, Web 2.0, YouTube

A Start Up Dream

October 13th, 2006

Wow. 1.6 billion dollars. Again – 1.6 billion dollars. That was how much Google paid to acquire YouTube.
The amazing fact is that it took Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube, just 19 months to get to this point!
That’s the wet dream of every guy and girl who ever dreamed about opening its own business.

The really cool thing about this is the fact that when you look at YouTube today you got to ask yourself, how the hell no one has done it before…
I guess that was the thing that always fascinated me about the Internet, even (and maybe more) in the early days. The fact that a person with a good idea and notepad has the potential to change the world. What other industry can give you this chance??

In a personal note, I got to admit that I’m sorry it was Google and not Yahoo that acquired YouTube.
I think that Yahoo is one of the only “big guys” that actually understand the new community concept. Their new products like Yahoo Travel and Yahoo music are just awesome, and they really know hot to get the social networking concept to work for them.
Meanwhile, as much as I appreciate Google as a search engine, I’m disappointed from all the other applications the company has developed.
It seems that Google is trying so much to shoot to all directions, that no one of their products is really getting as good as it should have been. Too many times they lunch something new and exciting and then “forget” to update it for months.
Even Gmail, which I use quite a lot, stayed almost the same for such a long time. I hope that the fact that YouTube should stay independent will keep them from going on the same lane.

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Posted in Google, Internet, Start ups, Web 2.0

The Future of Web Economics

September 12th, 2006

Marshall Kerkpatrick has a good post about the emerging trend of rewarding users in top social media sites. But what I really recommend is reading the comments section. You will find there a really high quality discussion about the future of the web economics. Should we give users incentives for interacting with our site? Should those incentives be based on money? Is it a good or bad thing?

On a side note, this actually show why talkbacks are such important thing today. Sometimes you can find more insights in the comments/talckbacks section that in the actual article itself. In this example, you can almost feel you are reading a live article – an article that updates itself over time by the power of the community.

Not many people know this, but my current start up I founded is working to answer exactly those questions. In the next week we will unveil ourselves to the world, and than of course I will have much to say about the all subject. In the mean time, here is an excerpt of one of my comments to the discussion (comment number 64):

Let me start by quoting Jason: “Quality. That single factor is what determines the winners in our business”.
That single phrase is the honest truth about user generated content and community bases sites.
People are going to Digg and Netscape.com because they can find there the most relevant information for them.
People are choosing a dating site by the number of quality guys and girls there.
You are reading those lines because of the number quality insights and professional users who comment in this site.

So the real question is simply how you attract the most contributing, quality users to your site.
If you are YouTube it could be that your brand name is simply enough. But if you are one of its competitors, you probably need to give users more incentives to come to you.
If the incentives should be based on money, reward points or mare recognition simply doesn’t matter. It will change from business to business. Most of the time it will probably be a combination of a few.
The real question is how you know to recognize these top tier users and how can you reward them in a way that will give them incentives to not just glorify their own names, but to try and help making your site better.
By paying users Jason done much more than just getting top users, he made them feel part of Netscape. In order to get the most of your users, you should treat them not as users but as partners. Their success is your success. Your success is their success.
A smart man once said that if we want to learn about the future we should look into the past. What we see today in the Internet is not different from what happened with other “old” media platforms. In the early days of the radio and TV everyone was armatures, mostly doing things for the publicity. But as the years passed we started to see talent emerge, and than even stars and today also super stars.
I believe this is exactly what we will see also in the Internet. We will see some of the users going from mare users to media super stars. Those users will be the ones that can make the difference between a business success and failure. Those users will be worth enough for us to pay to in order to keep them.

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Posted in Finance, Internet, Start ups, Web 2.0

How much is a year in Web 2.0 time?

September 7th, 2006

They say one year of a man worth seven years in a dog life. I wonder how many years it worth in a Web 2.0 start up life? ten? twenty?
I left my job and went on my start up adventure almost 7 months ago, but for me it looks like a all life time already. All I can say is that I’m happy I had enough friends who already took this journey, so I was actually fully packed and ready for the road.

Jason Calacanis blogged about how people forget that the all social news/search field is quite new, and it will take a few more years until the masses will understand it and adopt it.
The point is actually very relevant to a lot of other Web 2.0 technologies out there.
We that live inside this bubble, the ones who read Techcrunch, Mashable and Engadget every day, tend to forget that most of the people living with us on the planet don’t adapt to changes so fast.
Think about the Internet 10 months ago and the Internet today. It’s amazing to see how many things has changed in this time. Suddenly video is everywhere, wireless and 3G are again the hot stuff, Kazza is out and free legal TV on the web is on. The old media companies are still “dead” but now also the “old” traditional news sites are yesterday story. If you don’t have a MySpace account you probably came from Mars and the best way to correspond with your grandmother is via IM and Flickr.

This is how we, the bubble guys, see the world. And we sometimes forget that most people don’t wear the same ”reality glasses” we use.
We already decide which are the companies that will survive and which are the ones that will go down, even when the company is just six months old and the market itself is here for less than a year. When the true mass of the population will adapt the new technologies and services, it will be a completely new ball game.
There will be much more room for more competition.
There will be much more room for variation.

Think for example on the all concept of social networking and communities. Today, hot is more. More users. More features. More gadgets. People want to be part of the largest communities. But in order to learn on the future, we must all look into the past. Look at how life and communities evolved in the real world.
Does big is always the best option? Well… sometimes. But other times people are actually looking for just the opposite. They are on the look for a warm, close, small community. Where they can learn to know everyone, where they can feel “at home”. People are leaving the big cities with all the commotion and go to the suburbs. To the more quite life.
Are we going to see the same trend also on the web?
Think of it also in economical terms. What do you think is easier to monetize. A huge group of changing, different people or a smaller, more focused group? Where will you get the best CPM?

No. I’m not saying MySpace and Xanga will go down. I’m just saying that we will probably see much more space for more niche sites. As in the real world. We will always have Wall Mart, but we will also have our small grocery store.

Finally, we must all remember that as our world has changed so much in the last year, it can also change again in the next one. We all still got a chance to find our spot in the Web 2.0 world.

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Posted in Finance, Internet, Start ups, Web 2.0

AJAX Design and the Page Views Holy Grail

August 29th, 2006

In his post about the new Netscape mail system, Jason Calacanis made an excellent point about site design. When you design pages using AJAX, you actually lose page views. In today Internet economy losing Page views means losing money.
This brings up a very important question – What are you going for, better user experience or better statistics for your site?

I wonder if there is anyone out there who measured the number of page views sites are losing because of the use of AJAX. How many page views did Yahoo lost after redesigning their home page to use more AJAX? Did in turn the use of AJAX brought enough more traffic to compensate this loss? If MySpace would use a more slick AJAX design, would they still be the most successful site on the Internet?

I guess those questions just emphasize the problem of traditional measurement of CPM. Instead of simply measuring the number of times an ad was served, it is probably better if we could have measured an ad effectiveness using the following criteria:

Number of unique user sessions the ad was served to

Amount of time people watched the ad

The rate between number of times the as was served to the number of times it was actually clicked on

Put those criteria into a formula that gives each one a factor, and you’ll get the real CPM an advertiser should pay for the ad.

UPDATE: An after thought… How does HitWise and Comscore measure page views statistics? If I do 5 AJAX calls when I load my page, do they “catch” them and count them as 5 page hits?
Maybe the use of AJAX is actually doing the opposite – inflating your page views count?