The Gong Show

I fascinated by the evolution of the “@___” functionality in Twitter.

When people started using Twitter they saw similarities between the a thread of Tweets and a thread of comments. In a thread of comments, a convention emerged over time that the way to reference “foobar’s” comment in your comment is to write “@foobar”. So, this convention emerged in to Twitter community as well. Initially, Twitter didn’t realize that this would be the way to reference other people’s tweets, so “@foobar” was text and nothing more.

Then Twitter enhanced the “@foobar” functionality by embracing the emergent use of this convention by making the “@foobar” be a hyperlink to foobar’s most recent tweet. The dev team at Twitter saw how the community was using their product in unintended ways and embraced the community’s decision be reenforcing the emergent convention with additional functional.

This story is a great example of the power of the iterative design process. Build a feature, release early, see how your users actually use your feature, rebuild or add functionality in response to the observed usage, release again (early), repeat. This process is crucial to the success of any web service.

This story is also a great example of the power of emergence in feature requests. The “@foobar” feature bubbled up from the community; it was not a top-down directive by a product manager at Twitter. Many of the great features in my favorite products bubbled-up from third-party hackers through the community, such as:

• Geotagging in Flickr: There were a number of third-party tools to geotag photos in Flickr via the API before Flickr release their excellent first-party implementation.
• Tags on MBL: One of my favorite MyBlogLog features is the ability to tag someone else’s profile page publicly for all to see. It adds rich metadata, and even makes for a fun rudimentary message system ;) However, MBLTagger, a third-party mashup predated and predicted MBL tagging functionality. In some ways, I liked the MBLTagger functionality even better than the first-party implementation because it extended tags out the MBL faceroll widget too.
• WordPress Autosave: There may be multiple sources of inspiration for WordPress Autosave… however, prior to WordPress implementing a first-party auto save feature. I was using a GreaseMonkey script called Textarea Backup. It was crucial! Saved your work in textfields online every 10 keystrokes. I still use Textarea Backup in MovableType.

As major web properties continue to open up in deep, meaningful ways (first Facebook, then LinkedIn, now MySpace) I think emergent functionality is going to become an even richer vein of impressive functionality than before. For example, had Flickr been as integrally open as Facebook, there would have been no need for Flickr to re-implement geotagging of photos after a third-party had already put together a good implementation. But, Flickr’s API was too superficial, so no matter how good a third-party implementation of geotagging photos turned out to be, it was never integrated enough to hit mainstream usage in the Flickr community. Well, that’s all changing now as APIs allow for deeper integration (everyone copying Facebook). And, so I’m really excited to see the features that are developed as a result.

Dave Winer filled in the following SAT analogy:

Blogging : Twitter :: Podcasting : ________

The answer is “Twittergram”. A 200k or less audio file that is linked from a Twitter post.

It’s a fun idea, but I’m not a big fan of the artificial limitation. Twitter is limited technically because SMS messages have a fixed upper-limit for length; thus, Twitter messages have to be 140 characters or less. I’m not sure why Twittergram audio snippets technically need to be less than 200k.

Ignoring the arbitrary artificial limitation, I really like the trend of continually micro-chunked content. I wonder what the atomic element will be as we continue to micro-chunk down?

Anyway, once I pick up a mic for this computer, I’ll try my hand at some Twttergrams.

I’m late to the party as usual, but I’m absolutely loving the new Blonde Redhead album: 23. They knocked it out the park (I’m sure it helped to have Alan Moulder producing on this one).

I’m such a sucker for spooky dream-like vocals that drift over droning guitars. And the retro New Wave drum beats are just icing on the cake. I’m sure I’ll grow out of My Bloody Valentine derivatives some day, but not today. Today I’m reveling in the glory of Blonde Redhead. You should too.

Great Blonde Redhead resources:
FoxyTunes Planet page for Blonde Redhead
Hype Machine search for Blonde Redhead

Whenever I think about web services that require money in exchange for service, I think of Josh Kopelman’s terrific post: The Penny Gap. From Josh’s post:

The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture – it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. I can’t think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution. Can you?

Josh argued well that difference between selling a product for $.01 and giving the product away for free is HUGE. There is a relationship (linear, exponential, whatever…) between the price of a web service and the adoption of a web service, but that relationship falls off a cliff as soon as you require any payment at all in exchange for use of a web service.

Well, in answer to Josh’s question about premium services that have achieved truly viral distribution: what about games?

Games are web services. A game asks for your attention (and sometimes money) in exchange for service value. In the case of a game, the value is entertainment. Entertainment is such a valuable proposition to a user that the user will think through the decision to open their wallet for a game very differently from most web services. Susan Wu’s description of her thought process to spend US$ on MMO virtual currency is a terrific example of the power of entertainment:

A couple of years ago, I spent 10 real dollars to buy 1 million gold in a game… My friends mocked me and told me I was throwing money away, so I tried to explain it to them: 1 million gold would give me 20 hours of entertainment. If I were to go to the movies, 10 real dollars would buy me 2 hours of entertainment. Assuming that 1 hour of movie watching entertainment gives me the same personal satisfaction as 2 hours of game playing enjoyment, I would have been willing to pay $50 in exchange for that 1 million of virtual currency. In fact, I felt like I had gotten a bargain paying only $10!

I go though the same thought process when I buy a new game. I think to myself, “This $20 game will likely provide 20 hours of entertainment. $1/hr is a heck of a lot cheaper than most cost/hr-of-entertainment ratios in competing entertainment products.

Does the thesis of The Penny Gap breakdown in the games sector? Perhaps. GigaOm just did a breakdown of the MMO space, and it’s interesting to note that World of Warcraft (WoW) tops the list in terms of subscribers. WoW is one of the more expensive MMOs because it requires both a fixed cost to purchase the game and a monthly subscription fee. Other games on this list, such as #2 Habbo Hotel and #4 Club Penguin are free, but rely on purchasing virtual goods in order to make money. WoW’s position at the top of the list isn’t consistent with the Penny Gap. That’s the power of the value proposition that the best games offer. The entertainment factor is so great that in overcomes the Penny Gap.

I wonder how Yahoo’s casual games, such as Chess and TextTwist would fit into this list? I can’t find any total user numbers of these games, but it seems like Josh’s Penny Gap should carry over if you include the casual gaming sector. Can anyone point me to current numbers on casual gaming adoption?

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine and do not reflect the opinions of my employer (currently USV).

So, if I act like an idiot and say something dumb, this is Andrew Parker “the individual” saying something dumb. Not Andrew Parker “the employee” saying something dumb.

You aren’t cool these days (both around the office and the blogosphere) if you don’t obsessively link to Marc Andreessen. So, it’s time to join the club ;)

I’ve been very impressed with all of Marc’s posts recently, but the one that really stopped me in my tracks was the post on Science Fiction authors in the 21st century.

I believe that Science Fiction falls into two camps: pure crap and utter brilliance. There’s no middle ground. I’ve never read a piece of SciFi and thought, “eh, that was ok.” I’m either angry at the SciFi book for wasting my time, or I worship at the SciFi book’s alter of the undeniable genius.

Furthermore, 98% of SciFi falls into the “pure crap” category. The remaining 2% is a gift from above.

That’s why I’m so excited by Marc’s post. He’s applied a solid filter on the entire SciFi space over the last 7 years. And just in time for beach weather. I’m stoked to be drinking high quality cyberpunk on the Atlantic coast. I plan to start with Ken MacLeod, but I’m open to other suggestions is anyone wants to filter Marc’s filter for me.

Scoble revived the meme about how social networks hijack the term “friend.” At this point we all realize “Friending” someone on a social network has little to do with real-life friendships.

The act of “Friending” is just creating an edge between two nodes in the work. It’s a pair of values in a database… it’s very abstract when viewed so literally.

I really like danah boyd’s thorough investigation of this topic in a piece on First Monday called Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites. It takes an academic approach that really covers all the crucial elements of this topic.

danah is doing a new study on international social networks, and the #1 question she wants to answer is very important to this dicussion:

What do they call “Friends” (both natively and English-translation)?

I think the answer to that question will be very telling for determining what “friending” actually means in a social network.

Anyway, back to Scoble… Scoble’s feature request for describing “friending” is great:

Why can’t I add tags to each contact? Tags I pick. Not that are forced on me by some 22-year-old developer who has no idea about what a 42-year-old’s social network looks like.

I’d go even further and argue that a 22-year-old developer has no idea about the average 22-year-old’s social network structure. Everyone’s different. That’s part of the reason why I really liked MBLTagger when it first came out and later MBL’s new first-party tagging feature. Both of these services had Scoble’s feature request implemented before he even posted it today.

Social networking sites have gone so far in hijacking the term “friend” that the term now has a completely alternate definition. “Friend” still means “close acquaintance”, but now it also means “edge in a network of people nodes” and this new definition now has nothing to do with the original definition. Sure, the new definition grew out of the old, but it has now taken on an independent existence.

I dig web services that are so lightweight that they don’t require a registration or login and yet still offer significant value that competitive services only offer with a login.

For example:

• Craigslist – Post all you want without ever creating a login. Each time you post, your email address is used to setup a one-time account. It’s simple, efficient, and still feature rich. Competitors not only require login, they often require payment for equivalent service.
• Senduit – Send huge files to other people. The only thing you ever need to give the service is the file and an expiration date. Not even an email address required. By comparison YouSendIt (a competitor) requires the recipient’s email address, sender’s email address, message, file, and ToS acceptance.
• Wikipedia – No login required in order to further the world’s collective knowledge. Just click “edit this page” and get to work. By comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica requires a login just to view articles. The whole site is behind a pay wall.
• Last.fm – Listen to unlimited “artist radio” on the splash page. The only information required is the name of the artist. By comparison, Pandora requires registration after a fixed number of songs. This example is particularly irksome because there’s nothing about playing music that technically requires Pandora to request registration. Pandora is intentionally crippling their service in order to increase the number of registered users.
• BugMeNot – This final example is a little different. It’s a service that allows for collective use of registrations for access to sites for registration. So, returning to the example of Pandora, if you want access to unlimited music without registering, just cruise to this BugMeNot search for “Pandora”, grab the highest rated collective login credentials, and go. This service works particularly well for content sites (like newspapers’ online portals) that clearly don’t technically need to require registration, but do so out of greed for higher ad revenues.

I am interested in web services that don’t require registration in part because I register for hundreds of sites per year (such is the life of a VC analyst), and often times, I don’t feel like registration is necessary for the value the service is offering me. So, it irks me that I’m filling out yet another registration form without a clear purpose.

In all of these examples, the product managers on these products probably thought, “if I require registration, I can add XYZ cool feature which requires persistence of data across sessions.” Or “If I require registration, I will get better data reporting in order to optimize and monetize my service.” I appreciate the product managers that thought twice and resisted the urge to require registration for either of these reasons. Both reasons are legitimate. But, great product design comes from simplifying a service to loudly convey its core value proposition, and registration is often a point of complication that can be reduced.

I went to see the Richard Serra exhibit at the MoMA and bumped into the exhibition by Dan Perjovschi in the second floor lobby. Dan drew a bunch of politically-infused doodles on a giant wall. The combination of hard-hitting political message and childish wall-scribbling is a very cool dichotomy. The drawings are both playful and powerful.

There was a printed newspaper with some featured drawings to supplement the exhibit that were being given away. You can find a PDF of the newspaper doodles here.

Check out Dan’s work in progress in these two YouTube videos: