The Gong Show

One of my favorite classes in college was CS:147 Intro to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The class was terrific for two reasons:

1. The subject matter was so interesting I ended up doing my major concentration in HCI.
2. More importantly, Monzy was my TA.

Monzy is a PhD student in CS (HCI focus) at Stanford, and the premier nerdcore rapper. Monzy’s first two songs in his nerdcore prime both required at minimum a masters degree in CS in order to understand all the jokes. However, his latest music video is slightly more mainstream in its humor. Enjoy:

Damn, I miss Stanford.

So, Bebo sold to AOL for $850m today. A few quick reactions:

# I think Bebo’s audience was becoming less and less engaged in the site in recent months. My favorite metric to check as a measure of engagement is “time spent per visitor.” Using this metric, you can compare sites of very different sizes to see how engaged the average user is. Also, time spent per visitor is a great metric because it doesn’t penalize sites well-designed sites that manage to minimize pageviews. Check out Bebo’s decline:

As you can see from this chart, Bebo’s time spent per visitor has been slipping steadily since September. Looks like they’re selling just in time given that trendline.

# This Bebo price makes the $580m MySpace purchase look even more insulting. Rupert took candy from babies.

# Given the current $15bn value on Facebook, this exit is Bebo waiving a white flag. Unbelievable that $850m could be interpreted that way, I know.

# Bebo is exiting just a couple of months after launching their platform app network strategy… it must not have worked well.

# AOL is irrelevant, perhaps more so today. Nothing about AOL absorbing Bebo will improve either company.

Side Note: All of these thoughts, except the first one, should probably be Twitter posts. I find myself expressing ideas in under 140 characters quite often now. I didn’t Twitter these because I didn’t want to Twitter a bunch about a single subject.

I haven’t been blogging much recently because I was on vacation for the past week. Part of that vacation was a trip to Sonoma (with @DrDiver) to recharge my batteries. I had a fantastic stay at a cute little B&B. I can’t say enough good things about the place.

I just got an email from the B&B thanking me for my stay and asking me to write a review on TripAdvisor. But, I’m not convinced I should do that… why would I want to write a rave review for all to find? I rather that this gem stay hidden.

It’s not like the B&B wasn’t on the internet. In fact, I found it through some combination of TripAdvisor, Yelp, 71 Miles. So, the place isn’t obscure by any means… I don’t feel like I’m harming the B&B by not writing about it on TripAdvisor. But, I don’t have any incentive to make it more popular (and thus, more expensive and harder to book in the future).

I was thinking a happy compromise would be to write a nice review on my blog. That way, a small group of people, my friends and peers, could find the place, but I wouldn’t be broadcasting the message widely.

I find this question interesting not just in this example, but in the larger picture. Why should I ever review a place online? I’m happy to write a bad review about a place that treated my poorly in order to warn other consumers, but what’s my incentive to write a good review if I really like a place?