Part of the reasoning behind my decision was the Google seems to really dislike my blog. It used to rank #1 for all kinds of vanity searches. Now, it’s still in the index, but Google drives almost zero traffic. I think I got blacklisted somewhere along the way. So, I’m not bringing my domain with me (thought I could, because Tumblr’s domain mapping rocks).

Speaking of Tumblr rocking: This admin interface is beautiful. And I love the template scripting language. It took just a dash of CSS to make my template feel very ME-ish… much easier than messing around with WordPress templates.

Also, I completely purged my Tumblr account because I wanted to start fresh. I had imported 1000s of posts via RSS in my old Tumblr account that I didn’t want in this new version of The Gong Show. So, if you think you’re currently following me on Tumblr, you’re not. Re-follow me if you want the latest on what I’m up to.

And, if you’re viewing this through the web (not RSS), then learn more about the piping plover in my background. Best beach bird ever.

HolyCrapItIsFast! Seriously, it starts up fast, tabs open and close fast, browsing is snappier and more responsive. I wish I had some solid way to quantify what I am experiencing, rather than just qualitative anecdotal evidence… But, simply put, if you want to browse the internet faster than I recommend you try Chrome.

They put the tabs and the address bar in the correct order. Hooray! It’s a small detail, but I have always been irked by the inconsistent layout of tabs being below the address bar, instead of above the address bar where they belong. Why are tabs supposed to be above the address bar? Because moving to a new tab changes the contents of the address bar. So, when you change a tab, everything affected by the change should reside below the tabs. Laying it out in this order makes tabs more consistent with the real-world metaphor of folder tabs after which tabs in GUIs are modeled.

I do have a few nits to pick:

• The keyboard shortcut ctrl-tab does not go to the last tab you were on. Instead, it goes to the next tab in the list. This is silly. ctrl-tab should behave the same way that alt-tab behaves in OS environment. Firefox also makes this mistake, but since Firefox has a add-on architecture, a kind hacker fixed this problem by creating the Last Tab add-on. That brings me to my next nitpick.
• There is no add-on architecture on day one. This is a no-brainer feature that I’m sure the Chrome team will add quickly, but until they build an add-on architecture, they are missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage talented developers’ desires to scratch their personal itches and extend the browser for all users. Due to Chrome’s missing add-on architecture, Firefox’s library of add-ons will be a significant advantage for Firefox in the near-term.
• Adding new search engines is too hard. To add a search engine in Firefox, all I have to do is right click on the search box I want to add and then click the “add a keyword for this search…” menu item and fill out the dialog that pops up. By contrast, to add a search engine in Chrome, I have to go to “options” -> click “manage” under “default search” -> then click “add”. Not only is it more clicks, but it’s a significantly higher cognitive load on the user. There must be an easier way to add search engines… if not, then I’m sure the Chrome team will fix this issue quickly.

Overall grade: A-

Thanksgiving used to be known as the holiday then you go home and install Firefox on your parents’ PC. Now Thanksgiving will be known as the holiday when you go home and install Chrome on your parents’ PC.

At my high school one of the requirements to graduate was that you had to carve a 12″ x 12″ x 1″ wood panel that is displayed in the hallways of the school after you graduated. (Yes, I attended one of those private schools you see in movies, like Dead Poets Society).

I recently discovered that my high school has gone digital and has now archived pictures of all the students’ panels online.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I have an obsession with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that borders on unhealthy. So, I carved the cover of the book into my wood panel, as pictured in the top of this post. The picture is a little blurry; if I ever go back to the campus, I’ll have to take a better one myself.

Here’s the original cover for Snow Crash that was the basis for my panel.

Ba-dum Ching!

Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

To be clear, I think David Brooks is correct in his assessment on how we, the general public, make decisions, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I wish the opposite were true; the world would be a better place if decision making were a more rational, logical exercise that happened in higher levels of consciousness. But, using nothing more than my own subjective observations as evidence, it’s not.

For example, after watching The Watchmen trailer today, I was really worried that the movie could suck… it looks like I’m not alone.

However, sometimes these searches fail. For example, I thought The Watchmen was far more funny than either serious or dramatic. I don’t want to spoil any part of the story for anyone that has not read it, but I found myself actually bursting out in laughter in parts, particularly the ending… It’s a humor where I’m laughing WITH the author, not AT the author. Sure, it’s DARK humor, but it’s humor nonetheless. However, a search for “Watchmen funny” or “Watchmen humor” does not unearth any like-minded readers. Am I alone on this one?

Many of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio offer their services for free to end-users and find other ways to monetize usage. A significant part of the reason for this pricing decision is that any price (even one penny) is a significantly greater hurdle to jump when converting a visiting into an active user than giving away a service for free. Josh Koppelman best articulated this hurdle in his post on The Penny Gap.

I’ve talked about The Penny Gap on this blog before, and to summarize my thoughts: The Penny Gap is not an problem of economics, it’s an internet usability problem. The act of paying for something online (regardless of the cost) requires collecting so much more information (CC#, Paypal Acct, Exp Date, etc) which is subject to data entry errors and form fatigue… If paying $0.01 for a service had the same barriers to entry as paying nothing for a service, then I think The Penny Gap would almost completely vanish.

Returning to Yardley’s finding that “free” is no longer the most popular application price, the cause of this observation is that Apple has significantly improved the usability of paying for an application. Apple has made it drop dead simple for developers to charge for applications and for consumers to purchase applications. For developers, there’s no need to build a billing system, register for a payment processor, deal with chargebacks, etc; Apple makes charging for an application as easy as deciding on a price. For consumers, there’s no need to find your wallet, enter your CC#, create an account, etc when purchasing an app on the app store; all that info is stored in your Apple Account after your first purchase. That’s why “free” is no longer the most popular price on the App Store, because Apple has solved many of the usability problems that previous caused the friction which created The Penny Gap.

Here’s a list of the all-time low scores for movies on Metacritic. The Love Guru is in a tie with a bunch of other movies as the 184th worst movie of all time. Granted, Metacritic doesn’t go that far back in time (the oldest movie on the list is from 1983), but it’s still fun to see how bad The Love Guru is relative to other movies over the last few decades. Also, note that Metacritic only takes into account professional critics opinions. Consumer reviews are not incorporated into the ratings on this list.

Once I found the all-time low scores list on Metacritic, I made up a simple game: find the worst rated movie that I can genuinely say I think is fantastic. I ended up choosing Billy Madison in a tie for 66th place as the most critically-panned movie that I genuinely love. What would you choose?

Are there any real attempts at create Twitter media properties? @KevinRose is the Twitter user with the most followers according to Twitterholic, but he is not a media property IMHO because his Twitter presence is not his business. The closest thing to a media property in the Top 10 on Twitterholic is @MacRumors, but @MacRumors does not contain any monetization in their Twitter stream or on their Twitter page, so it’s really just a distribution channel for the REAL media property, which is MacRumor’s website.

A skeptic might ask, how do you monetize a Twitter page? Well, you could sell your background image, you could sell your avatar image, or you could offer sponsored updates to be injected into your stream of updates. Perhaps an example would make the value proposition more clear:

Sample sales are short windows of time where high-end designer fashion labels get rid of excess inventory at deep discounts. It’s hard to discover when sample sales are available (they are intentionally underground and exclusive), and because the window of time when they are open is short, information about sample sales is very time sensitive (which is perfect for Twitter). One could imagine a Twitter media property that send updates about sample sales when they are first announced and again when they are actually taking place. The property would be a great way to engage the target demographic that like sample sales: wealthy, 18 – 35 yr old, more commonly female, fashion conscious. You could reach this audience through sponsored updates or selling background images.

This example is a little bit contrived because there isn’t a significant overlap between Twitter users and sample sale connoisseurs. But, I bet that as Twitter grows in popularity, we’ll start to see media channels with models similar to this example start to pop up.

So, I was really surprised to find a recommendation to connect with my old buddy “Jack Mehoff — Owner, internet porn for the blind.” Jack is a social animal with a grand total of 0 network connections, and he’s always boasting about the wild times he had at Armstrong University.

WTF? How is this a recommendation for me? Did LinkedIn get hacked? Is anyone else seeing this?

See screenshots below:

That said, I’m trying on new shoes today that I got for sale online. I’m not sure if I want to keep them. I like the color, they’re comfy, and they’re good for work, but I think the toe is weird, perhaps too dressy… sorta elf-ish. Should I keep them or no?

Here are the pics:

I think there’s a lot of room for innovation left in the browser. I find that a lot of the actions I take in the process of browsing the web are redundant (the pages I visit frequently, registration processes, sourcing/importing media for content creation, the disconnected sites I use for search and discovery for different verticals). These are all sets of actions that could be improved or even radically redefined by a hacker willing to step out of the bounds of the traditional browser paradigm we’ve been using since the mid 90s.

Flock was a nice first step, but it was not quite different enough from Firefox to justify leaving behind my incompatible extensions. Besides, Flock was an incremental step forward. I’d love to see someone blow the doors off the barn and really challenge what I think of a browser today.

PS: Hey Disqus, there should be a dropdead simple way to reblog a comment I made elsewhere on my own blog. Like, as simple as blogging a photo from Flickr. I think very interesting behavior could emerge from such a simple feature (much like the behavior behind the simple “@” feature in Twitter).

Think about the quality of companies that currently incentivize users to participate in advertising:

• AllAdvantage
• InboxDollars
• ClixSense
• Bux.to

Microsoft should be embarrassed to join that list of companies.

Some naysayers might argue that the list above is about CPC arbitrage; whereas, Microsoft’s new offering is essentially cutting consumers into the loop on CPA revenue. Ok, then we should change the list to the “Big Three” companies that dominate the Affiliate Network world:

• Comission Junction
• Performics
• Linkshare

Again, Microsoft should be embarrassed to join that list. These are ad networks of last resort for publishers, and they end up powering a lot of product-oriented splogs. Is joining this list seriously Microsoft’s silver bullet to beating Google?

Granted, Performics is technically a part of Google at this point, but I don’t believe that the Performics asset was a motivating factor in the DoubleClick acquisition. Google acquired DoubleClick because it was the fastest way to get a foothold in the display ad world. Considering Google’s recent aggressive actions to either lower the pagerank or de-index spammy affiliate network driven splogs, I think Google recognizes that paying anyone other than publishers is a slippery slope towards inauthentic engagement with ads.

Yet, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Based on the relatively positive (or at least curious) initial reception to Microsoft’s new CPA strategy in the blogosphere, it’s not obvious to others how silly this idea is. I can’t think of an example on the web where paying an end-user (the consumer, the browser)
has ever turned into a big business.

Paying end-users to do anything online consistently results in people gaming the system, automating clicks, or developing arbitrages that pollute the online ecosystem. Why should we expect Microsoft’s latest CPA initiative to be any different?

We can’t parse DNA with Gattaca-esque accuracy yet, but we can see the expression of DNA in phenotypes and can make biased judgments based on those phenotypes. Some phenotypes (race, gender, etc) are obvious based on a quick visual scan, but many phenotypes require access to medical health records to know for certain.

With Google’s release of online health records today, I wonder if we are opening an opportunity for entities (individuals, corporations, governments, etc…) to access people’s health records with unprecedented ease. Could I download my neighbor’s health records as easily as I can download a copy of Gattaca? Fred mentioned he’s trying to make his health records public. I’m not quite there yet. Yet, at the same time, I feel a sense of inevitability about this whole process. Five years from now, I can’t imagine toting a file of paper medical records from one doctor to another.

There’s a whole industry built up around doing exactly the opposite. It’s called SEO. People pay other people ridiculous sums of money in order to make their site rank as high as possible on results pages for as many relevant keywords as possible in Google.

Furthermore, SEM is a similar industry that has grown up directly in contrast with Mark’s idea. People see ranking highly in Google to be SO valuable, that they will pay to rank higher than their competitors for relevant keywords, and will pay on a performance basis per click (which, unlike SEO, is a marginal cost, not a fixed cost — read: blackhole on your bottom line).

If the Search market is currently setup such that people are paying in order to get into Google, you have a rough sense of how valuable it is to be highly ranked in Google. So, the amount of money it would take a competitive search engine to incentivize websites to leave Google would be something like:

(Total SEO Spent by Top-Ranking Sites) + (Total SEM Spent by Top-Ranking Sites)

Which, considering Google’s market cap (which only approximates the SEM side of this summation), is a ton of money. And this is just a calculation of the allowable of acquiring an internet visitor! The actual calculation that Mark is proposing is:

(value of a single visitor to a Top-Ranking Site) * (# of visitors driven by Google to a Top-Ranking Site)

which, is greater than the total SEM spend and SEO spend combined…. I just used the SEM/SEO spend combo to show you how large a sum of money Mark is talking about.

Time to go back to the drawing board on beating Google.

So, in the past week:

- 250 snoozes have been successfully entered.
- 200 unique people have been snooze.
- 202 unique people have hit snooze on someone else.
- 6,926 Visits
- 6,733 Unique Visitors
- 7,801 Pageviews

Here’s a graph of uniques throughout the week:

Here’s the top 20 sources of traffic (with corresponding performance metrics… I’m still amazed that StumbleUpon can drive significant traffic):

Here’s a breakdown of repeat visitors (clearly, I’m the guy in the 15-25 segment):

Here’s a leaderboard of who has been snoozed the most:

1st — scobleizer: 17 (Scoble, your trophy is in the mail)
2nd – techcrunch: 6
Tied 4th — djchuang: 4
Tied 4th — obamanews: 4
Tied 6th — gsnail: 3
Tied 6th — jasoncalacanis: 3

… so, the remaining 194 people have been snoozed less than 2 times.

The service was launched late night on April 28th, which you can see in this graph of Snoozes/Day:

Thanks to all the people that made TwitterSnooze the “Look! SHINY!!!” of Tuesday, April 29th :)

A simple feature request will remedy this problem. If the followee/follower ratio on a Twitter account is greater than 15x (ie: if a user is following 151 people, but only 10 people follow that user), then an email message should NOT be generated when that account follows someone new. So, you can still create an account that follows 10,000 people, but only the couple multiples of 15 will be bugged by an email notification.

I like this solution (and think it makes good fodder for a blog post) because it uses the implicit usage data of the service as a filter to improve the service. It’s an example of how capturing as much data as possible about users’ actions can help shape and improve a web service through iterative design.

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

However, as firms break into smaller pieces (or as small companies disrupt and displace large firms) what will happen to the the power of brands?

The power of brands was recently reinforced for me by a friend of mine from Stanford, Brendan O’Conner. Brendan ran an empirical test on search engine relevance. He compared the relevance of search results from Ask, Google, Yahoo, and Live by running real-world, common queries on all the engines and had subjects rate the relevance of the top five results. His methodology is spelled out in painstaking detail, so I won’t elaborate on it, but it definitely passed my sniff test. It’s important to note that branding was stripped from the results returned.

Brendan found that Google, Live, and Yahoo all performed equally well (within a margin of error) and only Ask had inferior search results relevance. Yet, this outcome is counter-intuitive, because so often you hear people say anecdotally that Google provides the best search results (thus justifying Google’s overwhelming lead in search share). So, why is Google so over-hyped? I would argue it’s because of the value of the Google brand.

Brand value is still very important online. Brand value is the reason why I only trust PayPal will my bank account data (instead of… Neteller, EasyCharge, AlertPay, etc…). I know that the PayPal’s (and eBay’s) brand, reputation, and market cap is on the line when I use PayPal. They have far more to lose if they screw up a transaction or expose my private data, and so I (perhaps naively) trust they will handle my account information with the utmost care.

Similarly, I think Google search results are the best because I associate their brand with great usability and user experience design. By contrast, I think of Live or Yahoo as a roach motels… sites designed with stickiness in mind that make me less efficient. That’s why I use Google every time.

So, returning to my original point, what happens to brands when firms fraction due to the lower transactional costs of marketplaces? Will high-value brands hold a firm together that might otherwise break apart? Or will brands become more niche (in other words, will I trust a greater number of brands to service a wider array of services)? I think brand value is a cost of engaging in a marketplace that will give large firms (with high brand equity) an edge over smaller companies.