Common Challenge

I was just watching EpicFu on Revision3 and I had a little revelation when arriving at ‘user comments’ section. They were all Seesmic. Now, I used to think Seesmic was rubbish until I read that, but even afterwards I didn’t really see it as a viable business. Mainly because I didn’t know exactly what was it supposed to be: a blog commenting tool, a video conversation platform? Blog comments using Seesmic always seemed a bit out of place, mainly because you had to switch your attention from quickly scanning text to watching motion picture - this used to set me off track. Public video conversations? You could easily do it on Youtube if you wanted. So, what should it really be? Why, of course - a web TV commenting tool - just check out episode of EpicFu embedded below to know exactly what I mean (you have to watch it till the end).

You may now ask - what’s in it for me? (Well, all of you except Loic of course)

You have to know your context in more ways than you (probably) are aware of. In this particular case you have to watch how users consume content that you are utilizing and check whether your medium of communication is right for them.

Negative examples (of how not to do it):

• Text ads embedded in videos - too static
• Video ads on quick access pages (such as search engines, most of blogs etc) - too short recipient attention span
• A meal in a fast-food chain that takes 15 min to prepare - just plain wrong

Positive examples:

• Seesmic in video shows - obviously
• Text ads next to search - proved
• A printable up-to-date Internet travel book - after all, who carries a laptop on a world trip?
• Zemanta plug-in - that sits next to this post helping me edit it - right where it should be, just in time

So, if you are a web-gaming startup, don’t pitch your products to consumers in places where they spend 5 second (google front page) but rather in those where they spend hours (facebook). If you are in podcasting - iTunes is far better distribution channel for you than any RSS aggregation service.

You can basically break it into 3 simple check-points you should define about both your product and context/channel :

1. What amount of time does your user spend in the distribution channel? [define attention span]
2. What is the type of content in the channel? [text, visual, auditory - define medium]
3. Is the customer expecting/requiring interaction

Or maybe you think I missed something or you have different experiences? Please, share them in comments.

Getting a ‘comment notice’ e-mail from Mashable today got me thinking - it clutters my inbox, but also it helps me track the conversations I commented on (disqus and co.comments were not very helpful with that). So I clicked the included link and followed this conversation. It served mashable at least one page view, and probably some more from other people that commented the story (thus it’s effect could be expotential instead of linear). So using the simplest possible tool Mashable helped me engage into conversation and also helped itself by increasing revenue.

Modelling it for the rest of the web-world, we should focus on helping our users interact with our content - simple RSS is not enough anymore (although it probably could be used here as well if I had an auto generated channel for posts that I commented on) - as it brings users only once. You need mechanisms that constantly remind your users that the conversation (interaction) is on, and they should take part in it.

Seek balance though - if you push too much on your users they might stop coming back at all. Give them an instant opt-out to any incoming information (but don’t cut the whole stream, just one thing that’s not currently appealing) and keep the total interaction at a reasonable level (thus reducing the overeat effect).

Photo credit (cc): afroswede

Bloggers, especially A-list ones like to trash services whenever a new and effective competitor apears. This is not a new thing by any means - when TV was announced radio was dead. When video was announced - cinema was dead. When computers were announced - books and paper were dead. But they’re all still walking. From economical point of view, a consumer here has a choice of two free products that serve a similar need (and are thus substitutes). Since the transaction cost (of for instance switching or simultaneous use) are marginal - consumer has no other incentive to choose one product over another than the utility she or he gets. On the other hand, with no usage cost consumer has absolutely no incentive to abandon either product completely. Thus one product must produce ultimately higher utility than it’s substitute to be a real winner. Which is usually the case when technological leap happens (CD to MP3 for instance).

So when someone is writing that Twitter will die because Friendfeed is here, or comments are dead because Seesmic (and Friendfeed) is here, or Myspace is dead because Facebook is here - they slept on history classes. The truth is - if you have two competing services, both of which are free (vide Radio vs TV) people will either:

1. split their attention
2. split into target groups

If #1 happens, you have to make sure to be able to give them as much access to your service as possible (so their possible attention span is longest). For comments on blog, that means they should be pulled back from Friendfeed. For Friendfeed it means posting a comment on blog and on Friendfeed should be simultaneous.

If #2 happens, you have to choose your side. That’s what  Facebook vs Myspace is all about: reality vs dreams. Someone once wrote that on FB people are who they are while on MS they show who they want to be. In other words it’s communication vs entartainment. Sometimes people get confused and that’s what happens.

In other words - it’s very unlikely that a free product would have no customers. Of course, it doesn’t mean it will survive because of business issues (such as lack of sufficient revenue), but it’s not beacuse all users will abandon it.

What it means for you? Don’t worry if you get some competition in your (free) space, even if it’s big. Focus on the user, focus on utility, and grab your market share.

Photo credit goes to: http://flickr.com/photos/eelssej_/

This is way off-topic, but I just couldn’t help myself. Everyone on blogosphere is using Twitter for communication, promotion and (sic!) spamming these days. And, of course, everyone is complaining whenever Twitter is down (which does happen quite often). There were various posts on Twitter’s scalability issues, wrong architecture and even CTO shifts. However, I haven’t read any serious analysis of Twitter’s problems. After all Skype processes a lot more date all the time and it doesn’t break anyhow (I recall just one outage - but a major one…). True - it’s not possible to have a conversation (even one-way) with 5,000 people on Skype, and this is (probably) why Twitter goes down so often. On the other hand, BitTorrent clients can communicate with hundreds of peers simultaneously with no hassle.

And then it hit me: Twitter is archaic. It is constantly trying to uphold the old client-to-server communication, which considering the scale is quite hard. Rather than focusing on scalability and performance of it’s servers it should have a totally different architecture: Peer 2 Peer. Of course - it wouldn’t be web-based then. Of course you’d have API issues. It would be harder to monetize. Maybe it is even impossible to plan. But it’s surprising no one mentioned it before. Maybe I’m wrong somewhere - I’m not an expert in architecture, - so please correct me if you have other opinion. But until no one proves me wrong, let’s face it - Twitter is archaic.

ps. (Unfortunately) After writing this I found an excellent post by Alex Iskold at RWW. He claims that changing Twitter into a protocol would not solve the technical problem (judging by Alex’s experience he may be right on that), but his argument on the looks and ‘feeling’ of twitter are less accurate, as many people use twihrl and other applications to post to and read Twitter anyway.

Usually when we begin something new we have a (more or less) clear vision on where we want to go. Sometimes we even know how we want to get there. Sometimes the how can be more important then where for us - if we are a bit idealistic… And then the life comes, so be ready to ditch your basic asumptions for final outcome’s sake.

At first we thought that while creating Dooyt.com we will also create a great company to work in, similar to Google: with free lunches, stimulated innovation and not always business oriented products. And, of course, employing thousands of people (well, in future at least). We did put a strong emphasis on structure - even though we chose distributed team for the start, with people working from their homes. We set up communication rules, we carefully chose project management methodology (SCRUM), project collaboration software (ActiveCollab) and we were planning kick-off meetings for our team. We also wanted to keep our day jobs for some (preferably short) time.

The reality proved to be a bit different:

1. It was hard to find the right people to create a great team
2. Managing HR took more time than it was worth - we didn’t have time to focus on polishing our products
3. Working our day jobs we didn’t have enough time to take care of product development and the team
4. The product development went slower than expected (mainly with us as bottlenecks)

Fortunately we are used to being elastic - so we adjusted ourselves

1. Our team is now responsible for inventing and marketing the products, and main architectural coding work.
2. The rest of the coding is and will be more and more outsourced to India
3. Simple business tasks are passed on to our Virtual Assistants, also located in India
4. With some of our time freed (thanks Tim Ferris) we are inventing new products - so expect more from us in near future

As you probably noticed, it’s not really about ditching your dreams, but rather going a bit deeper to figure out what your big dream really is. For us it turned out to be inventing great products. The side effects like creating new jobs etc. apparently can be also achieved this way - the only difference is that the people are now working in India

So whenever things don’t quite go as planned try this: 1. Go up, to find why you really started, what’s the REAL goal. 2. Then think how you can change the “how to get there” (for instance by outsourcing - try Elance for that). You’ll be surprised how elastic your assumptions can be.

And remember to let us know how it went

If you liked this post, make sure you give it a kick on DIGG or MIXX - someone might apreciate it.

So you have just recently discovered that you no longer fit in the corporate world and want to live a life of a successful hot internet startup CEO? Soon after you come to the conclusion that to accomplish your newly chosen goal you need to make more time. You need to stretch the day to fit all new tasks that just need to be done so you can go down that road and hit the target that is luring you so strongly. You start to do research on the internet, add RSS feeds from different blogs to your favorite reader and soon after you find yourself having 1000+ unread entries. To cope with all the ‘new’ in your life, you learn GTD and organize your life into lists that have more and more tasks on them. The problem is… your daytime job with its urgent and important tasks just stands in your way to happiness. To make things worse, your office that once has been a dream place to spend time in, all of a sudden become a dull area with literally nothing interesting about it and you just can not stand it anymore.

To make things more interesting for you, the next step you decide to take is to do some of the ’startup’ tasks at your office. Now, that may get plain ugly when your boss learns of this, right? Just as cheating on your dear one leads to disaster, this situation may end up the same way. If this description seems familiar to you, well… TOO BAD! You just have to pull yourself together and make your dreams come true! The sooner you do that, the better for you and your mental health

To be honest, here in dooyt, we are in the same position. We have our daytime jobs with all the incentive bonuses and salaries that pay our bills. We just cannot fire our bosses and jump on to the fast track to success. We have to merge the two worlds together. One being the daytime job and the other - the startup endeavor. Of course I do not suggest here to push the limits to extremes and cheat on your boss to the point when he learns of it and sacks you on the spot. There are lots of tools and techniques out there that enable people to be more effective and achieve more in less time. If you have not read or listened to any book on this subject a good starting point would be to find some works of Brian Tracy or David Allen. If you are having problems finding enough time to do all important things, refer to The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss for inspiration on the art of outsourcing non-critical tasks. To be honest I find many of the tips from those authors to be very effective and they really make a difference for me.

If you are reading to this post and find yourself in a similar situation, please comment on this article with your insights on how you deal with these kinds of issues. Do you cheat on your boss? What other books or blogs do you think are worth reading?

In time of mass Internet adoption, free product and capital flow, we came to believe that the world is small. The possibility of doing business with customers being thousands of kilometers away and instantly getting in touch with people we barely new 5 min ago creates an illusion of being in the same room with the whole world. Digg, Facebook, Twitter, ubiquitous blogs and e-commerce - it really makes The Global Village a fact. Actually, having a video call over Skype with my friend in the UK feels pretty much the same as actually inviting him to my place. And of course I can get to know pretty much everyone in the world in less than 6 steps. So the world is small after all.

Really?

Recently I discovered that commenting posts on blogs like Techcrunch or Scobleizer (an important part of socially-aware-web-individual’s daily activities) only makes sense if you can be one of the first 20 commenters. Then someone actually reads what you wrote. To be one of the first 20 you have to read the post pretty much right after it’s online. When it’s fresh. The other observation I made is that my Twitter feed dies about 12pm - I only use Twitter to track the bloggers I’m interested in, and they, well - go to bed around that time. On the other hand - it’s most active around 8-11pm, and that’s the time when I should go to bed.

The world today is not 3D (unfortunately). It’s 4D - time being it’s fourth dimension. And the web is making me more and more aware of it. Unless you, just like RTM inventors, have “Interesting sleeping patterns” it’s hard to keep up with Pete Cashmore or Louis Gray. And we of course do not want to drop dead because of our work or blogging. The problem is not as simple as ‘not being in Silicon Valley is not cool’ or that you need to drink beer with A-list bloggers to get some buzz about your company. It’s influencing every part of doing business over the web: PR, advertising, customer service, invoicing (was it this month or next already?) - creating problems everywhere. We can deal with them, maybe using Internet Time, but they’re still there for thousands of businesses and bloggers around the world. Anyone about to solve them all?

Yup! So we did update our webpage after all. It’s been a while since the promised date of 31/03/2008 but we were busy designing the GUI for the beta release of dooyt.com. As you may have noticed the colors and the logo changed. Well… this time in fact it is a logo, not just a mockup done in PowerPoint.

Our idea behind the logo was that it should somehow show the ‘community’ aspect of dooyt.com. In our (or at least my) opinion the three little people depict just that - the community. In the world of web 2.0 an active community is by far the main and most important factor to website’s success. We wanted to express that. Now that we’ve underlined the community, our responsibility is to make sure the contributors are active. That’s probably not going to be easy but we’ll try our best We think that the design of and the concept behind dooyt.com will help in reaching that goal. Of course we invite everyone to submit their opinions and ideas once the beta starts. Now it just plain doesn’t make sense (too early) but if you already wish to send us some comments, please do so under this entry.

Moving on to the second change on www.dooyt.com, you may expect the final website to be in a blue/gray theme. Why did we choose to go that way? Well… First of all we wanted the design to be ‘light’ and easy to the eye. We were also inspired by designs and colors of webpages like www.apple.com or www.rememberthemilk.com which are both easy to user’s eyes and very functional. We also wanted to avoid a very popular web 2.0 trend of using intense colors and thus creating an eye-candy look and feel.

We will write more on the functional design of dooyt.com later once we’re close to finalizing it.

I guess that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more updates from blog.dooyt.com!

Now, I have decided to really immerse in all social trends on the web. That means I just got an account on… twitter(!). Ok, I know I’m a bit behind, but this is (kind of) my point. Do we (social web-apps developers) really have to use everything that is on top right now? Do we have to set up an account in the just-released-so-hot-new-service? Because it definitely takes more time than an average web-worker can afford.

The answer, as one of my university professors usually said, is probably same as always: It depends. For instance, in our team of 3, I’m the one responsible for (among making coffee, running with papers and other super-important stuff) marketing & PR (whoaa - do we need PR? - yes we do). That means reading tons of blog posts, twitts and other junk every day. But it’s supposed to be 2 way communication, if it’s to cause us any good, so I also have to get to know some people. And Twitter is one of the places I can stalk them (yea!) and communicate with them (haven’t figured that one out yet…). For instance, Robert Scoble is following me on twitter 9 minutes after I started following him - maybe if I shout loud enough he’ll hear me and mention us in one of his posts (no, I’m not naive enough to think it’ll work this way, it’s just a rhetorical figure).

The conclusion: I don’t know if Twitter will work for us, but as web entrepreneurs we have to BE on the social web, not JUST work there - if we want to be heard. And for me it means setting tons more of accounts and trying services I (sometimes) think are complete rubbish.

And BTW, you can follow me on Twitter HERE>>.

Update:

I also set up an account on Blip.pl, polish clone of Twitter. You can stalk me here.

the dip

from time to time we have a moment during our projects (both professional and personal), that we think we reached a dead end. this might be a straightforward situation (there is no chance to proceed, there are obstacles that we cannot overcome) or something what is called a dip.

I have recently read a little book by Seith Godin titled ‘the dip’ and it talks about exactly this situation. as the book’s subtitle reads - it is about when to quit, and when to proceed.

the illustration of the dip is a place where you are before mounting the success mountain.

it could be some kind of obstacle that you might need to figure out how to overcome, and as soon as you have done it things roll from there. but sometimes the dip is so deep that we cannot see the mountain at the horizon, only a dark wall in front.

how do we distinguish between a dip and a dead end?

more to come…