Monthly Archives: October 2007

10.04.07
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FOWA07b: Eric Rodenbeck

Next generation visualisations
With Stamen Design. Approach we have doesn’t come from anything other than a desire to engage with the technology and make a new experience for people.

Map of 2004 election, red states and blue states (MIT work). When you take these things by county instead of state, get a more variegated map. Break it down by degree, get a much more varied map, then add size of population you get a totally different map. More real, more expressive, gives you more to think about.

Working a lot on live data from places like Digg, or vast, or deep. Speed isn’t as important as consistently. More questions than answers.

Cabspotting.org – GPS signals from cabs to show you where people are going, and where the live cabs are, and which are full and which are empty. gives you an idea of where people are moving. Can give a speed map, red fast, white slow. Can see where the taxi depot is, the freeway. Then can animate it. Looks like the heart, it’s a circulatory system, or like a river.

When system breaks you know it immediately with live data. Breakages are not necessarily bad, e.g. on the Bay bridge, you can see directly the paths of the cabs on the upper deck, but the lower deck is a straight line because you can’t get the intermediary points from GPS.

Oakland Crime. Shows all the crimes in Oakland at once, so you can explore it rather than search is, as search implies you know what you are looking for. Can sort the crimes by type, e.g. quality of life crimes vs. violent crimes. Latter show more arrests than former. Can start to ask questions about why these trends occur.

Again, live data can show you breakages very quickly, so site has a blank in the timestream where system was shut down by crime reports end. Can access data any way – one visualisation doesn’t solve everyone’s needs all the time. Visualisations will prompt new questions that require new visualisations.

Modest Maps frameworks allows you to take tiles from any service. Starting to give you more control over how your map mash-ups look.

Digg story visualisation, each dot is a story Digg, so you can see which stories are getting more digs, and clusters of sstories, can see th links between stories and the popularities. See some interesting things when there is breaking news. when really big things happen, the visualisation nearly breaks, but that’s not such a bad thing. But the visualisation isn’t mission critical, it just allows people to keep an eye on what’s going on, more ambient than the crime one.

Similar visualisation where there are stacks with blocks falling from the sky. Can also give a tag cloud-like visualisation. Another that shows users Digging different stories.

Interesting things is that Intel sponsored a Digg visualisation.

Very interesting time, started off in universities, now progressing, starting to be useful, companies are taking notice. Important to provide multiple views into the same information.

Twitter blocks, takes your Tweets and strings them out in a 3D structure. Main stream is you and your tweets, and virtical access is time, so more time between tweets the more time between tweets. Crossing your line is the Tweet timeline for others.

It’s a gardening metaphor, you plant things and sometimes it grows and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s fluid, so you have to modify visualisations regulary to keep up with the data, amount of data, etc.

Trulia, real estate aggregator that connect realtors with buyers, provide a lot of visualisations and maps – heat maps, neighbourhood info, connections between realtors. Took the dates that houses were build and did a visualisation for each year’s builds. Took data to show when neighbourhoods were constructed. Madison you can see it flow down the peninsula, Vegas is like a big stain that feeds on itself. Shows you histogram of housing booms. See weird patterns, e.g. big spike in 1900 which is probably a record keeping spike. Visualising the data reveals unexpected things.

Ryan Alexander’s map of search results on Trulia, people who search for Mass City, MI, you can see where else they searched for afterwards, etc. Get a sense for people searching local, or outside of the state. Shows that people intrested in New Mexico are also interested in other places.

Start to see patterns, see surprising things. Brattleboro, VT, small town, people look for a few other places, but they are very, very interested in places in the rest of the US. college town, and all the other places you might want to be if you are a professor, aren’t local. Cheyenne, WY, is the same, which is a vacation town so all the other towns people are interested in are vacation towns. Anchorage, AK, people want to get out of. Was trying to get out of NY, Queens, and the people who live in Queens who are interested in other places in Queens, *or* places in Florida.

10.04.07
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FOWA07b: Thomas vander Wal

Putting users first
(Came in a bit later to this one. Sorry.)

User is a dirty word. Focus on people. Me. My interests, my services, my devices, being able to connect my information. But all the users are thinking about is me, and what interests me. Whether they have created the information or not, they think of it as mine, and it’s all about me.

When we think about real people we need to understand their real desires, wants, needs. Think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When people want or need information, resources, object, they expect them to be there, to be usable, re reliable. We need to think about user’s needs.

Focus not just on people but real people, including the 95% of people who don’t live their life on the web, probably not anyone who is in this room. We live much of our life on the web. Think outside the alpha and beta users.

We haven’t made it easy for information to be portable so people can use it in their real life, away from the computer, away from the browser, and are in the shop.

Technology pain: syncing devices, syncing services, suffered by real people not just alpha geeks.

Biggest tech pain is refindability – it’s one of the fun things if you are evil and say “Have you ever had a time in your life when you had to find a piece of information and you knew you’d seen it but you couldn’t find it, can you tell me a story about it.” Everyone has a story, everyone suffers it. Tools are addressing that, social bookmarking, it’s about context.

Taste. If are looking for cake, is it a big American-style cake, or a continental tea cake. Mahalo, for example, filters based on its editor’s taste for Martha Stewart cakes.

Been on the web since 94 so established, but everyone who sets up for the web now, has to set up a lot of profiles. Everything is all about me, so people want to use profiles, but they don’t want to repeat a lot. Want portability. Need ease of use.

Portability, move information where we need it, in our pockets, on our dashboard.

Privacy. Some people think that privacy is a lost cause and we should get rid of it. But we really do still need privacy, and need to get smart.

Attention, focus, energy are limited. We only have so much of it. We need to start filtering. We are doing the same stupid things over and over and over.

Need to ease tech pain. Tagging, and other features that are easy to implement.

A few different tactics: favourites or flagging – very easy to do. Identity, have to log on so most apps have identity, but also can do more and link people together. Tagging, takes a bit more work but helps you understand your own context and helps with refindability, and is really good. Ratings, takes a bit more effort, but sometimes people spend quite a bit of time figuring out how many stars to give something. Titles, things aren’t always well titled, and need to be more informative to be valuable. Abstracts and long text annotations take a lot more work.

Tagging brings up the ‘F-word’ – Folksonomy. Result of personal free tagging of pages and objects for one’s own retrieval. Saves refindability for me, but also for people with similar interests, terminology, taste, etc.

Tagging is usually done in social event, shared and open to others. But not always – private tagging is just as valuable. Done by person consuming the information so provides a point of reference for them.

Object, identity and metadata triad. Add community, people who use the same terms on the same object. But vocabulary becomes terminology when you have a community. Then it becomes a culture when in a community because it’s not so tightly defined, it’s fuzzy.

So if you have an objected identified by a tag and we want to find other things we can use the tag for it. Can find without having to re-see all the things we saw before because the metadata shows us things that are alike but new.

(Goes through Magnolia and the way that they use tags, bookmarks, etc.)

It’s all about sharing and social. Sharing and social is how we got out of caves, it’s how we move forward as a society. We need to be very reticent about how we think about this as we move forward. As we look at social systems out there, they don’t give us a good way to actually create new friends.

Sphere of sociality, i.e. things private to you at the centre – personal infocloud; friends that you have a private conversation; collective – everyone on the service, e.g. on Del.icio.us you can see everything on the public system; outside the system there’s a mob that doesn’t get it.

Directional sociality – relationships are not equal, can be one-directional. Unequal access at granular level.

Real relationships can break down into smaller categories, public sharing, private sharing, listening. Social software needs to understand this. but want to be contextual as well, e.g. “only want to pay attention to friend A when they talk about thing B”.

Jaiku good for granular listening.

Want to be able to do things with information – Facebook, you can’t do anything with what you put into it. Twitter lets you favourite things, so you can remember and re-find things that people say. Need to hold on to good things that have been said that we appreciate and like.

Ease of use. Web pages need to be easy, portable, need to put the information into our life. Stikkit gives you a chance to save snips of information, recognises date strings and puts it in to your calendar. Clearleft give their information as a v-card and h-card, so it’s easy to grab it. Stikket understands a v-card and knows that it’s an address and puts it in an address book. It does to dos, and notes.

Lots of really good ideas but need to test early and test often and testing with real people. Need them to test with – we are not necessarily our own best audience.

10.04.07
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FOWA07b: Rashmi Sinha

Making your app social
Created Slideshare for sharing your presentation slides online. Launched one year ago.

Social design of Slideshare. Idea was that presentations are hard to share, co-founder noticed that pics at conferences went to Flickr, videos on YouTube, but nowhere to put presentations. Can favourite and tag presentation.

Users drive navigation, using tags and popularity. Can do “slidecasts” where you mash-up slides with audio.

What do people share? More variety than you’d expect. Mainly expect it to be talk slides because that’s what we geeks use slides for. But within first few hours people were uploading “church 2.0” stuff, poetry, all sorts of things. Simplest way to get multimedia stuff up on the web.

Object-based social network. Social networks have been more about linking to people, but now they are more object-based, where you have the object that’s mediating the interaction, and in some sense it’s a powerful way to have a social space, because people want to share things, have an individual motive.

Lessons about Slideshare: Forget the iPod. Apple do great things but not social. People do what they want with Slideshare, cannot be a control freak. Have to give up control. Watch people make connections, and watch what emerges. Om Malik said yesterday that there’s a lot you can do when you think about online office applications, and people are going into the editing. I think that’s going to take a long time because people are specific about how they want their docs to look. Slideshare just wanted to solve one problem really well, which is to share slides.

Good beginning for a social app is one problem, really well solved.

Then take this and embed it in a social context. People don’t just keep presentations just for themselves – they are inherently social documents that you pass on. To find the social context that it fits in, which means Slideshow must be embeddable and have comments, and be linkable. Events are a powerful way for gathering slideshows.

Different choices people might want to make, e.g. use Facebook. Slideshow is a social space, but also a widget you can embed elsewhere on the web. People think of the social web as public, but actually it’s more about small social circles. Content going from public to private, it’s not a binary choice, it’s a range of choices. Google never forgets, and there should be forgetting in search engines, but then you have an ‘only in this place’ choice where you won’t allow it to spread out of context, share with groups, with friends, and then ultimately just for yourself.

We have gigabytes of documents on our hard drives, and mostly it’s just for us. Need to think about where you want to place yourself in this continuum. Flickr allows people to shift back and forth between public and private, can set privacy for each photo. Del.icio.us does the same thing, can make bookmarks public and there’re real value in that default public setting. Gives a return to the people sharing, which convinces them to share stuff that they might not otherwise.

Introducing privacy to Slideshare. Giving people take control over their stuff.

Q: What about images that have people in them.
We don’t see that as much as photo sharing sites. But relationship between you and the people who took the photo should be able to mediate the situation if they take an embarrassing photo of you.

Q: How do you deal with the temporal issues around privacy, might want to share things now but not later.
If it’s not being indexed by search engines then you can share it and then remove it, so one option for privacy might be “don’t index it by search engines”.

When you think about social networks you architect them to be open, so when you try to put privacy in place it can be hard to think how to do it.

Levels of participation – 1/10/100 rule. 1 creator, 10 synthesisers, 100 consumers. So use all visitors to surface good content, and leverage their participation even if they are quite passive.

Enable social navigation. Have most viewed, most featured, tags, and ‘viral navigation’ – can see what your friends are doing, only applies to registered users, not casual browsers. Three types of navigation: tag-based, popularity-based, virality-based.

Lots of different metrics, most viewed, most commented, can allow content to rise to the top. There is powerpoint porn and people do upload it, and it always ends up in ‘most viewed’, and used to have that most viewed showing up on the front page. Now have good community flagging, and don’t show most viewed on front page anymore. But different metrics reveal different things, so most viewed, commented, favourited, all show different material.

Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki. Talks about getting wise decisions from large numbers of people. Thought a lot about that when doing the system. One thing about this is that there’s no getting away from the users. they are always there, they will email you, call you, post on your blog, write posts about you on their blogs, and it’s great because it tells you this live stream of feedback that you’re constantly getting from your users. Never did usability testing for Slideshares because the users would tell them when there was a problem. They were very involved with the system. Sometimes it can get a bit much, where you don’t want to listen to the loudest users because they are sometimes just a minority and you then miss the needs of those who don’t speak out so much.

Came back form a conference once and put up her slides, and embedded on her blog and got lots of comments and blog posts, but no one really asked it how to embed it. So just launched Slideshare without really telling anyone. Then got Techcrunched, and hadn’t really shown it to many people before that.

Any kind of feedback you get before you launch is to hypotheticals, such as screen shots, so better to put it out there. The risk of failure was not that great, but just wanted to experiment and see what happened. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. But it did, and now the whole team is dedicated to it. For people who have another revenue stream, that’s a great way to experiment with a product. Another reason for not trying to get feedback before launching because feedback very invidualistic. But you need to see how people interact with each other in the system, and you can’t get that from individual feedback responses.

Q: Did you aim it at particular people.
Mainly people like ourselves, but people used it in ways we didn’t imagine.

Q: What about a closed beta?
That takes a lot of energy to do a closed beta, to get the URL out to people. But better to just put it out there and the people who need it will find it. If you’re quite about it… there are different ways of releasing. For us, we were really bootstrapped, small team, didn’t really have connections, so it was more powerful to put it out there and then people find it. We were not closed but we were invite-only, and that was the biggest mistake we made, because the initial momentum is enough to carry you out there, and invite-only crimps that.

Believe in “launch first, refine later”, don’t do too much, don’t try to do everything, just enough that people can see what you’re trying to do, and then refine after that.

Q: We can’t put stuff out that people depend on if it’s not ready.
Yes, it depends, we are not doing anything that people depend on it. But spending a whole amount of time creating something when you don’t know what people will do… Maybe do a small launch?

Q: Well, we can’t do that, it takes more resource. We are providing corporate apps, and they need to work.
Yes, it’s contexts. But we will end up moving in a more corporate direction slowly, as people use it in that context.

Q: What happens if you release a buggy product and people use it and never come back.
Yes, that’s a problem. We didn’t build too much, but we did try to take the bugs out. We thought about scaling, but not too much, so made sure we got the initial burst and that the site wouldn’t go down. You do have to make sure that it’s not so buggy that people won’t use it.

Q: Observation, if you’re talking non-essential B2C then you’re right, but this doesn’t work for B2B or mission critical stuff.
Well, yes, but i think there are things to be learnt from this. It’s a so much more effective way of building products. If you have an idea, and you’re thinking something, you’re wrong, part of your idea is wrong, that’s just the way it is. So put it out there, find out what’s wrong, be agile. Metrics were a huge part of that, we have a shadow app, which is all the metrics we care about.

10.03.07
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FOWA07b: Matthew Haughey

Creating and running communities
Started as a single developer, building something after work hours, thought about turning it into a community, eventually it became a business – Metafilter. Aside from coding issues around building a community app, there’s a lot of stuff that he hadn’t thought about. Hope to provide lessons to help you avoid his mistakes.

Mefi, started off as a multi-user weblog with comments. Didn’t like /.’s interface. Sub-sites for different topics. Advertising.

Couldn’t find a Web 2.0 definition that didn’t include social aspects. Tried to find something that’s considered Web 2.0 that isn’t social but only could think of Gmail, but even that’s going in that direction. Any site you have, any idea you have, can go from good to great if you throw a network at it. Peer communities. But if you’re building an app and never thought of the social aspects of it… there are many apps that you never would think would have a community.

Running communities are tricky, lots of pitfalls. A great app and community is great both for the members and the creators.

Lifespan of a community – steep growth to start with as everyone tries it out and then leaves, so a dip, and then people hear more about it and come back or attract new people you get more growth. Three outcomes – continued huge growth, reach an equilibrium, or a decline as the creators make mistakes and the communities dies. Need to stay away from 2 and 3.

Be a third place. Most normal people have home and work and then… their third place, like a pub or sports team or World or Warcraft. Goal is that people should want to join you and enjoy their time with you, get away from it all.

It’s not as simple as just throwing up some software. A lot of thought has to go into it. Going back to very first principles, it’s about the idea behind it, the more clever and original your idea is, the faster your community is going to grow. If something’s been done a thousand times it takes a long time to gather momentum. Winnow your ideas, run with just the very best ones. If your friends tell you it’s impossible, that’s probably a good idea.

We have 10 – 15 years of prior art on communities, social apps are at least 5 years old, so if you’re going to do a new shared to do list manager, for e.g., then make sure you know the best features from everything else.

Eat your own dog food. Use your own app. If you’re building a community you love to fill some need for yourself, build it to scratch your own itch, be the best user of your app. Users will pick up on this and contribute accordingly. It’s obvious when someone is just trying to fill a niche an make a buck. Make it personal – it if makes your life better it will probably make other people’s lives better.

Reward contributors, e.g. status based on postings. It’s not just about rewarding people for contributing, it’s about the readers at the end. Makes your site more interesting to casual readers. If 10% are actively commenting, 90% of people just lurk.

Flickr was a good examples, used to be just your photos and everyone else’s photos, but now they have interestingness pile to show good stuff.

Moderators: your best contributors. Elevate good contributors to moderator status.

Don’t be too controlling, let things run their course, within reason. Be flexible – MySpace is the example where people use HTML in their name area to do mad things. Allow unintended uses – sometimes it’s the most innovative stuff. Build out based on the edges. Use the weird innovative things at the edges of the community, and when you see something good and interesting make it part of your app. Smart tech companies do that all the time – see what the hackers are doing and then do that.

Run it well. Stick with guidelines over rules, as rules put you in positions where you have to do something that you know is wrong but technically they broke the rules. Provide ideas about how to be a good member of the community.

Keep your emotions out of running the community. You are going to get insults from day one, and if you start making rash decisions that just serve you, it’ll come back to haunt you. Bounce stuff off other moderators. Guidelines should be a living document and tailor them to what your community finds acceptable.

Never surprise people with a new rule out of left field – causes outrage. Facebook’s update stream cause outrage. Understand what the community norms are and don’t do things just because you feel like doing it.

Balancing act between chaos and happiness. Some things can push you over the edge.

Ownership is an issue – the more people invest in your community tool, the more they feel that they own it, they love it so much it’s part of their daily life, and there’s grey area about whether it’s yours or the people who show up? Are you going to make decisions top down or bottom up with voting? Keep this in mind – it’s not always black and white.

Happiness on the part of users is fleeting. Having a day of downtime will kill goodwill. People will think of apps as unreliable if it goes down for a day, even if rarely. Twitter has its issues, Del.icio.us goes down for a day and everyone freaks.

Every community will eventually have a revolt, you’ll have a problem moment. You might have a few passionate users who say they will quite in a huff. Shouldn’t be unexpected, and it’s good that it happens. Site’s are run by humans and they make mistakes. Everyone has these problems, but take them as an opportunity to learn.

Customer service. Even if it’s free and everyone can do everything themselves, there will be customer service issues. You’ll spent more time on customer service than coding – this sucks for developers, but plan it from the beginning. Expect it. Even if it’s free, even if it’s a side-project, people will expect responsiveness. Soon as you can, hire people or take volunteers from your users. Best hires ever made because frees him up to do other stuff.

Metrics can ease the workload – if people can flag abuse then you aggregate that then you can go and look at problems, not trawl for problems. Or have a support forums, and if you get a lot more questions in one problem area pay attention to fixing it.

Averting the eventual disaster.

Be transparent. Do support in public forums so people can see every decision made. Be honest. This goes a long way – people will trust you and see you’re responsive. have a place to talk about the site or app. Starting to become more regular. If you don’t, people will complain about the site all over the place and will wonder why you didn’t see their comment on their blog. People assume you’re reading everything, everywhere, so have a dedicated place for it. Gives you a good venue for collaborating on new features – float mock-ups and discuss it with people. Wholesale redesigns cause revolts if you do them overnight.

Always over-explain changes. Make sure you’ve covered every base possible.

When things go really, really wrong. Take the high road and acknowledge you made a mistake. Don’t play the blame game – you’ll lose community goodwill. If you see your community turning, email people, IM people, even if they hate your guts. It takes the wind out of their sales, and gives them a chance to understand your mistakes. They forgive you, and appreciate the honesty.

Legal problems. Anything multi-user will have legal issues. Comes up more often that you think. You make a multi-user apps, and it’s used by the world, so try to understand which laws apply. Find a well-versed internet lawyer. Might take a while to find someone but worth finding someone who understands the internet. Set up a business to give protection to your own personal life. Terms of Service and Privacy Policies – be clear about what you are going to do with people’s contributions. Get a lawyer to help on language with that. Copyright law, e.g. DMCA in the US. If you’re accepting content from people you could put yourself in legal hot water if someone uploads copyrighted materials.

Lawsuit threats are many, but lawsuits are few. Usually gets one veiled threat a month, specially from companies that people are talking about negatively. Digg is probably getting them daily, but it rarely ends up being much.

What’s stopping your site/app from building out a community?
Have a social aspect so people can talk to each other. Good communities can please readers and creators.

Q: Do you see periods where the community dips, then has to restore itself again, almost like a two year cycle? Can a dying community revive itself?
There are ups and downs, and I’ve seen communities take a dive when the community admin doesn’t have time to nurture it.

Q: How do you keep the core community welcoming to new members, rather than getting defensive and closing in?
It’s a natural trait, it happens all the time. The old guard will fight the new, will mock them. Haven’t discovered the magic bullet for fixing that. Can tell people it’s not cool to shout down new members, but I can’t think of any quick tricks I’ve seen people do. Digg does something new by showing you recent joiners and people meet that way.

Q: More focussed your community is, harder it is to find people interested in joining. How do you find those people?
Once those communities get going, people get way into it, and it’s a good thing after the first six months to a year of rockiness. I would find similar, not to the point of spamming comments, but find similar user groups and maybe announce it in a mailing list about that subject, but without stepping on toes. Subtly promote it.

Q; When you are at that initial stage, prior to critical mass, how do you make it look like an attractive place to congregate.
I started out with good seed content, which is important. Started with friends, showed it to then, and half of them started posting, so 10 people started posting. It wasn’t phoney, it was honest, but their was a silent slog on my own for nine months, and eventually people showed up. Seed content is important. Highlight best bits.

Q: Is there a risk of over-nurturing your community?
At some point, yes. At some point I got frustrated and told everyone that the more I spent on the forums, the less time I can code. It got out of control because I wasn’t realising. When Blogger started, didn’t have a pay version because didn’t want to do support, but end up providing support anyway.

Q: Are you earning more money now than when you were a developer?
Eeer, yeah.

10.03.07
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links for 2007-10-03

10.03.07
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FOWA07b: Robert Kalin

Founded Etsy, website for selling craft and hand made stuff. See it as a soap box for people who make things.

Moved to New York, faked ID in order to get classes at university. Wanted to remain unemployed and start a company. Started six, including carpentry. Did one year of art school in Boston, but had never used computers much.

Built Get Crafty for wife of a professor in NY, and then did client work, but didn’t like that. Got the idea to create a market place for people who made things on Get Crafty. Launched 2 years ago, 100k sellers, mainly US and UK. Haven’t had a hockey-stick, low growth. Only in US dollars but working to support multiple currencies. Mainly English-speaking countries. Visualisation clock, 24 hours, and show usage round the clock, quite overnight. 10k items a day are listed, 7k items selling per day.

Always a bump before Christmas, then it drops off afterwards. Usage jumps almost bi-monthly. People think Etsy is small, but it’s small now and part of something larger. Two paths the world can go down, one to go with shopping locally and buying hand-made goods, the other is petrol- and war-based.

Wants Etsy to be an organising principle, rather than a corporation. Wants to think about how can build businesses that are rewarding. Etsy has grown from 4 to 44 people, have learnt a lot on the way growing there, and the growth of the company has to stay in tandem with the growth of the market.

It’s not just a marketplace, it’s a community. Marketplaces have always been communities, people would go to the market not just to buy things but to gossip. Contrast that to what we have today, online or offline. Social aspect of knowing who made what you’re buying has been eradicated. Important part of Etsy is human contact between buyer and seller. Also a lot of alteration services, and items tend to come with stories. If you had to save 10 things from your burning house, you wouldn’t grab your flat-screen TV, you’d grab those things that would have meaning to you. Most stuff we have is actually easy to get rid of.

Make it playful – can shop by colour, so Etsy will show you all the things that are a particular shade of green, say. Seasoned Etsy shoppers don’t use that feature as much as new people. There’s also a ‘time machine’, that shows you stuff in the order it was posted.

The social side, stuff coming, where you can shop with your friends. (Demo was broken.)

Etsy – sees that as the first wave of hand-made people, most Etsy users are women, and most aren’t that into tech.

Sees Etsy itself as hand-made. Before industrial revolution, everything was handmade. If you needed a table, you’d go to your local artisan to get it made, or make it yourself. Now, if you talk about a group of people sitting around sewing, the image that comes to mind is of a sweatshop. Fallen into a Bladerunner future, where it’s all mass-produced. Mass production has it’s benefits, but there’s a human cost. Something that is baffling is how much more important that it is to put money over human life, and if that is the goal of your business then it’s a personality time that I think is very unhealthy and not sustainable in the long run.

When the Nazis were bombing London, their planes required a patented fuel, patent was owned by Rockefeller, and he sold that fuel to the Nazis. But people say “that’s business”. But what values does business have?

Need to look at long term growth. Google’s letter at IPO said “Our stocks should drop in the short term, because some of our investments will be puzzling”, and that’s an interesting way to go forward with a company but not sure if the US economy will go with that.

Created freeform virtual space, like a congress, with lots of additional options, and anytime they are teach a workshop, they beam it out, so you can see people talking to each other. Use it for their own remote developers, but also publicly for skill-shares.

In mass-production, there’s a lot of copying. That’s seen as a bad thing in the hand-made world, but it’s inevitable that people have similar ideas. Copying someone’s brand, though, is different.

Going to be able to request custom items. Most maps talking about social networks etc. never talk about commerce. Huge swath of people out there not thinking about it.

(Talks now about history of commerce, which I am not going to blog.)

10.03.07
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FOWA07b: Ted Rheingold

How to turn your app into a business
Just covering one thing about turning your app into a business. Ted did Catster and Dogster, where people can make profile pages for their dogs and cats, people trick them out, spend time socialising.

What does it take to be a business. When you start you need to think of things like logo, and company name and titles and business cards and incorporation and websites and APIs and launch parties, and all of these are important, but not covering any of that – that info’s out there. What makes the difference is generating revenue. What changes a project into a business is generating revenue, or at least having a really good idea of where that revenue is going to come from.

If you get VC funding, it can be easy not to think about this, and can run out of money half-way through. Think about how my business is going to be a business. Do not think that there is a “new economy” – there is new technology, but businesses are pretty much the same. Dogster and Catster make money through ads, sponsorship, and subscriptions. A lot like a magazine. Sell virtual gifts, but magazines do that too with branded items. Nice thing about virtual gifts is that there’s no inventory or suppliers. We are not creating a new economy.

When you start, and you have a popular service, If you’re selling subs or licences or virtual gifts or lead generation, whatever it is, learn your market. Don’t think you know how advertising go just because you’ve seen a magazine. Learn what prices people pay, do your research. Know your audience. Learn other audiences, learn other markets or other forms of advertising, because the first thing you try might not work. Don’t get emotionally attached to your business plan. If you really want it to work, then be ready to change with where the opportunity is based on what your customers’ interests are, the way the industry is moving, etc. If you don’t change, it will be changed for you.

If you are starting a business, get advisors, both in your industry and those who just understand business. One of his advisors is a dentist, one who had a failed business and gives a lot of good advice, and get real business advice from real people. Cuts through the clutter on the blogs etc.

Learn business finance. Need to understand your bank statement, know how much you really have to spend, how much you’ve spent, how much you’ve committed to spending this month. Learn how to forecast expenses, revenues, etc. Learn different ways of doing accounting, and learn how to use Excel spreadsheets and accounting software. Helps you not fail prematurely.

Don’t spend any money you don’t have to. If a pound falls into a toilet, dive after it. There are some things you have to spend money on, and there are others that you shouldn’t spend money on until you really have to. Don’t have the big launch party, or the flash brochures for clients, etc.

Sell, sell, sell. Creative people don’t like pitching or doing sales, but no one is going to sell your business for you. For a business to really work, you have to be selling 80% of the time. That’s scary – want to be doing other things, but the whole business changed when he brought in a business partner. If you don’t want to sell or pitch, find someone who does, someone who loves to do it. Hard, because if you commit to a business partner, it can’t be an employee, you need to team up with someone similar to you, has similar goal and life expectations. Unless you get bought, which doesn’t happen often, or if you fail which you don’t want, you’re going to be doing this for 2, 3, 5, 10 years. Very few overnight successes. Going to take a while, and if you’re biz partner isn’t there with you and ready to run the gamut with you, it won’t work.Businesses with two to three partners work better than people who go it alone.

Sees so many people starting a business where there isn’t a business there.

Q: If you have a niche social network, you can’t compete with Facebook etc., so is there no business room left in social networking?
Just passed 500k members, have 1.3 million visits per month. Hard to make money on AdSense or other network ads unless you’re serving 100 million of pages per day. but the money is still there because small, specialist audience is of interest to specialist advertisers, 100k people in one place is of enough interest that specialist advertisers will be interested.

Subscriptions work if you have a product that people want to subscribe to. Great if you can get it. Subs work in two ways: a utility, e.g. a tool that does something for you like give you stock information or upload photos; or if it’s like a country club or team with an emotional connection. That’s where Dogster/Catster sits – it’s about being on the team, putting your colours to a flag. LJ users subscribe to show their support to LJ. But I wouldn’t bank on subscriptions, I’d wait to see if it worked. If you get camaraderie, you can charge 5x what you should because you’re paying for the connection.

Q: Any key action to make Dogster or Catster profitable.
Business partner that did sales made enough money to leave his job and do sales full time. Being able to be responsive, and focused on sales. Took funding in the May to do this, and were profitable by the July.

Q: Were you cold-calling ads? How did you go about it?
It’s a lot of cold-calling. Couple of people on sales now, dedicated, and when a new magazine comes out, they will look and see if there is any new advertiser there they’ve not seen before, and then will contacting. So it’s not the company that sells the ads, it’s their agency. E.g., you wouldn’t call MS, you’d look for the advertising agency that deals with MS, and get in their good graces, and get them to understand that you might be small but you’re better. Then get into their cycles, which is a year in advance. So most of the first half of 2008 budgets are accounted for. So try to get in on special budgets or one-off budgets.

Sometimes agencies will come back to you for different products if you did well on one.

Q: Gave e.g. of functionality that you tried, when do you decide something isn’t going to work?
We always say ‘fuck up fast’. We turned off classifieds a few months ago because they just weren’t working, they were too bugging. They think about things like increasing subscription rates, and assess whether an increase is going to be worth it or not, as you may lose more people than you gain in a rate rise.

Q: At what point did you decide that Dogster/Catster could be a viable business?
I’d always thought it was going to be a business. I had mistakenly thought it was going to be a passive business where I’d get a lot of cheques each month and would do nothing else. Realised it was going to be a business when, by month 10k had joined, and that was as many as had thought could make a web page for their job. So thought of some goals, pretty low goals, to aim for to make it work as a project. When there was a chorus of “this is going to be huge”, really used the wisdom of own crowds, then sat on it for a while. Waited about three more months to make sure that people were committed, that it wasn’t a fad.

Q: Do you have a formula for when to start hiring employees?
Hiring is a real pain in the butt because if you’re slightly ethical, the last thing you want to do is hire them and then have to lay them off in three months, so you want to make sure your forecasts are steady. Were we profitable for last 4 months to validate this position. Then think about how much pain is it going to take away from someone who could be doing more better work. We usually wait until we’re in so much pain, and see the revenue’s there, but growing a company that doesn’t scale well. More employees means more managing people, disputes, technology, problem shooting, etc. So important to remember that employees take as well as give.

Q: Does 10k users in a few months – did you work on that really hard, or did it just happen? If you worked on it, how did you do it?
There was some luck and some timing, but put a lot of effort into who’s going to want to use this site and what are they going to want to see when they get there. Put a lot of tie in error message, which people weren’t thinking about in 2003. Spent a lot of time on the colour palate, there were rounded edges, it was moving to CSS and a refreshing experience compared to other sites. But there was a luck factor too, really hit a wave, 2003 digital camera was the main gift for Christmas, and before that it wouldn’t have happened. It is important to know when luck happens, and take advantage of it without relying on it happening again.

10.03.07
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FOWA07b: Robin Christopherson

The art of attractive, yet usable (accessible) sites
Many sites that are very pretty but as soon as you do anything different, things go to pieces. Attractiveness shouldn’t be fragile, needs to be robust and be sure that site is nice under a wide range of conditions.

What has accessibility got to offer usability. The DTA is a law that talks about accessibility, and over 90% of sites do not comply. Sites that meet DTA standards are also easier to use for able-bodied people, not just disabled people.

Legal and General re-launch, spent £200k on accessibility, and found a huge upsurge in mainstream users as well, 30k hits extra in first use, just about increased platform compatibility. People wanted the site to work on their platform, regardless.

Speciality browser called HomePage Reader, free, renders the page in a text-only view. Has a screen reader that reads the text. Goes to Amazon, reader reads out all the text, which turns out to be all the text for the images. No skip to content, so is forced to listen to the [image …] tags, because none of the images are labelled.

Google Mail, Ajax application, but unless you are using the screen reader you won’t know that there’s some hidden text at the top of the page that suggest that screen reader users use the basic HTML version. Heavy use of javascript in a web app can be got round by providing a basic version too. Google felt they wanted to go that extra mile to provide a completely JS-free version, which you don’t have to do, but have to make sure that your JS doesn’t mess with screen readers.

Google Maps. There is a text-only version which isn’t sign-posted, the URL isn’t publicised, but it can do everything that Google Maps can do, so can look up florists in Melbourne, or whatever, all that functionality is there. Have implemented this parallel alternative, but there are so many platforms that could benefit from this text-only version.

Google Accounts, if you want to set up a new account, uses a ‘captcha’ image, which obviously doesn’t have an alt-tag. If you are trying to sub to Yahoo, forget it. But Google has two things – an audio link, but that’s really hard to hear, has not been able to understand the string, which is a bit self-defeating. Or there’s a link to contact Google and they will contact you personally by email to help you set up your account. Requires manpower to provide that service, but they obviously take accessibility extremely importantly, and it shows that they are going to be a force to be reckoned with – little things like this make it the default choice for people with a disability.

if you’ve got someone who tests your site who has a disability, if the site is optimised for them, it makes it much easier for mainstream users.

Everyone knows about captioning, and multimedia more important in Web 2.0, but with YouTube you can’t caption, you have to ‘hard burn’ them into the video. Go home tonight and watch TV with your eyes closed – you can’t follow the action. Audio description actually tells you what the action is in a video, and it makes video followable for the vision impaired.

The vision impaired are the hardest category to cater for. Window magnifier which makes the web page much much bigger, e.g. x5. Demos inconsistent navigation, pop-ups, etc. which all make it hard for magnification user to find their way around. Pictures of words get hard to read – get pixelated. Another reason for providing a basic text version.

General Motors website looks lovely. Might want to increase the text size, which is often hard-coded which means people can’t make it bigger so that they can read it. Have to reset the browser prefs to ignore the text size, which many people don’t know you can do, but it breaks the navigation with overlapping links, etc.

Vodafone did a better job, marked up all the headings and navigation, but whilst they have allowed people to change the text size, it corrupts the page, with text showing over other text. Colour is the same problem. If someone asks their browser to ignore specified text colours, content can totally disappear.

This isn’t just about websites, but also applications on the desktop. Shows a mystery meat navigation that requires hovering over images to get up a button a few pixels wide. Not available to people who can’t use a mouse, as no keyboard shortcuts.

Google Search. When you search, you get next page links, 1 2 3 4 5 … and that makes it possible for people with co-ordination issues or problems with using a mouse to click the links.

Vatican website with circular navigation, and tabbing from link to link, with default IE dotted line highlight, and the tabbing order is the most bizarre in the word. Need to make sure that sites work and are usable from the keyboard.

Flash breaks the whole screen reader experience.

Voice recognition is there out of the box in Vista, but Flash totally ‘de-supports’ voice recognition, so it can’t read the screen and you can’t use the voice recognition to choose a link and click it.

Hearing impairment and cognitive difficulties, e.g. dyslexia, learning disabilities, language difficulties (.e.g second language). With UGC there’s a lot of lack of awareness out there regarding the content they create. Shows a home page on MySpace and will see some prime examples of pages that are totally overloaded with graphics and totally inaccessible. Falls on the heads of the MySpace and Facebooks of the world to flag those requirements well, in registration process or the toolkit for creating the pages.

Finally, there was a problem with the Olympic logo promo video that caused epileptic fits. There are tools that assess how likely a video is going to cause problems.

AbilityNet.org.uk

10.03.07
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Corporate IT: Touch our firewall and we fire yo’ ass

I wrote a post for the Guardian’s Technology blog about fascist IT policies and IT departments, but it’s something I feel very strongly about. One of the bottlenecks in companies is Corporate IT policies meant to ensure security but go too far and cause inflexibility. I don’t know how many friends had to run ‘trojan mouse’ projects with servers hidden their desks because corporate IT wouldn’t or couldn’t move fast enough. Too often, I’ve felt caught between a rock and a hard place – my manager wanting something done now and IT policy or rights issues that prevent me from getting my job done.

Territorial IT departments who view the computers as ‘their’s’ and other employees as the problem are now a serious problem. When I was with the BBC, several clue-ful field staff carried two computers – one with the corporate desktop for e-mail and wires and one ‘clean’ computer for getting their job done.

If your journalists’ computers are so locked down that they can’t file from the field, game over. Don’t laugh or dismiss that. I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t join WiFi networks because they didn’t have sufficient rights, and I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t file audio because their IT departments didn’t have the MP3 filters installed to compress the audio. It doesn’t matter how sexy your website is, if they can’t file, they’ll be back in the bad old days of phoning in copy and more often than not, getting scooped by the competition.

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10.03.07
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FOWA07b: Heather Champ & Derek Powazek

We’ve got this community. Now What?
Jewish creation myth, where an angel seeds the world with people. Angel has two sacks, geniuses and dunderheads, and there was an accident, and all the dunderheads spilled out of the sack into a valley and founded the town of Chelm, where they do stupid things.

If you’re running a community site, it can feel like you’re trying to run Chelm. Want to tell some Chelm stories to shed light on community.

User-Generated Discontent
Say you’re Yahoo, and you want to build some topic sites, and you decide to pull in some photos from Flickr tagged with Wii, and people feel unhappy about this, they start tagging non-Wii images with ‘Wii’. Yahoo were good when it became apparent that there was a problem, but people remained pissed off even when Yahoo played by the legal rules. Lesson is that you have to go beyond the legal rules. Give people copious opt-outs.

The way that Flickr’s built now, can role out new features without having to take the site down. When site has to be taken down its’ for database changes. Last summer, had to take the site down for something unexpected. Instead of serving usual “Flickr’s having a massage”, served a “Make Lemonade” page, with an impromptu competition to win a free Pro account. Had 2000 different entries, and people responded well. Crap is going to happen, internet is chaos and sometimes people push the wrong button, and it’s how you respond to that that counts. Realised that they couldn’t give away one free Pro account, but sixty, and gave everyone who entered a few free months,

It sucked that the site went down, but tried to make it not suck. Want to do ‘Connect the Dots” if it happens again.

So, when you’ve fucked up, say you’ve fucked up. Confess! Your living off the seat of your pants, which means you’re going to make mistakes, and you can earn credibility from the community if you just ‘fess up.

Stewart wrote a “Sometimes We Suck”, when Flickr growth was higher than anticipated. Mondays were a nightmare because that’s when people use Flickr most, and shit would rain down from the sky, and at this point they just wanted to say that they were really sorry that things weren’t as good as they wanted it to be.

Ryan Carson did similar last week, when a sponsor email went to the wrong list – the list of people who said they didn’t want sponsor emails. Ryan emailed everyone and apologised for the mistake.

Mistakes will happen, but you can benefit if you cop to it.

Don’t keep score. Scoreboards, leader boards, top things, winners – are an excellent way to motivate peopll when you are playing a game, but most web apps aren’t explicitly about playing a game, but doing other things. Pay close attention to score keeping, and using them when you want the result to be “let’s play a game”. When you don’t, it can work against a community.

Flickr’s ‘Interestingness’, and they ranked the photos and it drove people nuts. There’s nothing else in the Flickrverse where people are ranked. They self-organise, but they don’t rank. Interestingness was bad, it created aggravation where there was none before. Now it is a randomly loaded page so that there isn’t any ranking.

It wasn’t that ‘interestingness’ was bad, it was that the interface originally was ranked, so you could see how much stuff was above you. and people try to game that. Digg gets gamed, and if the gamers win, Digg uses.

Have an editorial layer on top of what you are doing. If people are bringing you stuff, and you have a lot of it, e.g. Flickr has 1.5+ million photos uploaded a day. So how do you put an editorial layer above that? There’s Flickr blog, there’s interestingness, and the 24 Hours of Flickr – asking people to take a photo representative of their day. 7,000 contributed the photo, half of them put geolocation on it, and so could add them to a map. Interesting way to look through a slice of Flickr and see common themes, e.g. birthdays, weddings, Cinco de Mayo, etc. That’s one way to bring people to the forefront and reward them in a way that was more collaborative rather than having a leader board.

Producing print stuff is seen as a money maker, but producing a physical thing is a great motivator to encourage peopel to participate in your universe. Having a physical artefact from a virtual community is a cultural signifier that ‘i am part of this’. JPG magazine was originally an invitation to photobloggers to submit to the magazine, only reward was getting to be published in the book, and that was enough for people. Did similar things for Fray, and Moo do this as well, and it’s about taking that stuff back home where we really live, offline.

Rip that band-aid. Aug 15 2005, decided to merge Flickr ID with Yahoo ID. Waited 18 months before finally said that “in six weeks you have to do this”. Learnt that if you need to make a significant change to how you are doing business with a community that is difficult for some people to understand why, don’t wait 18 months to do it. People don’t like change. Give them six weeks, be there, be engaged, make the change and hold firm. You are going to have to do things that are unpopular. But the longer you wait the more painful it is. If we’d done it at the beginning, it wouldn’t have been so painful. Community was so much bigger 18 months later.

Community, manage thyself. Give people the tools they need so that they can manage the community for you. Sign of a healthy community is when people rise up and say that they would like to manage bits of the community themselves. If you craft in small bits of functionality, it allows people to establish what is appropriate for themselves, so what comments will you allow on y our photographs. Some people don’t mind swearing, others do, so if people self-moderate they can work out their boundaries for themselves. Obviously working within a wider set of community guidelines.

Communicate expectations. Lawyers and risk in this world has meant that whenever we join anything, there are pages of ToS, and some paras are in all caps, and the expectations of what your role is in that community. But people don’t read ToS. Flickr didn’t have community guidelines when it began, it was easier to telegraph that info member to member when it is a small community. So needed to find a way to take that high water line and put that into human readable format. Favourite line “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” It was important to put that down in succinct way – four or five bullet points, that help people understand the expectation.

If you’ve got the job for policing the community for appropriateness, as a member, you never want to get scolded or booted for something no one ever told you about. Idea is to communicate expectations around usage. Later, at least they can say “we told you so”

Don’t create supervillains. In most Web 2.0 world, we have sites with free memberships, meaning anyone can come and create an account. Once you do that, the first community moderation tool you build is the “boot member tool”, and the person you boot creates another free account and this time they’re pissed off. When you boot people, you’re going to create supervillains. Instead, minimise the damage they do, work with them directly, and build tools around minimising damage individual members can make, design community so one person can’t do too much damage.

One site, if you get on their bad list, the site just gets slower and slower and slower for you. Because we’re used to that, the problem member doesn’t create a new account, they just get bored and go away. Don’t just boot trolls.

These people will just keep coming back and it’s unfortunate because people, members of your community are passionate, both good and… not so good. Amazing how engaged people become, and how much they want to participate.

Know your audience. Chevy Tahoe campaign, to make ad for Chevy, so you could pick from their video, photos, sound, etc., and could add your own text. Made ads which protested against the Tahoe. Lots of ‘off message’, but created a lot of attention. People rebelled because you couldn’t take your ad with you, it only existed in the Chevy universe, you couldn’t upload your sound or photos or video, so the constraints caused rebellion. Also, know your audience, they made a site for the entire internet, rather than say just Tahoe users.

Embrace the chaos. Whenever you create something where people have a voice, they are going to say things that you didn’t expect. Things will happen on your site that you didn’t expect.

A small computer in Vancouver had four computers stolen. One laptop had Photobooth, which was set to automatically upload photos to Flickr. So the company saw this dude with no shirt on, uploading pics of his tattoos to their account. Ran over all the web, media, etc., and Flickr could see his IP address and his phone number on his website, and busted him. He’s known to the police, and his lawyer saw his picture on Flickr, and told him to turn himself in.

When they launched geotagging, they were worried people would create a “porn island”. But instead if you went to Greenland, and someone had taken pictures and spelt ‘FUCK’ in little pink dots across Greenland. How you deal with that creativity, but when you build something, people will take it in different directions, and it’s how you engage with that.

Pet profiles on Friendster, created dog profiles, and in one weekend, Friendster wiped them all out. So that created an opening for Dogster and Catster. Sometimes when people misuse your site, they are telling you that there is a market, a need, an idea that you are missing. Misuse can be the best sources of ideas.

Q: How do you deal with proclamations from the Yahoo mothership?
Design for selfishness – people can share in several places, so why would they pick yours? So always focus on the benefits that the user will see. Use that to push back against edicts from above.

Q: How to you balance community and commerce
There’s a fable that community and commerce have to be separate, but it’s not true. You talk to your friends about commercial items. The trick is to do it in a way that benefits everyone, and be clear about the rules. JPG Magazine was very clear about what they were going to do with people’s stuff, and said that if they wanted to do anything else they would ask.

Give people options, e.g. free Flickr account with ads, and a Pro account that doesn’t have ads. People can make that choice. Expensive to run big communities, feeling from ’93/94 that the web is free, works until you have massive amounts of hardware, so find a way to balance it.

Q: Cultural issues. How do you deal with cultural conflicts?
If you have a global community, want to ensure people can express themselves. When I get uncomfortable is when it gets member-on-member, looking at abuse in terms of that, when it gets to specific stuff, that’s when I step in and try and do things. Have to determine what you are willing to deal with. What’s acceptable in the community. Key is having a ‘report abuse’ link, make it easy to say that this is right. Can start in aggregate data, what are people saying is or isn’t appropriate. Come down too hard, people won’t be happy. And there are some people who join communities just to be trolls, they love seeing people explode, so finding ways to mute the trolls or discourage them. How can you focus that particular conversation on something that is positive. If something is happens in a forum that is inappropriate, create a space for it, e.g. Mac vs. PCs corner.