somethings about search

Web search has been a game changer in many ways. One of those ways is making users habituated to finding what they need, when they need it. Search has obviated the need to keep track of stuff on the internet anymore. What's more, users have come to expect search to work really, really well.

So when it doesn't, and people can't find what they thought was there, it becomes a matter of trust. That just the search part might be broken is not the first thing that they think: is the website just losing data?

If the internet were to be considered information organized as a tree, it would be two levels deep, with a search function as the root node.

Besides being a gateway to information, search is also the most natural way (as yet) users interact with computers - they type exactly what they are looking for. This is valuable information to gain insight about your users' intent.

If you are a website, are you letting users search? And, more importantly, search well?

lean back and consider

John Battelle hits the nail on the head when he says news coverage in the tech industry is an "endless cycle of post and spin" when what is really needed is "leaning back and considering".

News coverage - and I am broadening the scope from just the tech industry to all news - can be split into two: (1) Facts, and (2) Opinion & Analysis.

Facts need to be comprehensive, correct, terse, and instantaneous. And not repeated.

Opinion and analysis add value by providing insight not immediately obvious at the fact. Balanced arguments and structured thought take some time to produce and consumers are willing to wait for this.

I think news coverage will increasingly polarize into these two kinds.

140 characters are enough to bring you facts, and consumers don't mind these facts being pushed to you constantly, throughout the day. When it comes to detailed analysis, consumers are going to be more selective, and open to engaging more closely through comments and "likes" and "shares". Also, the former is more of a commodity, while the latter is where experts and niches can be found.

And this last point is most important - especially for marketing and monetizing strategies of news organizations, small and large. There definitely are opportunities.

on privacy

This is the first in a series of posts about my thoughts on end-user privacy on the internet.

Did you know that websites you visit sell your browsing history information to companies that aggregate this information from many users and sell it to advertisers? BlueKai is one such company. Go here to see what information it has about your browsing behaviour. eXelate Media is another example of such "behavioural data providers". Most online advertising networks do this, but keep the data within their network, for use by their own partners/advertisers, instead of making it commercially available.

The NAI makes all member companies (most companies involved in online advertising are members) provide an opt-out mechanism to users. For example, Google's opt-out page is here: http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html. However, most users are not even aware of how much information is being tracked, much less how they can avoid being tracked.

Deleting cookies is often stated as a way to maintain privacy. However, there are these crumbs called Locally Shared Objects, provided by Flash, and supported by any Flash-enabled browser, that allow a website to store any data in your browser. They are very similar to cookies in that only the website that creates a particular LSO can access that LSO. However, they cannot be deleted from your browser. Adobe provides a Global Settings Manager on its website to manage the Flash component in your browser. Go there and see which websites have stored LSOs on your computer. Very often, LSOs are used to replicate cookie information, and deleted cookies can be restored from these LSOs. So even if you delete cookies, websites can identify you again. In fact, they can even tell if you deleted cookies.

Facebook's Instant Personalization is not the first to enable tracking of your browsing behaviour across websites and allowing websites to use that data. But they are doing it in the most transparent manner, sparking off the debate that is essential to figuring out the right+acceptable way to go about this, and taking all the flak for doing so.

The existence and protection of privacy has implications of systemic proportions on the ethos of the internet, and should not be taken lightly by only economic or political consideration. More on this in another post.

on Meg Whitman's gubernatorial ideas

Meg Whitman spoke at the Commonwealth Club a few weeks ago, speaking about her ideas for California were she to be elected Governor.

She spoke about about the required operational efficiency in governance, providing various examples of how money could be saved. She spoke about her experiences with the government while running eBay in the Silicon Valley and how the government needs to be more business-friendly: about how technology jobs are being lost to other states and what California can do to win them back.

All in all, she seemed ready to govern Silicon Valley, but perhaps not yet California.

Which is not to say her ideas were not substantial or consequential. When it comes operations, states would do well to hire business people. And from this particular speech, I think Ms. Whitman might turn out to be a great COO for California.

You can find the talk here in the Commonwealth Club archives.

games outside of games

With so much being said about Game Mechanics and how it can drive people's behaviour, I wonder if there is a breaking point to it.

One article on CNN talks about toothbrushes telling some website on the internet how often you brush and rewarding you on that basis. I already see too many people fretting about credit card reward points and micro-optimizing their rewards to the cent. If such fake rewards take over our daily lives, one of two things will happen: we will become immune to the concept of rewards and competition; or we will become so engrossed with competing in every single activity that fun and utility both will become meaningless, giving way to a perpetual vanity.

p.s.: Apparently, FourSquare usage (which is a classic use-case of game mechanics) goes from curiosity to addiction to apathy. If true, it might be an indicator.

touch and gestures

While the use of touch and gestures cannot be over-rated when it comes to human interactions, the recent gadget-makers seem to have some fundamentals wrong.

Touch is an "input" mechanism, as it were, for people, not machines! Putting your finger to cold glass and pretending it is touching a button drawn on the glass is not good user experience. It may be state-of-the-art technology, but the state-of-the-art needs to catch up with convenience quickly. If you've ever tried taking a picture with the camera on the iPhone, you'll know what I mean.

Swiping your hand or finger across a screen does sound like sci-fi made real, but it does not beat the convenience of pressing (or "touching") a button to turn a page. Sure, swiping seems to be a natural gesture, but representative gestures that require less movement, less concentration or allow for parallel activity (like eating, holding a phone to one's ear, etc.) add significant value. It is easier to press the eject button for a CD tray than to tug on it as a signal. In the same way, it is easier to zoom with a lever than to "pinch" the screen. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to drive a car if you had to turn your head to turn the car?

Humans have been using instruments even before the Stone Age. That means millions of years of conditioning to get comfortable with temporary extensions to our appendages - from knives to wrenches to racquets and even toothbrushes! It is much easier to draw with a stylus than a finger, whether on paper or an electronic screen, and many people prefer using a mouse with their laptops to the touchpad that comes with it. The next generational devices seem to ignore, even deride, the use of additional instruments, and that will be a handicap for users.

When it come to user experience, convenience is a much longer lasting advantage than novelty.

I am not being a Luddite - it is not the technology I criticize, but its experience: the application and messaging.

twitternomics

Some months ago I got interested in mining some Twitter data and played with their API and started following @TwitterAPI. Not much came out of it, except that I would get a few updates a week regularly about their API. Which seems to have progressed quite a bit while their website is still much the same. I decided to take a closer look.

It isn't hard to get data from Twitter. Kudos to them for that. Here's an interesting representation of the data I got about the different Twitter clients being used. The numbers are the percentage of times that client was used in a sample of public tweets taken over 6 days. Hover over the circles to see the data, or click on a row in the table on the left to see the corresponding circle in the chart.


(Feedreader users, you may have to click through to check out this graphic. All: I apologize for making you run a Java applet but this tool from IBM was perfect and I couldn't find anything in Javascript or Flash that had all this functionality)

48% of tweets are from the web. Which means the Twitter.com website. About half of that are from regular clients. From the looks of it, I guess about 8% are from the mobile. And the rest are from other web applications trying to get users to popularize their own content like tweeting about a video from YouTube or your scores from an online game, connecting your Tumblr (or blog/rss feed) to your Twitter account so updates get tweeted automatically, tweeting your Facebook or LinkedIn status automatically either through these sites or through an aggregator service like Ping.fm, etc.

So clearly, using Twitter for a viral effect is a popular use case - somewhat like the Facebook News Feed or FriendFeed. If you look closely at the various clients there, there are so many web apps are trying to get hooked into the users' Twitter accounts. And an API for that purpose makes a lot of sense.

Twitter lends itself naturally to mobile use, and I suspect Twitter has a higher proportion of its usage on the mobile than most other web apps. But the big question mark here is the Twitter website. So many people are still using the website. Why isn't Twitter doing something about that? Most Twitter clients offer much richer functionality than their site.

Firstly, by making the site a proper destination, Twitter will have a lot more data about user behaviour. Right now it is probably highly fragmented across the various clients. Secondly, being a destination is very useful when you want to experiment with features and see how users respond to them. As a semi-functional website, or a fully functional platform, they are removing themselves from the users, forgetting that a lot of the Twitter protocol (@ replies and RT's, for example) was invented by users. Thirdly, Twitter has given up control of content to clients. Which are not doing even a half-decent job. Sure, they have gotten better at spam filtering, but with millions of tweets a day, and hundreds of thousands of conversations, they can filter a lot more than just spam. Filter and collaboratively filter. And best way to bring this data to users is they were a destination. Lastly, there is a huge monetization opportunity in being the destination. And I don't mean ads. I am referring to Twitter as an incredible proven ability to enable conversations between businesses and their customers, regardless of whether the business is a 1-man show or a faceless corporation. Conversations are very underrated - in marketing, product design, in product support and this is where Twitter's real potential lies - in enabling multiple paradigm shifts, rather than being one.

Please go reclaim your website, Twitter.

concluding

I was listening to a debate on whether America is responsible for Mexico's drug wars and at the end of the debate, each speaker was called to summarize his or her position. Having grown with debating a prominent activity at school, I was surprised to see people like CNN show hosts and Congressmen fail to summarize. There was one anecdote in support of the main argument, one gentleman went so far as to even concede some of his points to another and the others just used their summarizing time to extend their arguments, not to wrap up.

This was a couple of days ago.

Today, interestingly, I read about someone else lamenting good conclusions - in the State of the Union, and other presidential speeches. James Fallows objects to Obama (and other presidents) using "God bless you all; God bless the United States of America" to end their speeches. It started with Ronald Reagan and all presidents since have used to say "this speech is over". Before Reagan, they would end their speeches with a more natural conclusion.

Read Fallows' take about this on his blog. He also has the recent State of the Union address with his annotations, which are quite interesting.

on prescience

Someone pointed me to a TED talk on the changes brought about by the internet and social media. In his bio, the speaker is highlighted as a "prescient voice on the Internet's effects". I wouldn't call the talk prescient; it was peppered with anecdotes from the internet revolution already well underway, and some extrapolation from those.

The trouble with trying to be "prescient" is that it lasts only until the event you predicted does not happen, the probability of which is extremely, extremely high. If you are only studying and/or talking about technological forces today, you are already behind the curve.

I was recently at a PARC Forum called Technology-Mediated Social Participation where academics were lamenting the fact that theory is trying to catch up with practice.

One interesting point from Shirky's talk is how the "former audience" now becomes "producers" and "participants". Interesting because it is not only true of media as he says, but, in my opinon, for business and social processes as well. Twitter is a great example of this. Users were using the @username style to refer to one another and the "retweet" format long before Twitter formalized and inducted these into their technology.

The only "prescient" voice is a collective one of the "participatory audience" - some of them are already doing what the rest will be doing in the near future.

giving to Haiti

I just heard a great program on NPR's Talk Of The Nation about giving to Haiti, with the founder of the American Institute of Philanthropy.

Both traditional and social media are abuzz with various ways to contribute, and reflect heightened emotions of people wanting to help.

Here are some takeaways from the discussion.

Money is the only useful thing right now. It helps buy all the emergency items required to get by while the clean up happens. Any kind of goods will cost a lot in shipping, are not useful right now, might clog up supply/chain for the emergency requirements. Besides, you don't want to send goods even later, but have things sourced locally to support the local economy.

A lot of callers expressed interest in volunteering, but if you are not trained in handling such emergencies, it is better to stay away. They only need experts at the moment.

Most of the help that Haiti needs is not in the next few days, but in the next few months, or even years. Emergency response teams are helping the Haitians clean up. But once that is done, the task of re-building is more challenging and a longer one. The rest of the world must step in then, instead of forgetting it once public shock and recency are no longer factors.

Sending money through cell phones and such is easy and lots of people are doing it. I myself did it yesterday, and asked my Facebook friends to, as well. But know that what you are doing is really pledging money. It is not clear whether your phone company will pass along the money to the charity until you have paid your bill. And then it will take a while for the charity to send this collected money to the intended destination. It is better to send money directly to charity organizations working in Haiti.

Most charity organizations keep a percentage of the money you donate to cover their own costs. Find out the details about the organization you are donating through. It could be as low as 55% or as high as 97%. Also, make sure the organization is using your money for what you intended, and not for other purposes (even if other charitable purposes).

On the show they mentioned www.charitywatch.org as a good resource for charities helping Haiti.

If you know how to send money directly to Haiti, or can endorse a particular charity for Haiti, please leave a comment.

You can also donate to Mercy Corps from your Amazon.com account: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=1297795011

Update: Find that NPR show here: Reliable Ways To Donate Money To Haiti Effort.

nuclear energy

Nuclear energy used to be the next endless energy source.

Tens of years later, that dream failed to materialize and the world has moved on to trying to tap into a host of different kinds of sources - solar, wind, tidal, bio-matter, etc. - and make it economically viable on a large scale.

Nuclear energy is still our next endless energy source.

The reasons for failure in the past decades have political roots. The "developed" nations were involved in the Cold War that centered around stockpiles of nuclear weapons. As such, using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes was relegated to being a front for nuclear arms and there was a huge political impetus to tie together weapons and nuclear energy generation. Power generators were made to use Uranium so they could create Plutonium as a by-product which is needed for nuclear bombs. The problem with using Uranium is that it is not well-suited for energy generation: it needs to be enriched (create fissile U-235 from naturally occuring U-238) in an expensive process, the nuclear reactors are dangerous and need many precision controls, and toxic waste is left over. And before you knew it, nuclear energy became the untouchable: dangerous and with evil intentions.

With some natural progression of history, this is where we find ourselves: the "nuclear" nations have enough nuclear weapons stockpiled, almost everyone has realized that nuclear deterrent is not the way forward, there is an impending energy crisis and a global warming crisis and we desperately need a solution to both.

Thorium tells a different story. This nuclear energy fuel that was discovered decades ago, but shelved because it did not generate Plutonium for weapons. It has already been proven to be a much safer and easier way to generate nuclear power, without any toxic waste and expensive enrichment processes. Scientists are now trying to create efficient and long-lasting reactors that use Thorium for large scale energy generation.

If this succeeds, it will be an interesting turn of events.

There will be some economic upheaval as the economy moves from being fossil fuel-based to being nuclear energy-based: transportation, as vehicle technology, range, capacities change, even energy storage and transportation. The politics are going to be interesting too, as different countries will be able to produce nuclear fuel.

Timelines for large scale nuclear power generation seem to be 20-40 years in the future, which is far too long. Oil is expected to peak in 10 years' time. I can't imagine ocean tides, for example, solving our civilization's energy needs in the coming decades. Governments need to give more impetus to safe and clean nuclear energy.

Further reading:
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15048703
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

half a billion dollars for Yelp

Is Yelp really worth that much?

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation makes me think not.
They've had $31 MM in funding, so the VCs will be getting a 16x exit, which is rather high. But then, Yelp has done rather well.
At 150+ employees, that's $30 MM /yr straight out. Plus some other SG&A expenses. With $30 MM revenue in 2009, I'd say they might be almost breaking even. Projected revenues in 2010 are $50 MM, so they might bring in a little less than $20 MM profit.
If I were the Yelp board, I'd take the $500 MM.

However, everyone seems to look at 2010 as the year of recovery, and online advertising is expected to grow quite a bit. If they do better than projected, the same offer might be worth more 6-9 months down the line.

If they want to go IPO, I think that as a retail investor I wouldn't buy. Not because of what it is worth today, but because I haven't seen much innovation there - how will it keep up with the fast changing landscape? I fear Yelp.com, as in the website by itself, might be plateauing out.

However, it seems to be worth half a billion dollars to Google. Think about who else might acquire Yelp.

Microsoft.
Yelp fits right in with Microsoft's Bing. Bing is approaching search vertical by vertical (which I think is the right way, and Google might be coming around to it too - it has been looking at Yelp and Trulia; but I digress). And Microsoft is the only company offering some real competition to Google's core business right now. So it is probably worth for Google to pay a few millions extra to acquire Yelp and thus block Microsoft.

Another important strategic advantage Yelp can bring to either of the two companies is local data and a social angle. Neither MS nor G are strong in these areas. The social aspect of Yelp is not been fully tapped into yet, but users participate on Yelp like nowhere else (except, perhaps, Twitter). Not even Facebook - activities on Facebook are becoming quite frivolous and there is little likelihood of anything serious to catch on there.

I think Microsoft would do more justice to Yelp, than Google. The Search Wars will get much more interesting if either of them does eventually acquire Yelp.

(numbers used in estimations taken from Crunchbase and/or Wikipedia)

search interfaces

I'm watching a video of Microsoft's Pivot - http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/VTL05.
They don't call it a search engine, but finding and exploring information on the web seems to be the primary task. The UI is extremely rich.

One of the reasons Sponsored Links on SERPs do so well is because the SERP itself is quite poor - in quality of the results as well as the user experience. If search engines provided all the answers, who would go clicking on ads.

Therefore, search supports a multi-billion dollar business because it doesn't work properly!

Perhaps that is the reason for such little progress in the area in the past so many years. Especially in the UI/UX.
Who's interested in breaking the current model?

ease of social interactions

If I may indulge in a little of that 20-20 hindsight, it is easy to see why IM, then social networks and then Twitter became so popular.

There was an inherent cost associated in picking up a telephone and calling somebody - you had to give a few minutes of focused attention to them, know what to speak about, make sure what you're saying is of value to them, think about whether they would be free to talk and for how long. And similarly for receiving a phone call.

Along came the Instant Messenger and did away with the need for pleasantries on the phone. You would know when people were available. You could have one sentence conversations with people as though they had always been in the same room with you. Much lower cost.

Social Networks. Even easier to remain connected with people. It became acceptable and usual, to "like" a link posted by someone you had not met in years, or to refute them rebuking your favorite sportsperson. Photographs - the most personal touch of all - added so much to that virtual link.

Then Twitter made it even easier and customary to share random thoughts, opinions, online content, gripes, victories, food menus, bad jokes and so many other mundane life-pieces. You could just talk into the air, and so many would listen. And a few would even reply back.

All this - so much easier than picking up the phone, wondering if it's the right time to call up someone you have not met in years to find out how their holiday in Greece was and whether they would recommend the hotel there. Wait, how do you even know they went to Greece this summer? Wait! How can you even assume you have their phone number!

Looking at this trend, what do you think is the next step in making this process even easier?
Listening to music with friends who are online at the same time? Watching Hulu with them? Just plain old browsing that you can share with people?

Two opportunities arise: the more things people share, the more you need help to consume all of it. And how do you meet all these people in the first place? Has that changed as dramatically as keeping in touch with all the people you have met? Can that change?

augmented fantasy

How involving would it be for the audience (and the creators) if the characters of a TV series were on Twitter. Tweeting as if they were real people, about their thoughts, events - some part of the main plot, some more to add to their characterizations.

The audience could reply to their tweets, and the characters would reply back. And have a conversation with the real world.

something missing

While I really like Quentin Tarantino's artistry and bent of imagination, I did not like Inglourious Basterds quite as much as his other films.

It's the small things in the plot that didn't go down well with me. It seems as if he wasn't quite sure how real or how fantastic to make his story and ended up with a little bit of both but neither. Not to mention that this mangling was not of individual characters, but of representations of entire political entities.

This article here - http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-09/my-father-the-inglourious-basterd/ - explains a little of that aftertaste I speak of.

To quote from the article a British soldier around the time of the Allied Invasion: ' “If you saw a dead German, you passed him and you didn’t laugh.” '

Other than that aftertaste, the film, by itself, is thoroughly enjoyable, being very classic Tarantino (although some scenes seemed to be directly adapted from Kill Bill).

Update: Yet another interesting article: The tragedy of Tarantino.

the blue umbrella

A quaint story by Ruskin Bond - I remember reading it in school in class 3 or 4. I even remember it was where I first learnt the word ravine. Funny how these tiny memories remain.

The film multiplies the magic of the story with Vishal Bharadwaj's genius. I love how he has used colour, and his music is brilliant (he composed his own). What is truly wonderful is how he manages to extract the ras* of a culture with a thousand years of history and portray it, so lifelike and along with all the eccentricities, on the screen.

Here's a trailer:


Do watch the movie if you get a chance.
It's also available on Netflix streaming.

*ras: hindi; pronounced as the first syllable in "rustic"; the closest english equivalent might be "essence", but the word definitely encapsulates something more that I'm not able to put my finger on. If you've got a better explanation, please do leave a comment.

asterix in hindi

My Monday morning was brightened up with a cousin telling me of Asterix comics translated into hindi. If you know hindi, check out how they've translated the names:

Dogmatix...........Kutta Bhaunkix
Vitalstatistix........Mukhiya Motumallix
Impedimenta.......Pyaari Sirdarda
Cacofonix..........Gavaiya Besurix
Fulliautomatix.....Lohatodix
Getafix.............Hakeem Vaidix

(Thank you, Nidhi!)

manner of speaking

I came across this talk by Seth Godin at the 2008 Business of Software conference.

Besides the great content and insights that Seth Godin always puts out, there are two things that I found incredible.

The first is his style of delivering the content. There was a lot of impact to the way he speaks, taking up the whole stage, moving about, waving his hands, etc. It conveys a lot of energy and energizes the audience. He also moves from one point to another quickly, making it worth his time and yours. It also is done on the assumption that the audience is smart, and can keep up with him. It keep the audience one their toes, alert and thinking all the time.

The second thing nearly blew me away. It came out when at the end he talked about some ideas he was working on at the time, yet to be released. He asked the audience to not take photographs or blog about it. And jumped into telling them about his new idea, establishing a new level of trust. The amount of commitment he shows to his audience is fascinating: you have come to hear me talk, and I am going to do everything I can to make it worth your while.

Watch it: (feedreaders may have to click here)

comments

Once in a while I click through from my feed reader to the webpage of the article I find is so much content there in the comments section that I miss out on.

And when you look at it, it is not uncommon to find a lot of user feedback there. Opinions given freely, for the sake of making your voice heard - it is natural. More people leave feedback on various blogs than on the feedback form for a product.

If only there were a way to extract all this information from there. The importance of listening to customers or potential customers cannot be understated.

At the very least, feed readers should have a way of integrating comments with the post.