The Pinyadda Blog

Palin vs. Conan vs. Cowell a media buzz showdown

2010-01-15T11:29:00.012-05:00

As you may know this week was bustling with gossip and headlines surrounding a few big names. NBC pushed Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show back so Leno could have his old spot, which Conan subsequently walked away from. Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol after this season. And the lovely Sarah Palin is joining Fox News as an analyst.

After a week of big headlines filled with even bigger names, our team was curious to see which name stole the spotlight when it came to online buzz. Before I run the numbers I am going to take a guess and rank them.

1. Conan
2. Palin
3. Cowell

Drum roll please.

What do you know, I was right! Conan was the most referenced celebrity in articles indexed this week, Palin was a close second, and Simon Cowell, well just couldn't keep up.

All three contestants were trending topics this week on twitter, but only two were fortunate enough to be covered by mashable. Here is an analysis of twitter stats on the the news of Cowell leaving Idol. Conan was just too easy though, his letter to the people was an enormous hit, and his most recent shenanigans have the internet world abuzz. And I really just don't have much to say about Sarah, other than she looks pretty feisty in the above picture.

Once thing is clear though when looking at the crazy amount of content (well over a thousand items) surrounding these people, publishers love drama!

Content Evangelism, or, Why Big Media Should Pay Its Readers

2010-01-13T10:15:00.018-05:00

Tonight I emailed someone I follow on an un-named social network. It felt a little bit creepy and a little bit exciting, much like friending a not-quite-mutual acquaintance on Facebook once felt. I have been following this person for over a year, and almost all of their posts resonated with me because we share a similar aesthetic sense of what it means for something to be well-done, or successfully designed, or generally pleasing to the senses.

So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can't find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.

What's more, I'm convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I'll follow up and let you know if that's true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda's design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.

I'll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the 'Design' topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I'm willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we're all about, and I'm proud to be part of a company that's trying every day to make that vision a reality.

The story, then, has two morals:

1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn't to say I don't like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.

2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we're seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.

This is what big media doesn't seem to understand, and it's the beauty of the web we're helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It's not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people's daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.

Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I'd love to hear about every one of them in the comments.

How much has Yemen blown up in the press? (Hint: A lot!)

2010-01-12T11:06:00.005-05:00

Jog your memory from before Christmas when Yemen landed on the terror radar -- was it in there? Geography buffs knew it was a country in Southwest Asia, but the majority of us couldn't have spit out any other facts about the place. Other than the obscure Friend's reference when Chandler bought a plane ticket to Yemen to run away from Janice, I certainly couldn't tell you anything.

So, exactly how much has Yemen blown up in the press? Let's visit the Pinyadda index and find out.

In the last 6 months ending on Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of 1,524 articles. Not bad. In the 19 days following Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of over 2,200 articles.

Woah, hold up, let's do the math: 60 percent of all Yemen focused articles were published in the last 3 weeks.

What Domino's Could Learn From Sean Ellis

2010-01-12T09:30:00.002-05:00

Dear Dominos,

Thanks for reiterating the critical feedback you received from customers in a $75mm ad campaign and subsequently not making the necessary changes to satisfy your customers taste buds. It's a great example of how not to go about finding product market fit.

When I first saw Domino's video ad (no, not the one from a few months ago where employees blew snot rockets on some very unlucky customers' food) I gave immediate props for taking on their “harshest critics” and was interested (and hungry) enough to place an order for delivery. Result 1: Domino’s counts a $16 incremental sale, directly attributable to the campaign. The delivery smell quickly brought me back to my late-night, freshman fifteen and I was as excited as ever to try the new recipe. A few bites later, and the verdict: slightly spicier sauce, maybe less-greasy cheese and the same tasteless, cardboard crust. Domino's ad campaign had tricked me into believing they had actually made a good pizza, but upon taste instead lived up to being a “sad excuse for real pizza.” Just about everyone I’ve asked has voiced similar sentiments. Result 2: Let down customer.

Where does this seem to leave Domino’s? In the short run their execs may clap for any incremental sales (Result 1). But in the long run some of those incremental sales may turn out to be forever lost customers, like me (Result 2). And as for measuring how viral the campaign was… well, let’s just say customers liking the product seems to have been an overlooked but critical element.

The campaign shines a nice spotlight on one of my favorite learnings from Sean Ellis and core to what we’re focusing on here at Pinyadda: the importance of the customer in achieving product/market fit. If customers were more involved and engaged in creating and taste testing with the chefs to create the new Domino’s recipe, I bet we’d see different results – like brand enthusiasts (“hey I helped create the new recipe!") and a product that lives up to the new branding (“wow this is yummy enough that I want my friends to try!”).

And so ensues Pinyadda’s 2010 focus – the customer.

After months of ramping up features and then stripping them down to minimum viable product, Pinyadda is focusing on achieving product/market fit. We want to test our hypotheses of what the product is, what problem it solves, and who is using it. So our focus is iterating on who exactly our customer is and how we can build the product to best meet this customer’s needs.

As part of this effort we were recently brainstorming homepage language across a spectrum of market segments (we’ll then move to A/B testing these). We ended up with 5 sets of taglines, each set emphasizing different Pinyadda value propositions. Check them out below:

Set 1: RSS readers aren’t meeting the needs of their most prolific users.

Better than your RSS reader.
The smarter, social RSS reader.

Set 2: Popular information sharing platforms contain non-threaded conversations, suffer from information overload, are too hard to organize/filter, and have character limits.

The easiest way to find and share articles and blog posts.
The news you want from people you trust.

Set 3: It’s getting more and more difficult to find the news and information that’s most interesting to me personally on the web.

Your personalized information assistant: articles and blog posts delivered just for you.
Spend less time finding news, and more time reading news.

Set 4: News is meant to be discussed, but emailing links to people clutters inboxes and takes too much effort.

A better way to send and receive links.
A separate inbox for discussing links.

Set 5: I wish there were one place to see and discuss what’s happening in my industry instead of subscribing to loads of newsletters, trade publications and large portals.

Free, real-time news on your industry.
Recommended industry news from peers and colleagues you trust.

Did we miss anything? How do you use Pinyadda?

(As we strive for product/market fit over the next several months you can be assured we are listening intimately. We will be building the product – from taglines to new features – in tandem.)

Avatar vs. Titanic; An Epic World Wide Web Battle

2010-01-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

Webatar (noun, adjective; web-a-tar): The enormous online presence surrounding the buzz of Avatar. Originally derived from Avatar, with roots in the World Wide Web.

There is no question James Cameron's new movie will eventually outlast Titanic's reign, and for one simple reason: the Internet. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for that last scene, "Don't let go, Jack!" (so emotional). However, a lot has changed since 1997. Google was a year old, Facebook didn't exist, Twitter - uh, nope. I was using AOL on a dial up connection to talk to my 7th grade girlfriend. But enough about the memories.

After reading Mashable's latest post on Avatar it amazes me that Titanic made as much money as it did in the first place with minimal use of the Web and social media. I won't repeat how important social media was for Avatar; instead, I am going to run some hard numbers from Pinyadda's index to prove my point.

From when the trailer debuted on August 20th until its release on Decemeber 18th, 55 posts and articles were published from the top social media blogs and newspapers. From after it's release through today, 63 additional posts and articles were published.

There are of course many more publishers out there than the handful above, so we pulled data from every single site we index to emphasize the point more dramatically:

From August 20th through Avatar's release, 149 articles and blog posts were published. Post launch, a whopping 1,215. That's over 8 times the amount of content.

While I wish I could run Titanic's numbers, unfortunately Pinyadda wasn't around in '97. Regardless, without the proliferation of the WWW and social media, I am willing to bet we would see the inverse of what we see above, with more posts and articles published leading up to the movie's release than after it hit theaters.

Please post your comments, hypotheses, and theories below. I love a good debate.

P.S. I can't even keep up while writing this - Mashable has already published another piece on Avatar, and it complements this post quite nicely.

TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat: Who Publishes the Most about Twitter?

2010-01-11T11:54:00.000-05:00

Rolling Stone recently published the Top 100 Albums of the Decade. To my surprise, not one but two Bruce Springsteen albums made the top 25 (The Rising at 15 and Magic at 24). Now, as blasphemous as this sounds coming from a Jersey man, there is no way that Magic belongs in top 100 of the decade or even the top 100 of 2007.

Why is Bruce so blatantly overrepresented in this countdown? The only answer is that Bruce Springsteen is important to the Rolling Stone business. When Bruce does well, Rolling Stone sells more magazines/ad space. This got me thinking about social media...

What about Twitter? Which of the four major tech blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat) publishes the most content about Twitter? For this, I took a quick look at our Pinyadda index from November and formulated the following chart (click image to enlarge):

Twitter-centric Posts as % of all Posts:
TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat

As you can see, TechCrunch is far and wide the most prolific of the publications, producing approximately 2 times the amount of content as Mashable, 4.5 times the amount as ReadWriteWeb and 3.3 times the amount as VentureBeat.

Scanning titles and various meta-data for 'twitter', it appears that only 7.8% of TechCrunch's articles are about Twitter. Compare that the the 8.6% for VentureBeat, 15.1% for ReadWriteWeb and a whopping 20.7% for Mashable.

Yes, one-fifth of Mashable's content for the month of November was Twitter-centric. Imagine, if you will, that Twitter's popularity wanes (gasp!). What is Mashable to do? Produce less content? Unlikely. Fill the gaping content hole with other content? Likely.

Product Trends of 2010

2010-01-05T12:20:00.000-05:00

From a product standpoint, it's hard to deny that 2009 has been the year of the Twitter explosion. For better or worse, the simple microblogging service has changed the way we think about social media, ingrained the phrase "real-time" in all of our brains, and left our centuries-old grammatical traditions rotting in the attic, sacrificed in the name of 140-character uber-brevity.

Twitter, with its revolutionary open platform, has also forever changed the way web applications think about their data and the possibilities that come from sharing it, instead of hoarding it. The implications of this are vast and I suspect will be long-standing. Many have and will continue to wonder if this decision will have positive or negative effects on Twitter's revenue model, and perhaps only time will tell. But it has made it nearly impossible to create a product strategy that doesn't involve an API.

Though this may be the most important product influence to come from Twitter, there are a few more that I suspect will make their way into many of the new entries into the consumer internet market next year. To be sure, Twitter isn't the only thing to cause these trends, but it's almost certainly the most important. Without further ado, here are the things I expect to see in profusion over the coming year:

- The dominance of the stream. While we may have already seen the stream format of content consumption take the wheel, 2010 will be the year it achieves total domination. In recent months we've seen stream-based models mosey their way into almost every corner of the internet, even penetrating the veritable Fort Knox of Google search results pages. With new services springing up on this model left and right and more and more people getting comfortable with their format and aesthetics, I wouldn't be surprised if more than one major media outlet (read newspaper) moved entirely toward a stream-based interface. And I think they'd all be smart to adopt some version of it - the box and column layout of print never translated well to the web.

- Asymmetric social connections. It used to be simple: I'm your friend, so you're my friend, right? Wrong. Twitter and every other social media service have brought us into the era of one-to-many communication - the "follow" model. I can follow you, you don't have to follow me. While at first glance it seems to make relationships less meaningful, it can often make them more useful. From location services to music streaming, asymmetric connections are making all kinds of social services easier to engage with and more valuable.

- Stackable networking. This is the phenomenon I like to think about as 'everyone plays nice with everyone else,' and it's almost - dare I say it? - web socialism. But the web has always been a symbiotic culture, of sorts, and the emergence of open data platforms and the adoption of a few open (err, mostly open, thanks FB) protocols is ultimately something that creates more value for everyone. Sure, some of these companies are probably bleeding value by outsourcing their networks, in a sense, but if that's the case they probably aren't going to make it anyways. The community of applications gets more powerful and more efficient, and ultimately the users are the ones that win. All in all it's a good trend and one we'll see continue in 2010.

- Privately created, publicly available curations. Twitter Lists is the easiest example to cite here, but there are tons of other examples of this phenomenon: music blogs and services like blip.fm and last.fm, product wish lists like those we find on Amazon and now others, and the thousands of lists of books, movies - almost anything you can imagine. I think we'll see lots of ways to curate and then publish personalized content materialize in 2010, and we hope Pinyadda's a big part of that trend. By giving our users a unique way to discover content from all over web and easily share what they've found, we hope that we might make the process of consuming content on the web just a little more enjoyable and social in 2010.

What do you think about the future of the consumer internet? Are we destined for a fundamental shift in the way we experience the web, or just a continuation of the trends we've already seen? And what will come of Twitter? Leave your predictions in the comments.

The Top 3 Open Source Stories to Follow

2009-12-16T13:00:00.001-05:00

1. EU seen likely to OK Oracle-Sun deal: Oracle, an international company with more than $50 billion put in an offer to purchase Sun Microsystems, the creator of such open-source products as Java and MySQL. The purchase, which has been under investigation by the European Union based on anti-trust concerns, is now likely to go through because Oracle has claimed that it will maintain MySQL.

MySQL, which is currently Oracle's main competitor when it comes to relational database management, is likely to see a significant drop in usage, however. According to a study conducted by the 451 group, MySQL usage will see a 10% drop over the next four years if Oracle-Sun merger goes through. How will this drop in usage affect Oracle's decision to maintain the popular open-source technology? Only time will tell....

2. Google Public DNS: Recently, Google expanded another technological branch and opened its own public DNS service, a service they are offering free of charge. Basically, DNS acts like the internet's Yellow Pages, matching up IP addresses (location of websites based on numbers) to their domain names (like http://www.pinyadda.com, for example). The major beef with the project thus far is performance. With the slow uptake of Google Wave, one wonders if Google's product hot streak is coming to an end.

3. China to nuture open-source software development: Just as the title states. In appears that the Chinese yet again are making the correct technological decisions from the top-down.

Tearing Down Bridges in Order to Connect the World

2009-12-16T12:23:00.003-05:00

I recently had an interesting conversation about how the Internet is changing the structure of people's social graphs that I thought I would share here. I have written before about the concept of the "weak tie" (WT) in network analysis and the important role they play in the dissemination of information through social networks (link to Granovetter's Strength of WT paper). My recent conversation was about the extinction of "bridges" online. A bridge is formally defined as an edge within a graph that if deleted, would cause its endpoints to to lie in different components of a graph. An easier way to understand a bridge is to see the image to the right - the members of the two groups would have no connections to the other group if Bill and Mike did not have a relationship. Their connection is the bridge between the two groups.

Building your social graph has become relatively frictionless online - the click of a button on a social network or the sending of an email creates a connection between you and another person, most of which would be classified as "weak ties". However, as our graphs expand and we interact with more people online, the concept of a bridge is beginning to face extinction. Interaction used to have physical limitations before the Internet, and as the web and specifically social media evolves, our interactions with people are increasing exponentially. While bridges are far from being extinct - our world's population is around 7B and world Internet population is around 1.67B as of June 2009 according to Miniwatts Marketing Group - it will inevitably happen at some point. In fact, once global internet use rises above 50-60%, the extinction of bridges will be expedited significantly.

So what does this mean for theories like Granovetter's and the overall social structure with regards to the dissemination of information? Well, starting with the first part of the question, Granovetter's theory will still hold. Good information will still pass through weak ties, since your strong ties typically have access to much of the same information that you do which does not lead to the discovery of new things. Granovetter simply used the concept of a bridge to validate a weak tie within a network, so future studies of information dissemination will have to find more sophisticated ways to determine the strength of people's relationships - such as measuring the amount of times people interact through different platforms, how they interact, what they share, etc. The range of measurements on ties will increase, and we will see many more relational classifications. Many fascinating theories and insights will come from these advanced studies. We will begin to see a rapid increase in these starting in the next 2-3 years.

The effect on the overall social structure that the extinction of bridges will have is already starting to show. It is democratizing. It allows for the free and open exchange of information and ideas that in the past was stymied by physical restraints of delivery and production systems, as well as oppressive people with power over others - the production and delivery restraints and pretty much gone, and oppression will struggle to survive as the world becomes mores connected. I believe movements like those seen in Iran will become more commonplace as coordination and communication between peoples online is very hard to prevent. Bridge extinction is bringing incredible collaboration and competition to just about everything in the world. Typically in the past bridges were symbols of connection and progress, however in the digital age we live in, it is the extinction of bridges that is bringing people from all over the world closer together for good.

The Future is Social (It shared that with me)

2009-12-16T08:30:00.001-05:00

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post a couple days ago on his popular blog called "Why Social Beats Search." In it, he alludes to Mike Arrington's post about the rise of automated content production and its effect on the larger content ecosystem. I encourage you to read both posts in their entirety and filter through the comments thread, but in the interest of brevity here's the nut from Fred's post, which is actually a part of a comment he left on Arrington's:

"social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t."

This has a lot do with what we're working on at Pinyadda and I think the point is worth commenting on. While we can complain about "information overload" as much as we want, and bemoan the emergence of hyper-velocity content production, the fact is that these things are here to stay. Ironically, the rise of machine-generation is leading many of us, Fred included, to use a large community of human entities (formerly known as "people") as a giant filter that helps us navigate this torrent of information.

Content is being produced at a volume and with a velocity never before seen by humankind. In the past, neither our social graphs nor any machine filters would have stood the test of the barrage. But digital social networks have made our graphs larger; their power more formidable. As these networks begin to make their utility felt, we're becoming more comfortable with the concept of sharing, moving beyond the perception of narcissism it once connoted. In this new ecosystem, sharing is not the cause of distraction and overload but the antidote; no longer the noise but the signal. A subset of the population has seen this transition coming, but the sea change is just now truly beginning.

The internet, having first rescued us from the relative drudgery of human-to-human content discovery ("no more asking librarians!" we screamed), has now thrown us back into each others' digitally enhanced arms, begging for the same sort of verification we used to get from our Dewey-Decimal-savvy friends ("can someone please tell me this is reliable?"). Search is still a good tool for some things and will continue to be so for a considerable time. But I have to agree with Fred's general philosophy that in the long term, the volume of content will make even the most advanced search a less effective tool than the social referral of our trusted sources. The great thing is that the internet is spawning new applications and platforms that allow us to leverage our social connections in more powerful ways than could ever have been imagined before.

So bring on the explosion of content. In the end, the result is more (and more powerful) human-to-human collaboration than we've ever seen. Make no doubt about it, this a the beginning of a revolution in how people find information and media, and it will be global, instantaneous, and inherently social.

What do you think about the future of content? Do you trust your social network to bring you relevant information, or do you think search and other technologies will continue to reign supreme? Let us know in the comments, or send me an email at austin[at]pinyadda[dot]com.

Capturing the Cat-Herders

2009-12-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I mused philosophical about the segment of media that exists between large media outlets (many of the "Old" variety) and the platforms that enable simple sharing and dissemination of all forms of media - for simplification purposes, the Twitters of the world.

The gap between the publication of "iron-core" original content and simple retweets is filled by cacophony of voices that represent the professional and advanced amateur segments of the blogosphere. These are the folks producing consistent, medium-to-high quality content, often using other media as a starting point or central focus. Generally speaking, this is the "here's my take on this issue" crowd.

The value of this type of media production is the context it provides for larger issues, or the refocusing of those issues for other populations. The context can be subject-based ("what this means for science"), geographically-based ("what this means for western Kentucky"), or demographically-based ("what this means for hemaphroditic cat-herders"). In each case, the original value of the content has been augmented by way of analysis and personalization. It's good stuff.

From the standpoint of the media industry, however, it's a serious problem. People are repurposing content that cost good money to produce and disseminating it to thousands of niche audiences that are hard to find, nearly impossible to market to. Potential advertising revenue is flying out the door and into the ether, newspapers are closing, the proverbial sky is falling.

But the problem isn't that value of content is declining - in fact, I'd argue it's increasing. Instead, media is faced with the gargantuan problem of creating a new system to capture the value of a fast-paced, diffusion-based content ecosystem. From my perspective, there are three things that need to happen in order for advertisers to take advantage of these niche audiences and begin capturing some of the value being created by the landscape of content production.

1) Content Standards - Somehow, some way, we need to create some meta-data standards that allow individual content items to be discovered. This is not, like the AP's failed attempt, a measure to increase ownership and prevent dissemination. It's exactly the opposite - a measure to ensure that the cat-herders can easily find content that's relevant to them, and so the marketers and advertisers can find the cat-herders and make relevant offers that add real value to their lives.

2) New Aggregation Systems - As sources become more abundant and more diffuse, expecting each of these small content publishers to exist as a standalone destination site isn't realistic. We need new aggregation systems that go beyond simple source aggregation (the RSS model) and include the ability to aggregate content by topic, using the meta-data referred to above and more importantly, leveraging the power of the social web to help like-minded users discover relevant content. Think Digg meets AllTop meets a personalized RSS bundle. This is, in some ways, the cable channel model, where shows are packaged according to interests and subjects (Golf Channel, HGTV, Food Network, etc) with one key difference: the content produces aren't subject to those that control the pipes, allowing for much more niche-focused content to be produced and discovered by its audience. The critical mass necessary to support topical programming is orders of magnitude lower on the internet than on television. Getting readers in one place, even if content comes for a thousand of them, will allow more of the value to be captured.

3) Intelligent Ad Networks - Where are the cat-herders today? What are they reading? These are the questions that the next generation of advertising technology will have to answer. Matching static display adds with individual pages or sources is a losing battle and can never achieve the kind of relevance the web demands. The internet is increasingly becoming a narrowcast ecosystem, and trying to apply advertising techniques from the broadcast world is a lost cause - but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Instead of doing demographic surveys and guessing about who might be reading a publication, the increasing specificity of content production is doing the targeting for advertisers. It's no secret who is reading the cat-herder blogs, but the advertisers will have to create new systems to reach them. Following the social media pulse and gathering real-time traffic metrics will be key to helping future advertisers find out exactly where their customers are, when.

This is a complicated market to tap, but the players (there will be many) who help to create solutions for an industry in the midst of disruption will reap vast benefits while at the same time helping both producers and consumers of content.

Half-way Around the World, Pinyadda is Being Made: Introducing VST

2009-12-09T12:13:00.000-05:00

In August 2008, our team here in Boston began working with a group of developers, VST, from Hanoi University of Technology in Vietnam. Our first project was a simple call and display function along with a minor template change. Since that project, we now work full time, around the clock with VST on complex projects dealing with our system architecture, crawling technology, semantic taxonomy and many other exciting components of Pinyadda. Like the Pinyadda Team, they are young and entrepreneurial and are passionate about their work and we'd like to introduce all of them.

First up is Christian. As the chief executive of VST, Christian's focuses is on running the business side of VST. Next is Jimmy, who is one of three team leaders for VST who runs a small group of developers working on Pinyadda. Jimmy maintains similar late hours as we here at Pinyadda do. His availability during our morning hours has been extremely helpful when last-minute tasks need to be completed. Jimmy's command of Linux operations and efficiencies have made Pinyadda a faster site as well as a more agile company.

Kurt is another team leader for VST and takes his nick-name from Kurt Cobain (his favorite rockin' roller). Kurt's tireless work on developing Pinyadda's indexing system has been invaluable. Over the last 12 months, Kurt and I have learned much about open-source technologies while tackling challenging obstacles together. MySQL, PHP and Javascript are just a few of Kurt's specialities.

The final team leader for VST is Mars. Although Mars is relatively new to our project, he has quickly learned and become a great help in project management. Thomas, the PHP and CSS efficiency expert for VST, and Sarah, the customer service representative, are both terrific at what they do and always available when needed.

Last but not least is the developers whose terrific development is the driving force behind Pinyadda. They are HieuT, HungPT, HungTX, LamHV, TamPT, and VuTD. Without the work of each of these devs, Pinyadda would be nothing but an idea (but a great one at that!)

Trends about Trends - Content Density and the Future of Media

2009-12-08T08:18:00.002-05:00

With all of the recent debate over the future of news as we know it, I have been thinking about the way media coverage is evolving. The idea I've been mulling is something I'm calling "content density", and it's related to a number of terms we're already familiar with, such as "popular," "viral," "trend," "meme" and a host of other names that seemed to be getting used almost interchangeably. When boiled down to their most fundamental level, they deal with the relationship between two variables: volume and time. When relatively high volumes of content are produced in a relatively short period of time, producing high "content density," the result is a "trend" (I'll try to stick with that term for the purpose of continuity, though it certainly carries proprietary connotations which I don't necessarily mean to imply). Represented graphically, it's the peak of the curve.

It's important to recognize here that I'm using the word "trend" to mean the high point of total exposure across all media. The actual thing being exposed can be nearly anything: a news article, a viral video, a song, a particular brand or product, an advertising campaign - whatever. If it can be read about, seen, listened to, and shared (by means digital or otherwise), it counts.

Trends have been around forever and will continue to be around for a long time. It's human nature. But the internet is adding all kinds of new twists to the scenario represented in the graph above. For example, while the time axis might previously have been measured in weeks or months, it's now more appropriate to measure in hours, days, minutes - even seconds. And while we might have once measured the volume of content in sources like magazines and newspapers, the atomic unit of content is shrinking almost constantly, leaving us to measure in articles, blog posts, reactions, comments, tweets, text messages, even individual keywords. Though it comes as no surprise to any of us, what this means is that we are producing more content than ever, faster than ever.

But if we're interested in content density, we simply adjust the scale of the axes and our graph looks pretty much the same.* But when we take a look at the composition of that content, we find that things have changed dramatically. Where is this content being produced? Who is producing it? And what relative value does it all have? This is where things get interesting. My money bets on a breakdown that looks something like the following graph:

There are several possible variations on this representation, each can be supported by case studies that detail where and when media influence was founded, how it traveled, and which of these tranches carried the load. For this post, suffice it to say that these relationships are changing every day and new models are emerging constantly.

The graph shows traditional "Old Media" producing the least amount of content over the shortest amount of time. I think that current market conditions and changing information consumption patterns will continue to exert downward pressure on this segment of the content landscape. I believe some of these institutions will survive; others, it seems nearly certain, will not.

The second and biggest tier I've labeled New Media and Value-Add Social Media. This needs a bit of an explanation. By "New Media" I mean blogs and other blog-like publications that are filling the gap being vacated by traditional media outlets and serving smaller niche markets that previously existed only in much smaller, more diffuse communities. "Value-Add Social Media" refers to any number of media activities that include the sharing, repurposing, and responding to of other original media. In short, it's any form of media that uses and explicitly references a previously produced piece of content as its basis for creation or main point of contention. Examples of this behavior can be found on almost every "social media" platform, from Facebook and YouTube to newer applications like Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous (though I think Twitter behavior more often falls into the third tranche).

The third tier I've labeled Simple Sharing, and it's meant to represent the behavior of sharing content without modification or addition. In this category I'd put most Facebook shares, almost all retweets and a good portion of 'regular' tweets, and various other sharing actions that don't add significant value to the content being shared. This is a hugely important tier in the total content volume makeup and it will continue to grow taller over time. But it's important to realize that this segment and the one below it are complementary - that is, they will help each other continue to realize growth. Much to Rupert Murdoch's dismay, this growth has negative effects for the Old Media cohort.

My point from all of this is that a few simple rules of media still apply. Where media is being produced and consumed, people will gather. Where people gather, influence can be gained, and wherever influence is being gained, from Jakarta to Brooklyn, advertisers, marketers, and salespeople will arrive in short order.

Let's return to the graph, shall we?

Google is making loads of cash by advertising against search results and established media outlets that have audiences large enough to drive high CPMs. With enough eyeballs, any destination media outlet can drive revenues with advertising, and Google is quite happy to be the conduit through which that revenue travels.

Twitter (and to some extent Facebook, though it's a different beast) is leveraging the top of the curve to harvest data that it believes is valuable. This is the real-time search, trending topics bet that's gaining a lot of steam lately. Time will tell if these wagers will pay, but at the moment there are a lot of very smart people who seem to think they will.

Then there's the middle. No gargantuan captive audiences, no oodles of instantaneous reaction, but lots and lots of high-quality media being produced. The supply is so large as to drive the market price of this content to zero, and the breadth of suppliers and their lack of retention mitigates the effectiveness of broadcast marketing. In other words, individual entities find themselves in a conundrum: they're not quite unique enough to generate subscription revenue, not quite big enough to live on advertising. But the content is there, and the composite audience is there. In the aggregate, this market may well be the biggest of all.

In my next post, I'll elaborate on this concept and make an argument for the type of entity that's necessary to take advantage of this opportunity and help create a new media ecosystem that's distributed, egalitarian, and economically revolutionary.

*Data supports an argument that the volume of content is increasing at a significantly greater rate than its velocity, but for the purpose of this post, I'll assume the rates of change are about the same. I'm more concerned with the composition of the total content volume, whatever its relative scale.

Man vs. Machine: Google, AOL and the Future of News

2009-12-07T17:19:00.004-05:00

Earlier this month, there was word of Google filing a patent entitled Systems and Methods for Improving for Improving the Ranking of News Articles, which organized and ranked news links partially based on a quality score of the news source. Last week, I came across an article on Pinyadda fromMediaPost AOL Readies Its Robot News-Writing Army, which discussed a similar strategy AOL is implementing with regards to an automated, algorithmic process for picking news stories for the site. These are hardly the first two instances of automated editorial services - The Huffington Post has a very clever way of automating A/B testing for article titles. Editorial boards shifting from man-power to machine powered is coming rapidly and causing a great stir among original content producers. Anybody who has wifi has sure followed the Google-NewsCorp feud over the past several weeks.

While I can understand the frustration of pouring time and resources in to making content and have its value diminish quickly as content is pumped out at break-neck pace all over the web, I think those trying to fight the changes brought about by the Internet by insisting on pay walls and resisting distribution technologies such as Google have the wrong focus. Many journalists are nervous that real-time search may make them extinct, but I believe we will see quality producers who create content strategically for an on-demand world thrive as technologies emerge that help users organize the torrent of information and cherry-pick what is most valuable to them. Where content publishers need to be focusing their efforts is on developing better forms of advertising that align with the content they produce along with better information architectures that help drive user's to valuable advertisements.

For example, as displayed in the graph below, sites such as NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com and HuffingtonPost.com receive collectively receive around 30 million unique visitors per month. This is an awful lot of traffic that is not effectively being monetized because of poor advertising practices and lack of innovation on behalf of the publishers. Take a trip to NYTimes or WashingtonPost and click on the Sports sections. I perused each for about five minutes and was only displayed one sports related advertisement - the rest were for cars and financial services. At the very least, news sites like the Times and Post need to be serving contextually relevant ads to begin monetizing their large amounts of traffic. Imagine if Google's search ads weren't relevant to the search query entered by a user - would they make nearly as much money as they do if this were the case? Of course not.

I will put together another post in the coming weeks digging in deeper to the architectural and contextual failures of online pubs such as the Times and the Post but before I do I would love to hear other's thoughts on advertising you have seen on these sites. What do you think pubs need to do in order to monetize their traffic? Can these sites survive off of advertising alone?

Data and Design - Part 3: Let the Data do the Driving

2009-11-25T16:24:00.001-05:00

In the first post of this series, I laid out some of my own thoughts on the role of data in web interface design, and in the second I brought in some voices that tended to emphasize intuition at least as much as data. Here I'll explore the other side more thoroughly and show some examples of designs that use data as their primary drivers.

As I was looking around for resources and links for this post, I stumbled upon a couple of interesting things. Take for example, the curious case of the $300 million button in which the simple redesign of a form and one particular button caused a gargantuan jump in revenue. Then there's the famous 41 shades of blue story that reveals how heavily Google relies on data to influence its design decisions.

Yet the most interesting example I found came straight from the source. YouTube's blog features a post called "Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment" about some changes it recently made to its pages and the process by which they went about doing it.

Using Google Website Optimzer to help them identify and test different versions of various icons, color combinations, and positioning, they were able to quickly test the conversion rate of each option, graph them against each other, and find out what the most optimal combination was:

"While we could have hypothesized which elements result in greater conversions (for example, the color red is more eye-catching), multivariate testing reveals and proves the combinatorial impact of different configurations. Running tests like this also help guide our design process: instead of relying on our own ideas and intuition, you have a big part in steering us in the right direction. In fact, we plan on incorporating many of these elements in future evolutions of our homepage."

Being able to do this kind of testing without huge budgets is a great, great thing, and Google Website Optimizer is a fantastic product that lets anyone test multiple combinations for any pages to optimize the rate of user-determined conversion. That's cool stuff, and it eliminates the need for lengthy discussions about this graphic or that graphic. The one problem I see is that it takes a relatively large amount of traffic to gather a large enough sample size to make truly data-driven decisions. For example, while it's possible for YouTube to gather enough impressions for each of the 1,024 variants to make a legitimate decision in a reasonable amount of time, we might not all have the same luxuries. Obviously, scale of testing should be equivalent to scale of traffic. But the bottom line is that ability to test in this fashion exists - so why not?

Luke Stevens, an author and speaker on the subject, agrees:

"On the web, you can measure what people do. You can measure what they click, how long they stay for, if they scroll, how many pages they view, if they ‘bounce’, if they return, and so on. You can ask if they were successful or not. For perhaps the first time in history we can accurately measure all interactions with a piece of design.

If it can be measured, it can be improved. And each of those improvements represents helping someone do something a little more successfully."

I encourage everyone to go and read the original post on Lukes's blog. It's full of great insight on this and I share a lot of the sentiments he expresses there. But this one excerpt is the nut of the story and where I'd like to leave this discussion for now.

Data and design have a symbiotic relationship. They work together to create meaningful and enjoyable experiences for people on the web. When we think about design in the context of an internet that allows and expects large-scale social interaction, multiple actions per session, and rich applications with a multitude of features and interfaces, it becomes quickly apparent that designer has no better friend than the data set.

To attempt to render all the differences in aesthetic tendency, design ethos, and user behavior into a cohesive design is an impossible task, and trying to do so will lead to frustration, lost productivity, and ultimately low conversions. But as Luke articulates so well, "In web design, people click or they don’t. They stay or they go. That’s good to know."

Indeed it is. Let's measure what matters, and may the best design win.

The 3 Best Tech Reads from Pinyadda Over the Weekend

2009-11-23T21:16:00.001-05:00

This weekend provided some excellent Tech reads. Here are the top 3:

News Corp, Microsoft want to lock Google out (Variety.com)- Basically, Microsoft wants News Corp. (owners of the Wall Street Journal and Fox just to name a few assets) to pull all of its content off of Google. If this went through, it'd mean no more Googling for Wall Street Journal or New York Post articles. This is a must-watch development.
China Cyber Espionage Threatens U.S., Report Says (InformationWeek.com)- A congressional group claims that Chinese cyber attacks on the US will increase to 87,570 in 2009, a 60% increase from 2008. Some of these attacks, the group claims, will come from hackers not even affiliated with the Chinese government. Anyone else terrified?
Google Chrome OS Depends On Hardware Partners (InformationWeek.com)- Google's operating system Chrome (think Google's version of Windows) is outlined in this awesome read. I see two tremendous advantages with Google Chrome OS. First, it will be open source so the creativity of all developers can be leveraged to make awesome programs and features. Secondly, it will be all in the cloud, meaning you'll have access to your documents wherever you go.

Google Stimulating Romance, French Pastries, "Search on."

2009-11-23T15:34:00.001-05:00

As I was sifting through my Pinyadda feed the other day I clicked on an article shared by Reid Snyder (old friend of mine from Hamilton College, I recommend adding to your network on Pinyadda for sports, politics and/or business) from the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times entitled Why Do We Hate. Typically I enjoy all of the posts from the Freakonomic's blog, and I especially enjoy the discussions Reid and I often have on Pinyadda about items we share. However on this particular trip to NYTimes.com, it wasn't a story that grabbed my attention, it was an advertisement. Because of the ad, which you can see in the screen shot below, I didn't end up reading the Freakonomics post or discussing the item with Reid. I ended up watching advertisements promoting Google's search engine. Yes you read that correctly - Google, the company that never needed to promote its search engine through advertising and prided itself on having a minimal advertising budget, is now promoting its primary asset through banner ads.

Never have I thought I would need to be convinced to use Google as my primary search engine, but after watching the YouTube video that the banner ad brought me to, I found myself wondering if Bing and the vast assortment of real-time search contenders had the Google guys sweating. What I found particularly interesting about the Google ad, which you can watch below, was what they seemed to be selling rather than the fact that they were advertising. The ad, entitled "Parisian Love", is a 53 second story told through a series of searches that starts with the user searching for study abroad programs in Paris, leading to searches for advice on impressing French women, and ending with searches for churches in Paris and instructions on how to assemble a baby crib. As to be expected from a Google ad, it was clever, simple and enjoyable to watch, but it did very little promotion of any of the aspects of the actual search engine. Rather, the ad seemed to be more of a promotion for the general act of conducting a Google search, particularly angling for an emotional connection - in this case romantic - to what we have all become so accustomed to referring to as simply "Googling".

The ad, along with several others from the ad campaign "Search Stories", potentially suggests two things. First, Google may be starting to feel that the plain and simple look and feel of their search could be lacking in some personality compared to Bing's search, which has a new background image every day with four interesting tid-bits of information embedded in to each background image that take you to Bing search results pages for the information being highlighted. When I conduct a Google search, I typically have something in mind that I am searching for - and while I occasionally will get lost in a string of Google searches that lead me away from my initial search topic, it is rare that I kill time Googling. After visiting Bing today and learning about the Antonine Wall on what appeared to be Bing's version of Wikipedia pages, I could see why the personality and small bit of guidance for someone not actively hunting found on Bing can be valuable.

The second thing the ad suggested is regarding a more significant trend of how people are starting to get their information online rather than small user experience differences between search engines. With the rising popularity of social media and the "stream" concept we are starting to receive a good amount of content and information indirectly through people rather than through endlessly Googling things. As the web becomes more social and the implicit web continues to develop, what we now know as searching will seem relatively archaic compared to services that can deliver valuable information without having to be prompted. As social interaction on the Web increases, Google needs to be thinking about ways to increase user interaction in ways that will improve the information retrieval process beyond putting together nifty ads that create a fleeting sense of romantic connection to someone who Googled French truffle shops in order to impress a girl.

What are your thoughts on Google's ad below and on the future of how we will be finding and receiving our information in the future? Would love other's feedback in the comments below.

Data and Design, Part Two: Context and Moderation

2009-11-20T10:05:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I wrote a post that began a discussion about the relationship between data and design, and I'd like to expand on that theme with this post.

I touched on both the importance of data and its limitations, and here I'd like to provide some more context for that discussion by bringing in some other voices. In June, Patrick Lynch, a web designer for Yale University and the author of the Web Style guide, wrote a piece for A List Apart called "Visual Decision Making." In the article, Lynch primarily focuses on new research suggesting that aesthetics play a larger role in user experience than commonly thought. I tend to agree with his point of view. Here's an excerpt:

"Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). [Sources here: 4, 5] These instant visceral reactions to web pages happen in virtually all users, are consistent over visit length, and strongly influence the user’s sense of trust in the information. In short, users have made fundamental, consistent, and lasting aesthetic decisions about the credibility and authority of sites before major eyetracking events begin."

Since most usability testing focuses on task completion, click streams, and navigational ease, this kind of qualitative response is nearly impossible to capture. It can, however, play an important role in the overall user experience. This isn't to dismiss the usability itself, but instead to place it within context - even sites with great usability metrics may fail to create a sense of enjoyment or engagement. Depending on the type of site or application, this may be of little importance - a company intranet doesn't need to make people feel warm and fuzzy - but it might also be the difference between people "getting it" and people "loving it." The bottom line from Lynch: "You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site." (Brownie points for anyone who defines "auto-magically" in the comments).

Douglass Bowman, a driving force behind the design for Google Calendar, Blogger, and Wired Magazine's web presence, among many others, eventually butted heads with the data monster too many times and decided it was time to leave. On his departure in March of last year, he wrote:

"When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions."

Does this sound a little like a whiny designer? Yes, it certainly does. And when you have as many users as Google does, it gets much harder to step outside the box, for fear of the masses coming back with a vengeance. But it can be done (look no further than Facebook, whose first major redesign caused a venerable digital ruckus) and sometimes the effects are quite positive. If Facebook had relied solely on user data when testing the first iteration of its stream-style design, I'm quite sure it would have been abandoned on the drawing board. Again, the point here is not that data isn't a hugely important factor in designing interfaces, but that it can be overdone. In the case of Google, for instance, I would argue that a little bit of aestheticism would go a long way. Gmail has done this pretty well with themes, but other products (ahem, Reader) remain strange, complex and often confusing beasts.

The purpose of this post, however, isn't to throw data under the bus. It's to help us try to understand what data will be most useful, how to harvest them, and how to put them to use. Here I turn to Allison J. Head, the principal and founder of usability research firm Head and Associates , and what she's called "emblematic measures." In short, she defines these as the measures that are easily understood with complex analysis. A primary example on an emblematic measure, she says, is bounce rate: "Everyone (from the CEO on down) gets this metric right away and can understand if it is good or bad." These are the metrics, she argues that ought to carry the most weight. When constructed correctly they are simple, easy to understand, and easy to analyze. Two other measures she discusses are Site Abandonment Measure (SAM), the percentage of people who give up on a task, and Site Abandonment Rate (SAR), a more traditional which measures the rate of users that end their sessions from specific pages - a setup guide or a shopping cart screen, for example.

These measures, she argues, are the right ones to track because they help point to large problems that have binary metrics: users either completed the task, or they didn't. Simple game. Smaller stuff, she admits, is harder to measure, as much because of the presence of data as the absence: "With so much of our research focused on striving for accurate representations of something as amorphous, varied, and hotly debated as user behavior, we are a profession usually awash in data, practicing a less-than-perfect science."

To make a convoluted analogy, the world of web design must rely on creationism and evolution simultaneously, making judgements that are scientific, artistic, and emotional at the same time. In the third installment of this series, I'll lean more toward the left-brained analysis and focus on how data can reveal insight that might never have been found otherwise.

The Symbiosis of Data and Design

2009-11-18T13:00:00.001-05:00

Last Thursday, we had a great user testing session where we got to meet a lot of our users, registered a few new ones, and generally had a good time getting to know the people that represent our awesome user base. These people are insightful, extremely bright, and just plain fun to be around. I'd like to thank them for making it over to our humble headquarters here in Boston, and I hope that some more of you will join us at our next session on the November 19th (email me if you'd like to come).

While we had a great time just interacting casually with our users after the primary testing was over, the real value of the event revealed itself after they'd left - and left behind great data for us. It's with this data that I'd like to begin a discussion that will span a few posts, focusing on the relationship between research data and applied product design.

There are all different kinds of data - behavioral, demographic, preferential, etc. - and each of these has incredible value for us. What products are people using? How are they using them? How are they using our product and what do they think about it? How do they perceive themselves as users? The answers to these questions give us a window into the hearts and minds of the people that make up our market. They help us understand the gap (hopefully small) between what our customers expect and what they feel they're currently getting.

Learning all of this is great, but products aren't built from thoughts and opinions and amalgamated data charts. Products are built by a few people who make a lot of small decisions about how things should look, feel, and work. Accurate, well-constructed data is important in the design process not as definitive statements about what exactly will work. Instead, data is a tool that can be used to clearly define those approaches that won't work and to narrow the breadth of potential design solutions.

So how can we use the data we gather to inform design decisions? There are lots of strategies out there, but here are a few basic tactics we try to use when constructing test sessions to gather usable data:

1) Test themes, not specifics. While there are certainly times we want to get feedback on really small features or design elements, it's usually easier to apply data when testing two or more different themes with distinct differences, where elements are arranged in a fashion that's clearly different to a user's eye. If design options are too similar, the feedback can be muddled, whereas wide variations often produce stronger, more passionate responses.

2) Numbers are useful, but words are honest. When we think data, we think numbers. But qualitative data - words, usually - can be just as important, and are often easier to read than numbers. Especially when dealing with small sample sizes (as we often are), it's possible to get numbers that can be misleading when taken alone. In addition, there are stigmas that come with answering survey questions, even if users know their data will be anonymous. On the other hand, getting people to talk through their experiences as they use the product or take the test can reveal all kinds of difficulties, frustrations, and gratifications that don't shine through from a page of statistics. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has long advocated for the power of qualitative data, especially during a more agile, iterative design process.

3) Ask what matters. There are some parts of a new design that the designer or team has decided are essential features because of their design requirements or other objectives. If an element, such as an action button, has been included and placed somewhere for a very specific reason, it may not make sense to test it. (Of course, if users respond negatively to the element without any prompt; it's probably a good idea to re-think this decision). Ask questions about the elements you're not dead-set on, gather the data, and then make decisions. Relying comprehensively on the data, especially if it comes from a wide range of users, lends itself to a loss of consistency and a common aesthetic.

In the end, it comes down to doing the research, looking at the numbers, and trusting your team's intuition. More data is always better, but finding ways to use and qualify that data is essential to keeping it from becoming overwhelming, especially in a small team without dedicated usability people.

I'll continue with a few more posts on this theme, highlighting some examples of design influenced by data and the musings of some more-established sources on the matter. If you have any thoughts on usability testing, design, or the role of data in the design process, leave a comment!

Facebook Starting to Understand the Value of Edges

2009-11-17T07:52:00.007-05:00

Last week, MediaPost noticed that Facebook now allows advertisers to target friends of people who are connected to their Page, group, event or application. As long as user privacy is handled properly (you can block being displayed on ads in your privacy settings), this is a very smart move by Facebook. It shows that Facebook is starting to understand the importance of "edges" for advertisers for targeting different users within a network. An edge in graph theory (warning: embedded link is for nerds only) is simply a set of two elements - in this case the edge consists of the friendship connections of a user who is participating in some aspect of an advertisers Facebook presence.

As I have discussed on this blog before (here and here), a better understanding of graph theory, specifically with regards to edge values will be critical for developing better solutions for advertisers to disseminate information to users on SNS. While it is still a limited function, it gives people the first look of the future of advertising that will extend well beyond Facebook and to all web properties. By leveraging a user's connections, advertisers can start to create "social micro-sponsorships" - meaning that an advertiser can use their regular, everyday supporters (i.e. you and me, my apologies if you're not "regular" like me and are actually a big deal) as advocates of their products and services when advertising to these user's social connections. In the future, Icy Hot won't be limited to paying Shaq large sums of money to promote their product - rather, people who are Shaq fans and particularly are interested in his opinion with regards to analgesic heat rubs will will see Icy Hot referred them by the Diesel, but most of us will begin seeing Icy Hot referred to us Unlce Jim with the bad back who swears by it over BENGAY. Social micro-sponsorships can begin to transform ads towards becoming a form of word of mouth referral from people you actually know and have participated in some form with the product or service being promoted. What is yet to be accomplished is a way for this ad form to be produced through genuine social referral rather than sneaky tactics on behalf of different advertising systems to promote said sponsorship without user validation (cough, beacon). So far, the new option on Facebook's ads seem to be relatively harmless, and if users begin to feel comfortable with this concept it will allow Facebook to dive much deeper in leveraging the power of user's connections for the promotion of paid information. But trust will be key, which hasn't been a particular strength for Facebook in the past, though my guess is they will be learning from their mistakes as they move forward.

Over the next few months, I will be working on developing some concrete definitions for some of the concepts and theories discussed on this blog with regards to social network behavior and analysis. If you are interested in collaborating on some of these ideas I would greatly like feedback and input from you - feel free to email me at chase at pinyadda dot com.

AI, ABMs, and fun new stuff

2009-11-13T16:06:00.006-05:00

First, let's dive into a few new additions to the site this week that will make your life so much easier. All add pages (add people, add sites, and add tags) have had a face lift and will provide an easier and more efficient way to grow your pin. My favorite addition was the NEW sites tab within add sites. However, it does take a section away from my Friday blog posts, but now you can see all new sites within the last week on one page. (If you have visited the site recently you should know this, due to a neat little notification bar at the top of our site, that's new too!)

Onto a much more complex issue surrounding the future of the web, computing artificial intelligence. Kevin and I recently had a meeting with Mikhail Gorelkin, and one of the highlights we discussed was around computing complex algorithms. As the web gets smarter and with the introduction of semantic and adaptive websites, the resources to power these sites will be incredibly large and quite costly. You must find a way to spread out and diversify certain functions, maybe personalized vs. basic. If you are able to split certain profiles and assign certain machines to compute these algorithms on the fly, you will be able to achieve cost effecitve, real time accurate personalization. Enter agent based computational models or multi agent systems. Without diving into too much detail in this post (I smell a whitepaper) what this will allow us to do is diversify computing systems(agents) and accurately measure personalized network structures by monitoring the actions(decisions) and relationships of agents (users), which tend to be of their own interests, interacting within a closed system. The outcome if done correctly will try to predict your thoughts, make trusted decisions on a users behalf, and define the future. Using artificial intelligence to mimic your intelligence.

Yikes, that was way too intense for a Friday.

New sites this week:

Check the new sites module on Pinyadda (suckers)

Cya next week,

$ligs

5 Free, Must-Have Tools for Outsourcing

2009-11-10T16:02:00.012-05:00

If you think it's tough keeping lines of communication open with Mike in the cubicle across the room, try to imagine managing a web development team based outside the U.S. The difference is literally day and night, because as the sun rises here in Boston, the sun is setting in Hanoi, Vietnam, where Pinyadda's development team is located.

For Pinyadda, this process is full of give and take...

The give? Interacting with a developer 8,000 miles away is much more difficult than interacting with one eight feet away. Add to this a small language barrier and a massive time zone difference and offshore development begins to look like a daunting task.

The take? Outsourcing to places like Vietnam tends to be cheaper without any sacrifice on the quality of development at all.

In our eyes the benefits far outweigh the frustrations.

Here are five must-have tools that will enable you to outsource effectively.

1. Skype
Skype's chat function is great, the skype-to-skype phone calls are always free and the wide-range of emoticons help overcome anything that may otherwise get lost in translation (kidding....sort of). I use this every single day to communicate with our developers and would be absolutely lost without it.

2. MediaWiki
As the free software behind Wikipedia.org, MediaWiki allows you to create a wiki that strictly revolves around your project. Specs, meeting agendas and brainstorms can be available for anyone to view and edit anytime. This is a much healthier alternative than emailing Word documents back and forth.

3. Google Docs
Specifically Google's spreadsheets. This is great for bug squashing.

4. Screentoaster
Anyone on either side of outsourcing knows the following phrase all too well: "But it is working here." With Screentoaster, you can capture of a video of your screen to precisely show what exactly you did to encounter a bug

5. DropBox
Have large files to send and emailing them would take too long? Just Dropbox it. Think of it as a specific folder on your machine that can be sync'ed up to anyone else's machine. We use this everyday for collaborating on Photoshop files that would take forever to send over email.

There you have it: 5 free tools that make outsourcing development work much less complicated. Stay tuned for my next post where I will highlight our team in Vietnam.

Social Network Content and the Lincoln MKS

2009-11-09T08:24:00.002-05:00

As I was working on the whitepaper I am writing about the four "value components" of social networking sites (SNS) last night, I came across a situation while perusing Facebook that I had to write about now rather than wait to discuss it in the paper. The topic is regarding the content that SNS play host to that serves as the "real estate" upon which marketers pay to place their advertisements on and around. As you will see from the two pictures below, one a screen shot of an ad for the Lincoln MKS on Facebook and the other a screen shot of a Google search results page for the Lincoln MKS, the "real estate" is quite different.

As you will see, I have edited out the lewd gesture in the screen shot from Facebook, however if you have any imagination at all you should be able to guess what the picture shows. While in most circumstances this certainly is not content that would have a place on our corporate blog, I decided to go ahead and post the picture for learning purposes to prove a point and because if you speak with anyone from my generation they will tell you this kind of content isn't far off from being par for the course on Facebook. In fact, this was one of several pictures along the lines of this kind of content that I came across in the same visit I considered using for this post.

Now just about anyone can see why the real estate on the Google search page might be more desirable than the real estate on the Facebook page for Lincoln as an advertiser here. For one thing, when advertising on Google you aren't trying to sell a four-door sedan with Weir leather trimmed seats and an EcoBoost V6 engine to someone who is trying to figure out why this girl hasn't untagged herself from this photo yet, let alone posted it in the first place. On the Google page however, the real estate is all high quality search results with matching information to the advertisements.

I like to think of content as the mechanism by which web properties channel and drive certain user behaviors. For example, Amazon wouldn't be great at selling books if the content on their site did not contain information about books, such as reviews, pricing, vendor information, reading recommendations, etc. So after seeing the Lincoln MKS ad, I decided to go through Facebook and mark down all the page types with ads that I could find. Below is my preliminary list, please add pages I may have forgotten in the comments.

Profiles (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, and any other application tabs)
Groups
Pages
Applications (Including Facebook's core apps such as links and notes)
Friend/People lists
News Feed
Search results pages

What I would be interested in seeing is the data on which page types have the highest click through rates on advertisements. My guess is the third party apps with specific information types driving a particular user behavior have the highest click throughs. Evidence of this could be the fact that Zynga, the second biggest advertiser on Facebook behind AT&T, spends approximately $2.5 million a month on Facebook advertising. Since users actively play Zynga games or other gaming apps while on Facebook, an ad for a new application would align with the content on those pages more directly than most other ads and pages found on Facebook. Again, I cannot say this for sure as this is simply a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess).

I believe moving forward allowing advertisers to have more control over what types of content their ads are paired with will be a good thing for social networking sites, specifically Facebook, in terms of developing better targeting for reaching users. What are your thoughts? What pages would you think are the best for reaching users through ads? Or do you think I am entirely off on this? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Indexing All for you

2009-11-06T15:44:00.003-05:00

Well this week's post will be short and to the point. We have recently finished a major milestone in general content indexing across the United States top news sites by circulation. The current growth focus is targeted at diving deep into specific industry verticals (ie. venture captial, advertising, healthcare...) and guess who gets to do most of the work...YOU. Well not really, but we definitely need the voice of our users telling us what they read everyday. I will rely heavily on our elite beta users and even the new guys to drive what content Pinyadda will index. This is your chance to personally receive exactly what you are looking for on the internet. Perhaps you just have a suggestion for a new tag or even a genre of content, we'll make it happen. Please post a comment or send me an email (greg at pinyadda dot com) and I will respond and get what you want indexed live right away.

New sites this week (all from users):
zerohedge.com, chrisdixon.org, paidcontent.org, moconews.org, contentsutra.org, paidcontent:uk.org, npr.org, designsponge.com, smittenkitchen.com, csmonitor.com, weekly standard.com, and commentarymagazine.com

Until next week,

sligs

ps. pinyadda is currently averaging 30,000 trusted content items a day

New Look and a Look at What's New

2009-11-05T10:37:00.009-05:00

We unveiled a couple of new features last week and though I mentioned them briefly in my last post I thought I'd take a minute to dig a little deeper. What follows is description of each feature and a little insight into the though process that went into them.

1) Universal Search. While search is a no-brainer for almost any website, it was a little different for us because we have so much content in our system and so many different content types. Page specific search functions will remain in some places, but we placed the new search bar in the header so that it's always available. You can now search all content types at once or specify a content type using the dropdown. Small feature, big usability improvement.

2) Email Notifications and '@' Replies. Instead of sending emails to users bugging them to come back to the site, we wanted to figure out how to give them something valuable that made them want to come back. You can now mention other Pinyadda users in your comments on any news item using the '@username' convention, and they'll receive an email with a link to the article and your comments. You can also choose to receive email updates when another user replies to a comment you've made. Our internal experimentation with this feature went great (we really liked it) and we've already noticed a big jump in user engagement since bringing it live.

The core idea for Pinyadda came in part from the need for a better way to manage group email lists where lots of great content in the form of both links and commentary were being shared. These features solve a big part of that problem that's something we're really happy about.

3) While it's not exactly a new feature, we've completely overhauled the Initial User Experience, including a brand-new Getting Started guide, a handful of prompts to help new users understand our core functionality, and host of interactive help icons all around the site. Making new users feel at home and letting them know that we're here to listen and help is huge priority for us and we'll continue to work hard to make each user's experience the best it can be. (If you're a user, feel free to email or call me at any time. I mean it!)

4) Again, not really a feature, per se, but we made a host of UI Changes and Language Adjustments to make things more clear around the site. We continue to abide by a "simpler is better" mantra when it comes to UI design and while we're not all the way there the latest changes are a big step in the right direction. We've included more visual cues, simplified navigation, and improved aesthetic consistency. If you noticed the changes, let us know what you think!

In the coming weeks you can expect to see even more improvements, including all new pages for adding People, Sites, and Tags, the ability to email items to friends outside of Pinyadda, and number of integrations with existing social networks. Suggestions and feature requests are always welcome. You can send them here.

If you're already a user, thank you. If you're not yet a user, head over to the site and sign up for an account. We can't wait to hear what you think.

Indexing Speed & Real Time Content

2009-11-02T11:52:00.012-05:00

First of all, I should mention that I'm a few days late in my post. Halloween is our favorite holiday here at Pinyadda, and I was entirely too busy playing tricks rather than treating you to Friday morning with Sliggity. So here's my blog post for Oct 30.

As you know, the hype about the interweb nowadays is this thing dubbed "real time." In context, I guess it makes sense - real time, meaning right now or when something really happened. But what if that thing never really happened and someone simply made up a rumor or published bogus content. My biggest qualm with this term is services like Twitter and oneriot utilizing it so heavily. Yes, when someone tweets about something it shows up right away on Twitter and with a slight delay on oneriot. However, I am more concerned with actual 'real' time 'content', meaning that it has value and can be verified. We'll come back to this topic shortly.

Next item; indexing speed. I am running a test (as we speak) in order to measure Google's content indexing speed and the time lapse until I receive a Google Alert. I will clock the time from the moment a content item is posted from this blog until it appears in Google search results and I receive my 'Pinyadda" Google Alert. While I am doing this, you can entertain yourself with some side reading. Here is a post by Charles Heflin back in 2008 about clocking the speed of content indexing (I like how he touches upon page rank influence). To touch upon Alltop, an RSS-powered aggregator that (in their words) allows you to answer the question "what's happening?" Well what's happening when? Yesterday? 5 minutes ago? Right now? Well their answer is once every hour...boring.

Now take Pinyadda's backend, which I like to call a 'real' time 'content' indexing service. I like it because you have to focus on real time, we are indexing new content within minutes of when the item is published, and then focus on real content, which is trusted and valuable to you.

Long enough here are the answers you have been waiting for:

2 minutes for search*
still waiting on google alert. UPDATE 2:52pm, what is the reason for the delay here?
not a controlled test b/c google owns blogger, will try again next week.

New sites this week:
The Blade, Tulsa World, Dayton Daily News, Press-Register, Akron Beacon Journal, Syracuse.com, Kentucky.com, Delaware.com, The News Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Oakland Tribune, The Morning Call, Philly.com, The Advocate, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, The State, The Post & Courier, The Journal News. Phew that wraps up the top 100 News Publications by circulation.

What's next? Tune in on Friday morning, Pinheads.

Cheers,
Sligs

A Response, New Features, and the Vision Arriving

2009-11-02T11:24:00.006-05:00

Last week, Andrew Davis of Tipping Point Labs wrote a post called "Start Up Overexposed: Too Early, Too Far, Too Fast" that used Pinyadda as its primary example. I encourage everyone to go and read the original post, but in lieu of that commitment, here is Andrew's main point:

"...something I noticed early in my interaction on the new platform highlights one of the major concerns I have with early-phase new media channels: the integration of features that increase reach too fast, too early."

Before responding to this comment I'd like to thank Andrew for his honest critique of our product. One of the best features of new media and the social web movement is the ability to post honest reviews and the ability of small firms like ours to respond. Andrew's keen eye and expertise in the field is something that can only make our company better, and it's feedback like his that is the single most valuable metric of user engagement and satisfaction we have.

Andrew's main critique stemmed from our (now-obselete) set-up guide that asked him to import his contacts before becoming acquainted with the site. If I understand his points correctly, he argues that this sort of 'exposure' has the potential to taint the experience of the initial core user base by extending the product's reach ahead of its development - the internet equivalent of letting too many people taste the secret recipe before it's been perfected.

It's a great point and one that we've wrestled with for a while now as we decide when to push the product, what features are ready for implementation, and what the consequences of each of these actions may be. On one hand, it's very important not to poison the well, so to speak, by inviting people to an experience that's not fully formed. On the other hand, there is simply no substitute for having outside users tell you what works and what doesn't. In our business, particularly from a product standpoint, the work is never done. There will always be cleanups and feature enhancements and new functionality to experiment with, and there is at least as much art as science in the timing of these releases and updates. It is, as Andrew points out, a delicate balance "between inviting constant and sustainable new user adoption without risking too great an exposure to an audience that is not ready to adopt your new concept."

It's something we think about every day, and I'm happy to announce a couple of new features and other product improvements that we think greatly enhance the user experience on Pinyadda and will allow us to open our doors to more people. For the record, we've been in closed Alpha phase for several months now, and access to Pinyadda has been restricted to those we've manually approved on a user-by-user basis. While Andrew's point are well-taken, we have been pretty diligent to avoid over-exposure in this early phase of the product. Andrew was personally invited because we value his expertise in the field and knew that he would provide constructive feedback.

The set-up process is something I've written about before on this blog, and was where Andrew found his main rub with the user experience. I'm happy to say that we've completely overhauled the process, including a repositioning of the invite/import process he talks about. Coupled with a new landing page, the design focuses on providing simpler calls to action, giving users more information about the actions they're performing, and presenting the value of the product to the user, not the other way around.

We've also introduced a universal search function that allows users to find what they're looking for quickly and intuitively, whether they're looking for content, people, sites, or tags. It's the beginning of a series of changes designed to make navigating the system simpler and faster. Also new are several email integration features including the ability to send links and comments via email using a simple "@" operator, and the option to be notified when someone responds to a comment you've made. Both of these features have already begun to influence the way users are behaving by increasing engagement around high-quality content. Discussions are becoming more robust, comments more insightful, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

This kind of interaction is the real beauty of the Pinyadda product - the ability to engage in real discussion around content that makes people think. Seeing people begin to use the product to facilitate these discussions is an incredible experience, and one that makes the vision stronger and the will to execute that much more intense.

Once again, thank you to Andrew and all of our other testers who continue to help us make this product and this company a positive influence in the world and in their lives. Information is the currency of the knowledge economy, and we're thrilled to be playing a role in that economy that helps people stay informed, express their opinions, and enrich their world view.

If you've got any critiques or comments you'd like to share, or if you'd like to be a test user, please let us know in the comments! We've also enable Disqus commenting on this blog so that you can sign in with one of your existing accounts and track your comments from across the web.

Expanded Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook; Value and Trust

2009-10-28T17:45:00.011-04:00

The other day as I was searching to find the end of the Internet (no luck yet but I am still convinced it is flat), I came across a post on Danah Boyd's (@zephoria for you Twitter-heads) blog titled Some Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates. Clearly many other people saw this article as it has over 5,000 clicks tracked by bit.ly and from reading the comments it was apparent that the post resonated with many duel Twitter/Facebook users, as there was a litany of interesting comments about people's personal use cases. Most of the conversation was focused around the types of crowds people interact with on the different networks, with my favorite description coming from Ian Kennedy who quoted Marry Hodder, "While Facebook is like having a dinner conversation with friends, Twitter was like getting up on stage at a nightclub on open mike night." This is a great analogy and I think most people who use both networks would agree with the comparison.

What I find to be interesting about this Facebook vs. Twitter issue has less to do with who people are interacting with on the networks and what information they are sharing, but rather which types of relationship people find to be more valuable and more trustworthy. Now I know this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges since the two networks are used for sharing different information types (for the most part) with different networks of users, but let's forget about these two issues and simply analyze this based on the two different graph designs of the networks.

It is commonly known amongst SNA geeks and many people who study social sciences that the most famous SNA paper published to date is The Strength of Weak Ties written by Mark Granovetter in 1973. Granovetter found that weak ties, basically more distant friends in his study, were positioned to be sources of new information more so than close friends. This idea comes down to the fact that you generally know about the same things as the people you spend a lot of time interacting with, and that new information typically disseminates through your weak ties (technically bridges), people who interact mainly with people outside of your network, who would be sharing different information.

Now considering the two social networking site's (SNS) graph designs from a high level without getting into the different ways different people use the sites, let's agree for arguments sake that one typically uses Twitter to connect with weak ties and one uses Facebook to connect more with strong ties (even though we all have "friends" on Facebook that we aren't really friends with, but I will save the argument that a perfect SNS would have an infinite amount of relationship types for another day). So Twitter = weak ties, Facebook = strong ties. Immediately, the discovery of new and valuable information is more likely on Twitter, making it more valuable right? Well not so fast Ghostrider, some not so recent data (2008) for the real-time world that we live in found that far and away the most trusted source of information was "an email from someone you know", with 77% of people validating this referral type. On the other hand, only 43% of people actually trust the social network profiles of people they know, making me wonder how much they would say they trust the information they receive from people they don't technically know on a social networking sites (SNS) - i.e. a weak tie.

When Granovetter explored the topic in 1973, he considered only symmetric relationships as to not complicate his formal math experiments for his thesis (if you want to get into that go read the paper). Considering the expanded opportunity of developing new relationships on the Internet, it doesn't really make sense to define a weak tie on a SNS the way Granovetter defined them in '73 based on 1) amount of time 2) emotional intensity 3) intimacy (which he defined as mutual confiding) and 4) the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. Anyone who uses Twitter follows people with whom they are not intimate (based on Granovetter's mutually confiding restriction) and by nature and purpose the services aren't reciprocal, but the amount of time and emotional intensity for the follower could still be high, so how weak or strong really are the ties on these networks - sigh, the grey area expands.

This can all be boiled down to this: do you typically value a referral of some sort of information more from a symmetric "strong tie" on Facebook or from an asymmetric "weak tie" on Twitter? (Hold the information type constant in each situation). And secondly, do you trust a referral more from one tie more than the other? And without getting into semantics, yes the two are different (I did just kind of get into semantics huh?). Obviously there is no right answer considering it is somewhat of a subjective measure and a more complete argument would have to take into consideration different information types being shared, but I invite you all to share your own sentiments on the matter.

It is without a doubt in my mind that as we move forward and SNS's evolve we will begin to make sense of some pretty amazing structural, "macro-level" patterns that happen in our society because of the data we will be able to extract from the microscopic relationships within social networks. I have said it before and I will say it again, we are only at the tip of the iceberg on this stuff.

Value Components of a Social Network

2009-10-25T12:56:00.001-04:00

Let me start by following Sir Sliggity's lead and introducing myself. My name is Chase Garbarino and I am a one of the Co-founders here at Pinyadda. I will be blogging frequently about a number of topics including news about Pinyadda's progress, our company culture, the social media industry, and a series of posts focusing on social network analysis (SNA).

As many friends of Pinyadda know - I am really into social network analysis. Some of you have been unfortunate enough to run into me at a bar and get locked into a conversation about measuring edge values of relationships on different social networks (social networking sites actually). Let me apologize right up front to those of you who have found yourself in this conversation at the Beer Garden on a weekend night - I often forget my passion for SNA is not the most exciting drinking fodder for others. As I have so astutely realized that most people who are interested in SNA with regards to online properties such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinyadda are not usually the people I am watching the Pats, Sox, B's and Celts with, I am going to channel these discussions through our blog here at Pinyadda.

I have recently been reading a lot of blog posts speculating over the valuation of Twitter, most notably Robert Scoble's post that pegs Twitter's valuation to be between $5-$10 billion. Scoble certainly generated a lot of buzz, with more of the comments and reactions seeming to suggest that most people think he is over shooting the valuation a bit at this time. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has taken a stab at valuing a large SNS and stirred strong debate (see TechCrunch's SNS valuation formula here, and an old post from Om Malik about Facebook here that will make you chuckle), this particular post pushed me to share some of my thoughts on the valuation of SNS's that I am writing a whitepaper about in the coming weeks. I personally believe that the more exploration, discussion and debate we can stir up around this topic, the better. While social media has reached critical mass with 83% of Internet users now using social media, we are merely at the tip of the iceberg on what we know about social media use and effective social media measurements will evolve an incredible amount in the coming years.

In an effort to help us develop a better understanding of SNS's and better ways to measure different forms of value on SNS's I would like to start a conversation about what I call the "Value components" of SNS's. Value components are simply the different components that every SNS has that combine to make up the overall value of of a SNS. After several months of on and off research, I have come up with four value components - they are:

User Behavior
Content
Microscopic network design - the design and types of relationships of a SNS
Macroscopic network design - the overall design, structural activity and use of a SNS

The focus of my upcoming paper outlines in more detail these value components and the next set of measurements I believe we should start exploring in order to have a better understanding of where and how value is generated within SNS's. While this will be an ever evolving project, I would greatly encourage and appreciate the contributions of others as I share my thoughts and findings on this blog.

What are your thoughts on the recent valutations of Twitter and the history of valuations of SNS's to date?

Welcome to IA

2009-10-23T12:52:00.008-04:00

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don't use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We're constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor's Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs

Usability vs. Ease of Use

2009-10-07T17:07:00.004-04:00

In a Web 2.0 world, we want everything to be customized. We want our web applications to know who we are, where we are, what we like, even what we're doing right now. There are a few techniques that designers and engineers can use to get this information without asking us - IP targeting, for instance - but they remain rather blunt instruments, and often leave us feeling violated, as if an evil internet spy was lurking just beyond our gaze.

The solution is to put the customization in the hands of users, allowing them complete control of what information they share, giving them oodles of preferences and settings, and making sure they can change everything at a moment's notice. Seems simple enough, right?

The problem is that most users won't ever find all those switches and dials, let alone know what to do with them or what mix of this setting and that toggle will result in Goldilocks-style contentment ("a this privacy setting is just right..."). There are a few us who enjoy this kind of masochistic settings torture, but we're not average (or stable). For everyone else, there's the dreaded user set-up guide, a ubiquitous necessity that's found its way into every website you've ever signed up for.

At Pinyadda, we're all about customization. It's our bread and butter. But we're also committed first and foremost to making our user experience completely painless. The place where these two goals conflict most intensely is in the set-up process, and it's where almost all of our product attention has been directed lately.

The most difficult part of designing any component is finding the ability to put yourself in other users' shoes, to imagine what it's like to be anyone but yourself. This is multiplied almost tenfold in the setup process, and the consequences of getting it wrong are similarly heightened. If you can't set it up, you can't use it. Imagine how much business Ikea would lose if they made you put the furniture together before you bought it. That's the kind of thing we're dealing with.

So how do we bridge this gap between usefulness and ease of use? Between customization and speed of adoption? It's a tough nut to crack, and something that probably takes a few failures to get right. A few basic principles we've learned (sometimes the hard way):

- Make as few assumptions about the user as possible. When you work on something every day, it can be hard to make yourself think like a brand new user. It can almost never hurt to make things twice as simple. Then make them twice as simple again.

- There's no substitute for user feedback. It's tempting to stay inside the bubble and iterate on your own designs, but the only real metric you have for usability is users. Seems so simple, but it's always harder than you think to put your designs out there for critique. Try to remember the adage to "have strong opinions, that are weakly held."

- Speed is good, but quality is better. Brevity is important in a setup guide, but quality of user experience shouldn't be sacrificed to achieve it. Would you rather get to mediocre experience fast, or get to a great experience a little slower?

- Structure makes people comfortable. Telling users where they are and giving them a clear understanding of what's next is important. Showing the steps up front and giving clear feedback when each one is completed goes a long way toward helping people feel comfortable and relaxed instead of anxious and annoyed.

There are probably a lot more, but we'll stop there. What do you think? Can you think of a great setup guide and why you liked it? Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to setting up a new service, or any tips for how to make it great? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Press Release - Pinyadda wins DEMOgod Award

2009-09-24T14:50:00.005-04:00

PRESS RELEASE

Pinyadda selected as one of seven DEMOgod Award Recipients at DEMOfall09

SAN DIEGO, California (September 23, 2009) - Boston-based startup Pinyadda was selected as one of seven DEMOgod Award winners at the DEMOfall09 technology conference. Seventy total companies from a pool of over 1,000 applicants were invited to present at the gathering, dubbed "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology."

Pinyadda (www.pinyadda.com) is a personalized and social content aggregation system that allows users to customize and aggregate content from multiple sites and blogs and then uses a system of social referral to help highlight and share relevant articles.

DEMOgod Award winners are selected based on their “outstanding potential to succeed in the market while motivating and exciting the DEMO audience...DEMOgods have a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off it's most compelling features, and differentiate it from other products.”

Pinyadda is currently in private beta. The company has been financed to date by a private angel investor and is seeking another capital infusion to help propel its development of revenue products. The company sees a number of potential monetization opportunities, ranging from advertising to premium accounts to micropayments. Says Garbarino, "We're excited to have the product in the market and we are getting great feedback from our users. People are suggesting new use-cases for Pinyadda every day. We have had content publishers, advertisers, academics, businesses - pretty much anyone who has to manage large amounts of information - show interst in putting Pinyadda's technology to work. At our core we're about helping people organize and filter the information that's important to them."

Pinyadda was founded by Garbarino and Kevin McCarthy, fellow Hamilton College graduates who previously ran The Campus Word, a national collegiate media outlet that staffed over 100 of the top collegiate journalists from over 60 colleges and universities. Austin Gardner-Smith (Head of product), Greg Gomer (Head of Operations) round out the Pinyadda team.

Contact:

Austin Gardner-Smith

austin@pinyadda.com

508.289.1616

###

Pinyadda, a Personalized and Social News Aggregator, Launches in Private Beta at DEMOfall09

2009-09-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

Here is the link.

Pinyadda, a Personalized and Social News Aggregator, Launches in Private Beta at DEMOfall09

PRNewswire
SAN DIEGO

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Boston-based startup Pinyadda announced the private beta release of its product, described as a personalized and social news aggregator, today at DEMOfall09.

Pinyadda leverages a user's social graph to help deliver a personalized stream of content that uses social referrals to help the most relevant content rise to the top. Chase Garbarino, the company's CEO, says Pinyadda's technology represents "the next step in a natural evolution" in the way people get their internet content. "The emergence of the social web has taught us that our friends and colleagues are the best discovery engine ever conceived. Pinyadda just brings the content and the people together in a simple, easy-to-use product."

"There are big opportunities for companies like Pinyadda that are re-purposing the social web into other verticals, in this case news aggregation," said DEMO Conference Executive Producer Matt Marshall. "Pinyadda uses the social graph to go a step further, delivering an incredibly personalized content experience."

Garbarino and co-founder Kevin McCarthy founded The Campus Word, a national collegiate media outlet, in 2006 while juniors at Hamilton College. The impetus for Pinyadda came out of their Campus Word experience and what they saw as "an extreme information overload problem." The Pinyadda team consists of the two co-founders as well as Greg Gomer, a 2007 graduate of Babson College and Austin Gardner-Smith, a 2008 graduate of Boston College.

About DEMO:

Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.

SOURCE Pinyadda

SOURCE: Pinyadda

Web site: http://www.pinyadda.com/

What's New for DEMOfall09

2009-09-20T11:30:00.005-04:00

Finally. After a summer filled with long hours, two complete user interface overhauls, plenty of backend headaches, and a lot of soul-searching about how best to explain what we are and what we do - we're ready.

This post comes to you from sunny San Diego as we prepare for DEMOfall09. We couldn't be more excited to meet some of the best new companies in the world and see what they're doing. But we'd be lying if we said the most exciting part of all this is having a product that works and telling everyone we can find about it.

While this is certainly not anywhere near the end of our development, it does mark a big milestone for the company and gives us a great base from which to figure out where we fit in the market, how we can best serve our customers, and where we need to focus our efforts going forward. Whether people love us or hate us, we know that all of the feedback we'll get over the next couple days is invaluable. Whether you're going to the conference or not, we'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email, tweet us, or leave a comment here.

Here's a few of the notable changes we've made:

1) New user interface.
We stripped it, toned it down, and stripped it again. Pinyadda is about providing quality web content to our users, not about giving them a visual feast every time they log in, and this new look give the content you want without any distractions.

2)New homepage.
The new homepage features a module that allows anyone to get a glimpse at the content that's being shared on Pinyadda without logging in. This is the first step in a number of changes we'll be rolling out that opens up the content experience to everyone.

3)Real-time indexing.
We were close before, but now we're there. Content is coming in hot, and we like it that way.

Yesterday was the first chance we all had to really play with the finished product as end users, and I have to say the experience was great (Finished, of course, is a relative term...). Lots of great content, easy navigation, and conversations flowing. We're a little partial, but it's truly amazing to see how far the site has come over the last couple of months. Anyone who saw the original prototype can attest to that.

We flew out yesterday, went for a swim in the Pacific, and grabbed a room at the nicest HoJo we've ever seen to get our internet on and grill each other on the pitch. Today we're headed to the Longboard Bar & Grill to watch the Patriots game (at least one of us will have a close eye on the race at Louden, too) and then it's back to the laptops for all the last minute tweaking and de-bugging we can handle. We'll be posting at the end of each day of the conference to talk about our favorite presenters and give general updates.

A big thanks to all of our team members, advisers, friends, parents, and users. We couldn't have come this far without you. You can follow the conference on twitter using the hastag #demo09. If you're going to be in attendance, you can find us at booth 65.

Defining Quality Content

2009-09-02T13:26:00.008-04:00

As the media landscape continues to change and we move away from traditional forms of content like daily newspapers and monthly magazines, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish quality content from the barrage of information that's available everyday.

At Pinyadda, we've made a commitment to present our users with content that's "high-quality" - but like many others, we continue to find it incredibly difficult to define a set of standards for internet content. Before we try to answer that question, let's go back to the beginning:

Used to be there were newspapers - big newspapers. At least one in every city. What they printed was considered fact; it could be reasonably asserted that leads had been followed, investigations had been performed, sources checked, editors consulted. With relatively few exceptions, these papers represented the definitive source of information for businesspeople, laymen, and housewives alike. They print it, you read it. Simple game.

Over time we saw the reach of radio and television extend, but the mechanics remained the same. It took lots of money and smarts to run a station or a channel, and the barriers to entry remained high: formal training, infrastructure, and approval from the media cohort. One could still reasonably assume that these sources met at least some minimum standards of professionalism and journalistic integrity - otherwise they wouldn't be on the air.

Yet once the internet gave everyone the ability to become a publisher, these assurances vanished altogether. Certain old media stalwarts (and some new ones, ProPublica and Politico come to mind) have successfully established brands that serve the purpose of validating the quality of their content. So create a powerful brand, problem solved. Instant legitimacy.

But what about the other 10,000 sites that are producing quality content on a daily basis? The small-to-medium blogs with a couple of writers who focus on local and niche issues, and probably do it better than the big brands - what about them? Here's where it gets tricky.

From our standpoint, there's a very fine line between providing readers with the information they want and maintaining high standards of quality. So we have to establish some benchmarks - a job much easier said than done. There are a few basic metrics:

Traffic:
Unique visitors over time.
Pros: Gives an accurate approximation of how many people read and/or trust a given web property.
Cons: Quantity doesn't necessarily denote quality.

Staff:
Does the source have professional (paid) content staff?
Pros: Professional staff indicates a seriousness of purpose that definitely increases the likelihood of quality content.
Cons: Tough benchmark for many sites to meet.

Frequency of Publication:
How often does the source publish?
Pros: Acknowledges and recognizes obligation to an audience (or perceived audience).
Cons: Publishing poor content every day doesn't make it good content.

None of these are decisive metrics, and none can be used in isolation. Furthermore, each of them ignores the most subjective aspect of the debate: quality is, in many ways, in the eyes of the beholder. Who's to say that the NYTimes is of any higher quality than TMZ? Both have lots of readers, both publish oodles of content, both have full-time staff. And for some readers, TMZ's content might be far more interesting.

We tend to say something along these lines: "Nonsense. The NYTimes is a much higher quality source than TMZ. It's all fact-checked and very serious. TMZ is nothing but unfounded gossip." But is it really true? What about the Op-Ed section? The blogs? Suddenly the two sites seem closer than we thought. The example is a bit of a stretch, but the concept holds.

And what about a well-reasoned, thoughtfully-prepared, and oft-published blog that has little traffic? It might well be the most "quality" source available on a given niche topic, but if no one reads it, who cares? It a blog post falls in the internet forest, does it make a sound? More importantly, should it?

These are hard questions, and ones that have vast implications for the future of media on the internet. Without a way to define legitimacy, the big boys will continue to feel the air sucked out of their advertising revenues, as more and more traffic defects to the little guys. But it's our hope that finding a way to create a set of standards for quality content will raise the bar a little for everyone, creating a media ecosystem where everyone is encouraged to do more with less, not more of less. In other words, finding a way to grant legitimacy to sources who deserve it can both improve margins for those that meet expectations, and encourage others who might be capable of high quality content production to step up to the plate a little sooner.

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

2009-08-10T11:24:00.006-04:00

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.

The State of Information Architecture

2009-07-22T11:18:00.005-04:00

A large part of what we're doing at Pinyadda revolves around information architecture - the way content is organized on any given website. In many ways, the internet resembles the largest library ever created, harboring a collection of books, articles, photos, songs and videos in unfathomable quantity. Yet unlike the modern library, where every item is classified and sorted in a universal manner, the internet library is made up of millions of walled repositories, each with its own unique method of classifying content.

Classification is one of the most important parts of granting identity to any person or object - if I don't know what you are, it's nearly impossible for me to determine who you are. We classify things in our everyday life in a subconscious manner; it's how we make sense of the world around us. But if you've ever tried unsuccessfully to find a certain article on a certain webpage, you've experienced firsthand the limitations of the way things are classified on the internet. Was that article in the Culture section, or the Arts section? Maybe it was Entertainment? Or was it Local?

We have a few solutions to this problem, the first and most obvious being search, and most of the time it does the trick. You know what you're looking for, you type it in the box, and viola, up pops the article. Sometimes. Other times it's there, but it's buried 30 items deep in the results, and still other times it's not there at all. And most importantly, search requires that you knew what you were looking for in the first place.

What we're moving towards is a system of tags, like the ones at the bottom of this post, that allow us to label items instead of classifying them. This approach gives us a far more flexible way to categorize information while allowing it to remain organized and findable. By creating semantic relationships between tags, we can begin to infer implicit hierarchy instead of explicitly stating it. If all items tagged with "internet" are also tagged with "technology," but not all items tagged "technology" are also tagged "internet," we can begin to infer that the internet is commonly thought of as a subcategory of the Technology. But unlike defining a strict hierarchy that asserts Internet to be a subcategory of Technology and nothing else, inferring this relationship allows us to make reasonable assumptions without ruling anything out. Tags let us keep our options open.

But there's a catch. In order to infer useful relationships between tags, we need to place certain limits on their scope. A thousand tags loosely related to each other is far less useful than ten tags strongly related to one or two others. In the same way, a few tags used many times is far more useful than many tags used a few times. In order for us to identify patterns that make it easier for us to find information, we need to define the scope of our available tags. In short, too few tags limit different users' ability to find information, but too many render the system nearly useless . It's a balancing act, and a delicate one.

At Pinyadda, we feel strongly about creating a system that makes as few assumptions about individual users as possible. Everyone is different, and everyone's information consumption preferences are different. It's our job to make sure that we do as much to help you find the stuff you're looking for without getting in the way. The current state of information architecture on the web inhibits everyone's ability to get the most out of it, and it's a shame. The content you want is out there, somewhere. We hope we can bring a little method to the madness of finding it.

A New Perspective

2009-07-08T14:39:00.003-04:00

After a great meeting last night and an even better whiteboard session this morning, we've made a couple significant changes in the way we're going to be positioned going forward, and I think all of them are great decisions that were made for the right reasons.

The product itself and our development roadmap has changed very little, but we realized that we had a different animal on our hands than we initially thought. The good news is that this characterization solves a more palpable problem, creates more value for both users and publishers, gets us to revenue and profitability faster, and is a much more sustainable business plan. All very good things.

In the meantime, it allows us to work smarter while we work harder by focusing on more specific tasks, and helps us get a product in users' hands a lot sooner. With a clearer vision of what our product is and does, we're even more determined to go all out for the next couple of sprints and push this thing out the door.

We've reorganized our information architecture, made the site much easier for users to navigate and build their Pin, and changed our attitude about content to focus more on quality and organization and less on flat out quantity. Our new mission is simple, intuitive, and clear: to connect people in meaningful ways around the world's most valuable content. We hope that Pinyadda can become the way content and consumers connect in the age of the social web.

Execution and the Thrill of Self-Reliance

2009-07-06T14:39:00.004-04:00

When you have a great idea on your hands, it's really easy to keep pushing the boundaries of what might be possible. In a startup, it's one of the most important things you can do - more than a few companies have gotten their big break because they kept pushing forward, innovating, thinking up crazy schemes about how to their product could take over this or that market, be tweaked to fit this or that need. And often those other implementations turned out to be the real gold - PayPal and Twitter are the first examples that pop into my head. Pie in the sky sometimes works out great.

But what makes the entrepreneur different from all the other crazies with great ideas is one simple thing: execution. In business, just like in sports, execution is the simple key to success. You've to have a good gameplan, a good team, and be well prepared, but in the end it comes down to how well you play when all the marbles are on the line.

For us, it's time to take a little break from dreamworld and get right down to it. Now that we have a working product with almost all of our core functionality intact, we're concentrating on making it work exactly the way we want it to, with no exceptions. Until now, we've been able to get away with saying "of course, we'll obviously fix that before release." Not anymore.

And to a certain extent, that's a really gratifying feeling, because we're all invested in the product and want to make it great. Unlike a hulking corporation, we can see a problem and fix it with our own two hands. There is a direct correlation between how hard we work and what kind of results we see, and it has nothing at all to do with financial compensation. It's about taking pride in your workmanship and owning the success or failure that comes along with it. That's the real point of addiction in startups, and it's why successful entrepreneurs go back and do it again even after they've struck it rich. It's the thrill of self-reliance and the unqualified gratification of knowing you've built something wicked cool that actually works.

And on that note, it's time to get back to work.

Information Agriculture

2009-07-03T11:44:00.006-04:00

Users are the bread and butter of any type of social network. They are a network's component pieces: its publishers, owners, critics, advocates, and consumers. And every one of them is a real person with distinct needs, interests, and habits. For a network to be useful, it must cater to the needs of an incredibly diverse community and provide value for a host of different user types.

For the information addicted web-worker, Pinyadda's value is almost immediately apparent. It takes the work out of using your RSS reader. Anyone who uses an RSS reader regularly can understand that. But the RSS reader remains a tool of the few, and not the many. So how do we provide value to the other 90% of potential users?

The answer is simple: we provide access to relevant content they were previously ignorant of. We like to think of the Web as an egalitarian paradise where any piece of information is available to any user, but the reality is that getting more than cursory value from the Web requires a skill set and technological understanding that represents a pretty high barrier to entry. Most users visit search engines to find information, email to communicate with friends and colleagues, and social networks to establish connections with others. But beyond these relatively simple uses, the value of the web is lost on the average user. Massive amounts of data that could help users make sense of the world around them exists, but it's diffuse; scattered across thousands of websites and blogs, buried in directories and hierarchies and archives.

If you know exactly the type of information you're looking for, search works great. If I want to find the address of a business, the name of public figure, or a bus schedule, you can't beat static web search. But if I want to use the web as a news portal to find out what's happening the world around me, search is complete failure. It's a static resource in a dynamic world.

We can do better. There is a way to break down the walls of knowledge and training that keep most users from getting the most out of the web, and we're building it. While Pinyadda's appeal to the uber-user is important to us, it's the ability to harvest data on the web and deliver it to the average user that will make Pinyadda both successful and profitable.

Think of it like information agriculture. We're your new farmers.

Walking the (Bottom) Line

2009-07-02T11:30:00.004-04:00

Yesterday's Alpha release coincides with a big week of business for us when we return from Saturday's festivities, and it got me thinking about the need to balance the internal and external aspects of our company. One of the hardest things we have to do as a small team is find the right balance between product and production, by which I mean spending the right amount of time on product design and development and the right amount on networking, marketing, positioning, and pitching. It's a tough line to walk but one that I think we're doing pretty well with.

As a team, we're in agreement that we should spend as much of our time and energy developing the best product we can. Without that focus, we're nothing more than words on a page. But the need to raise capital isn't going away, and as a group we understand the importance of keeping our eyes wide open when it comes to the market opportunity and the way we position our business. Yes, we think Pinyadda is the coolest thing in the world, but it's first and foremost a business venture that demands our constant scrutiny and focus.

The great thing about our team is that everyone clearly understands both sides of this equation. Each product innovation represents a new business opportunity, which in turn leads to more product improvements. When done right, the interaction between business strategy and product strategy creates a positive feedback loop that drives both innovation and ROI.

As much as preparing for meetings with investors may seem like a chore to some entrepreneurs, it's an amazingly useful exercise. Considering an outside perspective is crucial to avoiding the groupthink trap, and formulating our value proposition forces us to constantly evaluate our long-term vision and make sure our short-term actions are directly related to achieving those goals.

As entrepreneurs who are absurdly obsessed with our idea, our initial urge is to think of raising capital as a necessary evil that will allow us to get back to work on the product. But in reality raising capital is great a way to always be asking ourselves the question "is this idea worth the work we're putting into it?" As long as the answer remains a resounding yes, it's more likely that both users and investors will find value in our product. If not, it's a sign we're doing something wrong and need to re-evaluate the direction we're heading in.

At XSITE last week, Tilman Genross, the CEO of Adimab, kept hammering away at an idea that I think is often overlooked by startups. The first thing to do, he said, is to figure out exactly what the problem is, and then ask yourself if there is real value in finding the solution. The short answer is always "of course, why else would I be working on this?" But being honest with yourself and regularly holding your own feet to the fire is enormously important.

We happen to think that the disjointed and scattered nature of the huge amount of content on the internet is a real problem, and we see enormous value in creating a system for people to get that content in a manner that is relevant and entertaining. And we hope we can pass that value along to our users.

Alpha Rising

2009-07-01T09:48:00.009-04:00

After months of product development and testing, our Alpha is being loaded to the live site right now, and it's really exciting. We've come a long way from that first spark of imagination, and we still have a long way to go. But it's the little pieces of gratification along the way that make the startup ride worth taking. And today is one of those days.

This update includes a whole host of stuff that is just plain cool. All the functionalities of our core product are here, along with a bunch bug fixes and UI updates that make using Pinyadda a truly enjoyable experience. The difference between this version and our prototype seems infinite, and the product is really starting to come into its own.

A new, way more intuitive Build page, better Pintax navigation, and host of back-end improvements are all up and in working order, and we're pumped. When we look at the big picture these seem like small changes, but when we put on our user hats and try it out we realize that these improvements make a big difference. It's an encouraging and exciting milestone, and as we start to refine the product, the tech, and the business model, the amount new opportunities and ideas seems to be multiplying almost daily.

With all this comes an ever-expanding to-do list which has required us to begin developing and implement some key workflows and processes that are already helping us to stay better organized and be more productive with our time. Scheduling our time better, setting and achieving measurable small goals, and using collaboration technologies have been a key focus over the last several weeks as we begin to think about growth phase. While we're still really small and everyone is definitely wearing multiple hats, we're very aware that streamlining our processes and workflows and documenting our systems will be a key component of how fast we can ramp things up and how much we can squeeze from each dollar of investment. Two of our key organizational philosophies are agility and resourcefulness, and making sure that we can get new people up to speed quickly and adapt to changing conditions are tasks that affect every aspect of the business.

As we ramp up this summer we're making it a point to share our experiences on this blog, and we're always interested in hearing what you have to say. Post a comment, drop us a note, tweet us, whatever. We're also going to schedule a couple of external work sessions where anyone can drop by and shoot the breeze about tech, Boston, Pinyadda, or pretty much anything else. We'll post those times and locations up here and tweet them as well. Hopefully we'll get to meet a bunch of new folks who are down with what we're doing and love the internet in the same freakish way we do.

Today's a great day for Pinyadda and for us, but we're already logging bugs, testing features, and thinking about ways to make it better. With every milestone reached comes a new starting point and a new opportunity for improvement, and we can't wait to get moving on the next round of stuff as we head toward Beta. It's part insanity, part geekiness, and whole lot of obsession with our product and our vision.

A Better Way to Get Your Information

2009-05-13T21:54:00.010-04:00

Good news - by the end of the week/early next week we hope to have Pinyadda up and running for a select few people to check out. For those of you who don't eat, sleep and breathe all things Pinyadda, let me give you a quick update on what it is we're doing here...

A while back, Kevin and I (along with our pal Greg Rogan, now of Expat Teaching Recruitment, a kick-ass recruitment agency focusing on the placement of qualified teachers and trainers with top international companies) were transitioning from our last startup, CampusWord, when we began speaking about the potential for a smarter, more efficient way to find and consume the information we want and need everyday. As we discussed the possibilities for our relatively vague "smart system" (enter our other partner Greg Gomer), we came up with a few ideas of what this system should be able to do:

Search for information for us even if we're not looking.

As Google announced earlier in the year, they have identified over a trillion unique URLs online and the number is climbing quickly. With so much valuable information available, we could sit around searching all day and still not find every piece of content or information out there that would be valuable to us... so we need a system to do it for us.

Deliver information without having to be asked.

Brad Feld, Co-founder and Managing Director of the Foundry Group, explained this best in a recent blog post, "In 20 years, I expect we will snicker at the idea of having to go search for information...typing the same stuff into little boxes over and over again." Basically, no one can possibly know what to search for all the time and we believe that to receive information, a user shouldn't have to continually ask the system for it... it should just be there for us whenever we want.

Understands the unique nature of every person's information needs and adapts as these needs change over time.

Why should you and I see the same search results when we enter the same keyword phrase? Why should any two people see the same results ever? Why should you even see the same search results today for the same term you searched yesterday? You shouldn't! Because after all, information is absolutely unique and infinitely dynamic. Think about it... absolutely unique - meaning no person "computes" any piece of information exactly the same as another person. Infinitely dynamic - meaning at no point in time will your information needs be exactly the same as they were a moment ago (or at any other time for that matter), nor will you "compute" a piece of information exactly the same as you did at another time, nor will your information needs be exactly the same at any time... follow my drift? In brief, the system needs to know each unique individual user and grow with them.

I think I have gone deep enough for our first blog post here. Our team will continue to describe different parts of our vision for Pinyadda here and we look forward to receiving your feedback! Till next time...