It's Rishi

Whether you realize it or not, the interactions you have with other people and businesses are a big part of your identity. Every interaction you have says something about who you are. If you kept a journal that summarized every interaction you’ve ever had, that journal would paint an accurate picture of yourself.

Of course, no one actually writes down summaries of interactions they have. However, while you may not actually write anything down, you are likely to record in your head a little memory of the experience i.e. “My barber John kicks ass. Another bitchin’ haircut!” or “WTF, the drive-thru guy seriously doesn’t understand a word of English. I’m never going back! “. Those memories of your experiences usually just remain in your own head. You might share your experiences with friends and family, but that’s about it. As a result, you, and maybe your friends, know that your barber John rocks, but at the same time there’s many more people in your community that are either in search of a good barber or are walking into John’s barber shop with no clue of what to expect.

So what’s a solution? The (now) obvious answer is to rely on members of the community to publicly share their experiences with one another. I can read about the experiences of others who have interacted with this person/business. Generally speaking, this additional information will help me determine whether I want to interact with this person/business.

Okay, so blah blah, what I just described is simply the concept of what we now know to be a community feedback system. Far and away the largest, most mainstream feedback system belongs to eBay. eBay’s feedback system works well because it is a very tight system. Each user on the system is required to validate their identity and each feedback entry is linked to an eBay transaction. Because of these two requirements, it’s relatively difficult to game their system.

People networking sites from social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace to career networking sites like LinkedIn are founded on this principle of exposing one’s identity and reputation for a possible gain. Users of LinkedIn are encouraged to thoroughly describe their backgrounds and solicit endorsements from past colleagues to bolster their professional reputations. The same thing happens on social networking sites. In both cases, your profile page is your reputation so users naturally want to pad it as much as they can. The problem with these sites is that they are much easier to game. There is no concept of identity verification and one can easily fabricate a profile. Nevertheless, networking sites continue to grow rapidly in popularity and will likely be a force to be reckoned with in the identity/reputation space.

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the implications of reputation on both personal and business interactions in the Internet of the future. One of the most intriguing topics around reputation is privacy. Of course, I want to use my reputation when it can help me get what I want. For example, I’m generally protective of my credit history, but when applying for a loan, I’m more than happy to divulge this information to help me obtain better loan terms. Similarly, even as recently as a decade ago, one’s resume was considered to be a fairly private document. Nowdays, many people make their resumes publicly accessible on the Web in hopes of landing an even better career opportunity.

Right now, fragments of your reputation are spread all across the Internet on different sites. It’s all but impossible for anyone to assemble those fragments to get a complete view. Let’s say you have a a couple eBay transactions gone bad. What if a bank saw that and rejected your loan application because of it? Sounds kinda farfetched but is it really that crazy? After all, your eBay feedback represents real transactions that you were involved in. So, really, we want to utilize our good reputation when it will help us but mask any negative reputation when it might hurt us.

And that is precisely where things get complicated. First of all, how should reputation be applied? What are its boundaries? How can your reputation in one space be applied to another space? Does it make sense? Who gets to decide? As it is now, most reputation systems are closed systems so for now there is no cross referencing. I can have a horrible reputation on a dating site and no one outside of that dating site will ever know.

One site that’s trying to knock down those boundaries is RapLeaf. They’ve built an open community system. Any site in which the users exchange feedback can integrate with RapLeaf. Initially, they’re focusing their attention on the classifieds and bartering space. Basically every site but eBay. There certainly is value in bringing together reputations from many different communities into a single place. If your reputation is stellar across all the communities, then this is a big win for you. However, if you have some holes in your reputation, now they will be visible across many communities. RapLeaf’s mantra is “it’s more profitable to be ethical”. While this mantra makes sense in the context of transactions, the idea of being “ethical” does not always make sense in other contexts.

The bottom line is that within every community, no matter how small or large, that we belong to, we have a reputation. The Internet is slowly revolutionizing how that reputation can be used for and against us.

Hmm.. this post didn’t really come together as much as I wanted too. There’s still some more points that I wanted to cover like universal/portable identities but this post is already too long and disjointed so I’ll stop now…

After thinking for a while, I came up with the following list of those fundamental things that every human wants:

• attention
• importance
• companionship
• entertainment
• sex
• knowledge
• time
• relaxation
• success (at any challenge/goal)
• earn/save significant (relative to the individual) amounts of money
• and even though it’s sort of implied: power to get any of the aforementioned items

Is that a comprehensive list? Can anyone think of anything that’s missing? Any items that are there that you think don’t belong? Lemme know!

Yesterday, Google announced a limited availability of their new web-based spreadsheet application aptly named Google Spreadsheets. Is it nicely-designed and does it deliver basic spreadsheet functionality? Absolutely. Is this the first web-based spreadsheet application? No. Is this the best web-based spreadsheet application? Possibly. Is this going to disrupt the MS Excel-dominated spreadsheet market? Not anytime soon. Let’s face it folks, barring some special circumstances, I can’t think of anyone who would prefer to use a web-based application instead of a locally-installed application. While Web UI technologies have improved to the point where a web-based spreadsheet is feasible, it still pales in comparison to the rich UI libraries available in any modern OS.

So does this mean that Google has failed? Not at all. Every large R&D organization has tons of development projects going on at any given time. However, in just about every other industry, the majority of those projects never see the light of day. Many projects are done just to gain internal expertise, others are skunkwork projects that never had a clear market driver, and other projects are simply cut by management for all kinds of reasons. The unique thing about the web software industry is that the cost of manufacturing is nil. If you have a piece of software, you can basically flip a switch and it’s live to the public. Google probably knows full well that many of its projects aren’t revolutionary in their present form, but there is little reason not to make it publicly available. Part of the research and design process is receiving feedback and I think that’s what Google Labs is all about. Kind of like “here’s a cool project some of us (engineers) have been hacking at…we wanna see what you think and how you guys use it”.

The problem which Google runs into is that they’ve built a brand like no other. A brand that screams innovation. Because of this brand, people expect awesomely innovative products from Google. Those of us in the tech community who follow the bleeding edge of innovation are often less than satisfied with the innovation we see from Google.

As I say time and time again, I think a lot of people in the community need to get a breath of fresh air – from outside the Silicon Valley bubble – and realize that a simple web-based spreadsheet from Google is not going to challenge Microsoft in any meaningful way for a long, long time.

Some bloggers have commented that this lack of innovation is starting to hurt Google’s brand and reputation for innovation. I don’t really think so. If you were to demo Google Spreadsheets to the average Web user, they’re likely to be wowed and comment on Google’s brilliance. However, it’s also a safe bet that they’ll still use Excel the next time they need a spreadsheet.

Note: I’m not anti web-apps. I think they will be very much be a part of computing within the next 5-10 years. Read some of my vision

Alexa is an Amazon company, that among other services, provides traffic details and rankings for web sites. Everyone references Alexa’s traffic rankings. I use it regularly to get a glimpse into how much traffic (and the traffic growth) of a particular startup. Likewise, many tech journalists/bloggers/pundits use Alexa rankings to analyze how much traffic one site is getting versus another and if the site is growing or decreasing in popularity. I’ve also read on many SEO discussion boards that prospective advertisers will look at your Alexa ranking to determine how much your ad space is worth. I’ve also spoken with investors who include an Alexa traffic check in their initial look at a startup. So, clearly, if you run a web-based company, that Alexa ranking is an important number. It will likely have a direct influence on your business.

There has been much debate over how accurate Alexa’s rankings are. To understand how accurate (or inaccurate) Alexa’s data is, you need to understand how their system collects traffic data. It’s really quite simple. Alexa offers a toolbar for IE that offers up a Google search box, Alexa site info, popup blocking, and page highlighting among other features. More importantly, it records every single URL the browser visits and sends that information to Alexa. The important thing to understand here is that Alexa’s traffic data is based solely on the traffic of users who run IE and have the Alexa toolbar. For some more specifics about how and what Alexa calculates, go here.

Up until this point, you might be thinking…hmmm this Alexa sounds pretty reasonable! Rishi, why do you call it a “myth”?

Alexa states that they compute “traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.” Millions huh? Seriously, have you ever seen anyone that runs the Alexa toolbar. I sure haven’t. Google or Yahoo toolbar, sure. But never Alexa. My hunch is that it’s more like hundreds of thousands, not millions, of users. Possibly millions have downloaded it and had it installed at some point, but not all are currently running it. Check out this post from a couple years back on SEOChat. The author concludes that “that the Alexa sample size was 180,000.” Since Alexa does not post any demographic data, all of this is 100% speculation. However, the point is that the toolbar’s user base represents a very, very small percent of the Web-browsing population. And what kind of people do you think have the Alexa toolbar installed? I’m thinking it’s more Joe InternetProfessional and less Joe Teenager and even less Joe Noob. Evidence of this is that MySpace is currently ranked #5 and Google is #2. According to every other data point I’ve seen, MySpace pageviews far exceed Google. My guess is that your typical MySpace user is a lot less likely to be running the Alexa toolbar than the typical Google user. If efforts were taken to make this userbase statistically random (like a Gallup does) then the traffic data would be a lot more reliable. But as it stands today, one could not expect the pool to be random and thus the traffic data just isn’t that reliable.

Another huge problem with Alexa rankings is that it easy to manipulate. The traffic rank of ItsRishi.com is a patheticaly low 3,741,850. According to Alexa, my reach per million users for the past 3 months has been 0.1. That means that 1 in every 10 million Web users visit my site on a daily basis. Is that accurate? Who knows. Even Alexa states that traffic data beyond the top 100k is not statistically significant. Fair enough. As an experiment, I will be improving my traffic rank over the next few weeks. How? It’s simple. I installed the toolbar on my IE browser and from now on will use IE whenever I am working on ItsRishi.com. What this means is that I’ll probably end up with a few hits on average per day. If I don’t see enough of an improvement in a couple weeks, I’ll recruit some IP addresses – oops, I mean friends – to also install Alexa toolbar on IE and use it while visiting ItsRishi.com. My hope is to crack the top 100k. I’ve read many stories from webmasters who have done this very same practice with great success.

While I will be doing this for ItsRishi.com purely to satisfy my curiosity, you can bet that many companies are using such techniques to magnify their Alexa rank. The higher your rank – especially if your rank is rapidly climbing – the more people are interested in your company. That’s just a fact. Whenever I hear about a startup for the first time, I usually do a quick check of their Alexa rank to get an idea of their popularity. If the rank looks promising, I assume the site is hot and I take a deeper look. As I’ve explained, this assumption is faulty, but there really is no better (public) way of determining a site’s popularity. So while the Alexa number may not be accurate, it is a number. It’s not really much different than when Forrester publishes a report saying that an industry is X billion dollars. When you want a number, any number is better than no number. I guess the lesson here is to be careful of how much meaning you try to extract from the Alexa data.

If you’re trying to compare two companies in the same industry, the best suggestion is to find a metric that’s more pertinent to that industry. For example, an owner of a online retailer comments: “There is one competitor in particular that I watch..He is a member of Bizrate, so I can count the number of customers that take his survery each month, and compare it to the number that take our survey.” In his space, the number of Bizrate survey submissions is a much more accurate metric for him because its a nice apples-apples comparison since you can assume that at his store and his competitor’s store, the % of customers who complete the survey is about the same.

You can follow my Alexa progress here.