Among other features, IMDB allows users to rate movies. What I’ve noticed for the past several months is that nearly every movie inevitably starts out with a massive number of 10 ratings.

How do you explain the following?

At first glance this rating breakdown exhibits a common phenomenon in user ratings: many users rate the extremes. In this case that would be 1 and 10. However, if you look at most rating breakdowns on IMDB, there is no such polarity. Only a heavy bias of 10 ratings.

Another theory might be that the people who are first to see a movie and rate it online are generally those who are most enthusiastic about the movie. Thus, it is natural that the ratings of their users would be irrationally high.

Yet another theory is, of course, that those involved with marketing the movie are gaming the ratings. IMDB is massively popular site (almost 20M uniques per month according to Compete.com) and many movie-goers use the site’s movie ratings to decide which to see. Moreover, even if a movie studio didn’t intend to game ratings, they are almost forced to simply to keep pace with other movies that do have people gaming its ratings. Anyways, this is just a theory. No proof.

More to come…

Have you ever been browsing a merchant website and a popup appeared asking you for feedback? Or have you received an email following a purchase asking you to fill out a survey about your experience? I do almost weekly.

Having needed to collect feedback in the past, I understand both how hard it is to get people to fill out surveys and how valuable direct user feedback is to improving the user experience. Thus, I’m more likely to fill out a survey than most.

Today, I got an email from BestBuy asking me for feedback on my in-store pickup experience. I clicked thru the link and was awarded with the following:

A whopping 40 questions each needing an overly granular 1-10 rating. When I saw this survey, I immediately lost motivation.

This brings me to my three rules for effective online surveying. I’m not a marketing veteran but I have conducted a few online surveys in my day. Also note that I’m not suggesting that these rules are going to boggle your mind. However, since most surveys I am presented with don’t adhere to these rules, I think they’re worth reiterating.

Keep it short - Seriously, this is so obvious but it shocks me how few surveys are truly concise. Some surveys are honest saying up front that it will take 15 minutes to complete. Others are less scrupulous and say it will take 5 when it really will take 15. Either way, keep the survey to 5 minutes or under and hope that your users can complete it in 2-3 minutes.

Start and end with the easy questions - If a user is stumped by your first question, they’ll abandon. An easy question will get them in a groove and help their brain recall more details about their experience. Conversely, by the end of the survey - particularly if the survey is longish - the user’s attention is waning. They’re nearing the end of the mental commitment they originally made to your survey.

Keep the answer choices simple and meaningful - Why do 1-10 when 1-5 will suffice? Mix up the answer choices as well. It will make taking the survey a little less monotonous and keep the user’s attention. Qualify the answer choices with text descriptions to make numerical ratings more comparable between users. e.g. “5 - I will definitely visit X.com next time I am shopping for a computer product. 1 - Even if X.com had the lowest price, I would buy elsewhere” . Keeping your survey short will make adding text descriptions not such a time consuming step.

It was rumored back in August that Facebook would be adding friend lists to the site. Many speculated about how exactly friend lists would work and how exactly it might spell the death of the Top Friends app by Slide. Today, four months later, the feature has launched. Were the predictions true? Here are some thoughts:

1) For now, friend lists are private and cannot be made public. Moreover, lists cannot be accessed by the API. Thus no RIP for Top Friends just yet. It’s possible users may be given the option to make lists public and API’s may be able to access lists in the future. For now, though, it would seem that Levchin and Co are okay - heck it wouldn’t surprise me if Slide and RockYou used their leverage to influence Facebook’s decision on this issue.

2) Some other posts have implied that Facebook provides a news feed specifically for each list. That’s false. You cannot currently see a news feed for a specific friend list. You are able to see a list of most updated profiles and status updates for friends of each list though.

3) Anyone suggesting that this feature is a LinkedIn killer needs to do some deeper thinking. I’m not saying that Facebook doesn’t already provide much of the value (keeping track of contacts, people browsing/hunting, etc.) that LinkedIn does, but these private friend lists don’t add much incremental value in making Facebook a professional tool. Facebook already provides enough tools to search through your friends if you need to pinpoint a certain friend or a friend matching a certain (network, interest, etc.)

4) So what does this do? Adds more, finer edges to the social graph. My best bet is that these lists will be exposed via the API such that both Facebook and third-party app developers as well as advertisers (again more edges on the social graphs means more ways to discover behavioral and interest patterns between persons in the social graph) wil be able to take advantage.

5) Why did friend lists take so long to launch? It was four months ago that the API tool dropped a hint as to this functionality. Four months is an eternity in Facebook time. Unless I’m missing something, this feature - in it’s current state - would not have taken that long to develop. Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than meets the eye here. We’ll find out soon enough…

So it turns out the touchscreen on the iPhone doesn’t work if you have gloves on. What’s going to happen for east coast users this winter? I suppose one answer is to cut out a finger tip of your glove? Ridiculous.. As I’ve said before, the iPhone is undoubtedly a breakthrough device but it’s just not a device for serious use yet.

Recently I flew to the east coast via JetBlue. Although I took the red-eye, it was still a pleasant experience. Time flew by (no pun intended) as I spent half the flight watching the WSOP and then proceeded to nap for a bit while listening to XM radio via my noise-cancelling headphones. On my return flight, I took a US Airways flight that I found for about 20% cheaper than other alternatives. Worst decision ever. The plane was old, the seats narrow and worn, legroom sucked, no in flight entertainment…horrible. I just couldn’t believe how much more pleasant a flying experience JetBlue offered. I thought to myself: “Man, if JetBlue offered internet, I think I really would pay even 50% more to fly JetBlue”.

Fast forward to today and I see a headline saying that JetBlue is testing Wi-Fi internet. I was super excited..until I read the article. It turns out that JetBlue is in fact testing out the feature however it is super, super crippled. It’s the equivalent of having an early 1990’s AOL client as your gateway to the internet. Because, it seems, RIMM and Yahoo! are sponsoring the feature, passenger internet use is limited to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and BlackBerry messaging. How incredibly dumb. Moreover, according to the article, while JetBlue has plans to expand this service to their entire fleet, they don’t have plans to expand the capabilities of the service.

Meanwhile, Virgin America has equipped their entire fleet with Wi-Fi and are planning to add Internet service within a year. If I recall correctly, they will be charging passengers a very nominal fee for access and possibly a slightly higher fee for additional bandwidth. Sounds perfect to me.

As the rest of the domestic airline industry seems to be supremely focused on profitability over service, JetBlue and Virgin American clearly are bucking the trend. It’s not a stretch to say that they are reminding their customers that flying can be a joyful experience - as it was decades ago. I’ve talked to several friends and we all agree that we’re willing to spend more for a better experience. Internet is the true killer app for in flight entertainment. I hope JetBlue realizes this and rethinks their internet strategy. Otherwise they’ll be eating Virgin’s dust.

Ever since Facebook launched their Beacon program, there’s been a non-stop attack on it from journalists, bloggers, and even advocacy organizations like MoveOn.org. Facebook has been accused of invading privacy so much so that some are actually describing the publishing of Mark Zuckerberg’s college application and personal journal entries by 02138 Magazine as Zuckerberg getting a taste of his own medicine.

The fact is, the Beacon is designed to be an opt-in feature for Facebook users. If a user does not want to publish an event him/her triggered on a third-party website, they need not do so. In other words, activity is only published to a user’s feed if that user approves. Moreover, if users are sure they never want to do so, they can permanently opt-out.

It turns out, though, that Facebook is being a bit sneaky though in how the Beacon system is implemented. According to Stefan Berteau at CA, even if a user on a third-party site - via a Beacon - declines to publish an event to their Facebook feed, information about the event is still sent over to Facebook. Whether they are doing something with this info is unknown. My guess is it is being recorded. Gathering as much information about what a user’s recent activity is may well help predict/define what their near-term future intentions are. Such info is critical for ad targeting.

What is distinct about this privacy blowup at Facebook compared to the News Feed privacy blowup back in September ‘06 is that the Beacon is a much less visible feature. Beacons launched a month ago and a very small minority of users have actually seen it. Both because only a small percentage of Facebook users have used third-party websites that employ the beacon and because, as a result, few beacon-sourced news feed items have been created (and my guess is that even for those feed items that have been published, few users users viewing the feed clicked on it and realized it was an external link). As a result of this slow uptake, most users haven’t heard of the Beacons and those that do haven’t been personally affected by it. Those that have been prompted by a Beacon were pleased to see that it was opt-in: the user had full control.

The “spying” issue brought up by Stefan is simply not going to be important to the vast majority of users. Unless you’re a techie, you’re not even going to understand the technical details. More importantly, the truth is that most users have simply become used to the idea that companies are spying on them or, worse yet, simply do not care one iota. Heck, some percentage of users probably think such spying may be a good thing because it could mean that companies can offer them better service. Let’s not forget the insanely high number of people who have Google and Yahoo toolbars installed on their browser. The primary purpose of most browser toolbars and plugins is to track your browsing activity. Oh and don’t even get me started on the Doubleclick’s of the world. I cringe to think of how many tracking cookies from all the different ad networks that are sitting in my Firefox right now.

Ask a random sample of 10 your Facebook friends questions about privacy, beacons, tracking cookies, etc. The replies you’ll get back will be filled with ignorance and indifference. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it’s a reality. This passive attitude towards personal privacy isn’t new either. Traditional companies have been tracking individual consumer behavior for decades and only until a person is directly inconvenienced or violated do they actually start to take interest in their privacy.

Perhaps Facebook’s mistake is not so much the Beacon program itself as their recent marketing blitz over SocialAds, which is all about whoring out user profile data to advertisers. It’s a concept that everyone new was coming but to a lot of people I’ve talked to, including myself, it does feel a bit like they’re exploiting the user. Yet, Google attaches ads to everything from your searches to your email and nobody cries foul. Maybe Facebook just needs to adopt a “Do No Evil” mantra to divert attention from their secret goal of beating out Google in becoming the Big Brother of the Web. =)