The answer: 50% of all Internet users! Hitwise released a report comparing the traffic of the four leading map products: MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft’s Live Local. What didn’t surprise me is that Google Maps is the only one of product of the four that has gained significant year-over-year traffic. The others are flat to down slightly. However, even at GMaps’s brisk growth rate, it still won’t likely catch MapQuest for atleast 18 months.

I don’t know a single person that uses MapQuest. Even after a recent redesign, MapQuest is still a poor, uncompetitive offering. The only times I use MapQuest is when it is integrated into a third-party website (most often store locators). Even in such cases, I often copy+paste the address into GMaps. MapQuest is that horrible and I am shocked to learn that half of Internet users still choose it. Above all, this news serves as a great wake-up call that even a compelling product from a market leader still can take years to cross the chasm.

Back in July 2006, I wrote a post titled Predicting the Future With Google Trends in which I described how Google Trends, which measures the relative search volume of keywords on Google, could have been used to reveal the relative popularity of real-world phenomena, such as who will win American Idol.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up 30-day trailing data for both the republic and democratic presidential candidates and compared it to the actual Iowa Caucus results yesterday.

Is it just me or was Google Trends a remarkably accurate predictor of yesterday’s result! I tried specifying trend data for only Iowa however it seems as if there isn’t quite enough data to draw any meaningful conclusion.

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.

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.

Wow. 5 months since my last blog post. I don’t even know what to say..where to begin. I guess I should start by listing my excuses for this disgustingly long gap. When I first started blogging in late 2005, I was instantly hooked. Much of my idle thoughts turned into ponderings over what I would write in my next post. I was certain that blogging would continue to be a regular activity of mine forever. As it turned out, “forever” was about 18 months. =)

So why after 18 months did blogging suddently fall off my radar. Well here’s the rundown:

1) In early April I started working at SideStep as a product manager. It has been an interesting transition for me..some aspects good..some not so good. Nevertheless, it’s consumed a lot of my time. More time than I had expected actually. Why? That brings me to reason #2…

2) Facebook F8/Platform. In early May, just a few weeks after I joined SideStep, SideStep was enlisted to be one of the F8 launch partners. What that translated into for the company was we needed a Facebook app ready for public consumption in a mere 2 weeks. I was the PM for the project as well as the lead developer (this part was unexpected but became necessary for various reasons). For those 2 weeks leading up to May 24th, the F8 launch, I worked literally around the clock to build the Trips app. We (barely) finished by the launch date. I celebrated the next day by going to Vegas for the weekend with a bunch of buddies. I quickly realized that it was way too early to start celebrating. Various bugs and other technical issues kept me busy for half of that weekend in Vegas. When I arrived back to work on Monday, I quickly fell back into the frantic development pace of the prior weeks.

3) Once July hit, Trips was less crazy but I had taken on new responsibilities at SideStep. I was now the PM for essentially all our community products as well as a couple other products. However, what really kept me busy outside of work was working on facebook apps of my own. With Andrew (my co-founder of Revunity), I built AnswerBook and with a SideStep co-worker, Paul, I built and launched The Nickname App and Complaints. We’ve also developed some really intriguing apps which have yet to see the light of day. The bottom line is, I’ve been a coding machine. (Oh btw somewhere doing this period I bought a MacBook Pro. Thanks for showing me the light Nick!)

4) Finally, in terms of my personal life, things have also been busy. I still live in SF but SideStep is in Santa Clara. The commute is pretty killer, and even though I crash at my parent’s place in Palo Alto often during the week, the back and forth between the city and the south bay is a serious time consumer.

Anyway, I’ve got one or two more solid excuses to add to the list but I’ll spare you those for now. The important takeaway in all this is that Its Rishi is back from the dead, I once again will be posting regularly, and I’m here to stay…forever. =)

Last week I was channel surfing while eating dinner in front of the TV. After failing to find anything interesting, I gave up and settled on Jeopardy. I used to watch Jeopardy sometimes as a kid and I recall being amazed at how smart the better contestants were. Not only did they have vast amounts of knowledge, but more importantly could recall it in just one or two seconds. While watching the show last week, I found myself equally amazed as before. One particular contestant fired off answers to 15th century European history questions (or more correctly “questions for answers”) so quickly I thought he must have just finished authoring a book on the subject.

By the time the Final Jeopardy round came, I was done with dinner and in front of my laptop. The question (err answer, whatever..) was given and (of course) I had not the faintest clue. For the heck of it, I typed some relevant keywords into Google and bingo! I solved Final Jeopardy. It turned out that two of the three contestants solved it correctly also. Sure, they couldn’t use Google to find the answer, but at the end of the day, in the real world, I would be equally as effective as these two contestants. This realization sparked me to think about the value of knowledge.

What’s the purpose of knowledge? My answer would be that knowledge allows one to perform a task more efficiently. Any task. The task could be conquering the latest shoot-em-up video game, cooking dinner, or solving a complex mathematics proof. Each of these tasks can be performed faster if the individual performing that task has relevant knowledge in the respective domain. The problem though is that for knowledge to be useful, it’s not sufficient that you had once gained that knowledge. Instead, for it to be useful, you not only need to have once gained it, you also must be able to recall it both accurately and in a timely manner. Without speed and accuracy in recollection, having knowledge is useless.

How useless? The test is this: Your brain or an electronic/digital means, which is faster? Which will give me the info I need faster, more accurately, and more consistently? Nine times out of ten, my answer to this question is the latter. Honestly, I wonder why I even bother remembering anything. Phone numbers? Got my cell. Favorite restaurants? Got Yelp. CS stuff? Google works just fine. Forgot who my friends are? Got my AIM buddy list, MySpace and Facebook. How to get home from work? Got a navigation system. How to spell my name? Outlook auto-corrects it. Ok, I think you get my point…

The thing you need to remember is that all the electronic information sources I just mentioned came very recently. You think finding this information is easy now? Trust me, it’ll get easier. I’m just waiting for Google to announce a search plugin for your brain. Sounds ridiculous but is it really that crazy to imagine such a device might be available in my lifetime?

Now, you might argue that humans are capable creatures because of our intelligence, not simply our knowledge. Intelligence implies not just semantic knowledge but the ability to combine building-blocks of knowledge into composite forms of knowledge and, ultimately, to innovate. Innovation, after all, is a hallmark of human civilization. Innovation implies a certain higher level of thought which only a human can perform. You could say that freeing our minds of the burden of knowledge management will allow our mind to focus on innovation and other forms of higher-level thought.

But this implies that computers cannot perform high-level thought. Computers can be given “intelligence”. It is very common today to program computers to make sophisticated decisions based on input data. Due to complexity, or other limitations, many of such decisions were once thought impossible for a computer to make. A classic example is chess. A couple hundred years ago, the thought of a chess-playing machine was just a big joke. Ten years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the greatest chess player of our time.

But can computers innovate? If you look up the word “innovation”, the word “new” is mentioned repeatedly: new ideas, new dimensions, something new, etc. Convention has it that computers cannot think “outside of the box”. While computers can perform sophisticated logic and are able to “learn” patterns, they can’t really form new thought . A recent example of this is an article I was reading about Monitor110. They have developed some proprietary technology that allows their software to scour niche information sources on the Web (blogs, message boards etc.) and pick out potentially market-moving news before it hits the mainstream. So, their software can pick out the bits of signal from the noise, but it cannot determine if and how to act on information to bring financial reward and, moreover, outperform the rest of the market (the common term is “generate alpha” in the alternative-investment world). The formation of a unique investing strategy can only be performed by the human investor staring at the computer screen. The investor may utilize computer-based modeling tools to aid in development of the strategy, but the high-level strategy still is up to him to devise.

Will computers one day be able to innovate? Maybe. If and when scientists are better able to model the human brain, it may turn out that deep-down, it is, in fact, a deterministic system. If that is the case, it may be possible to model the human brain electronically.

Until this day, though, I do think, on the basis of the test I put forth earlier, that much of the knowledge in people’s brains is truly useless. Instead of just giving students knowledge, it is more important to teach them how to efficiently find knowledge when the situation demands it.
“Give a man a piece of knowledge and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to locate knowledge and you feed him for a lifetime.” Yeah I know..I’m a dork.

Ok, it’s way past my bedtime again. Maybe I’ll continue this thought in a later post…

I’ve gained incredible amounts of knowledge from the Web. Being a self-described “knowledge whore”, I’ve spent countless hours on sites like Wikipedia and howstuffworks.com as well as other sources of knowledge like blogs, newsgroups, and forums. Almost without fail, though, every time I find myself digging deeper into a topic, I quickly realize that the topic is WAY more complex than I had imagined it to be. Try it sometime. Pick a topic and Google it. For even the most obscure topic, the sheer vastness of relevant information on the Web is mind-boggling.

I realized today that even though the Web has given me volumes of knowledge and wisdom, above all, the Web has taught me this:

You don’t know what you don’t know.

The Web bombards us with this lesson because it’s so damned efficent at information retrieval. In minutes we can open gateways to knowledge sources that might have taken hours or days before. More importantly, though, the highly-linked nature of the Web supports a breadth-first search pattern of knowledge gathering. You might be reading about sub-topic A and in the middle of a paragraph follow a link to sub-topic B and so on. I’m sure you’ve done this plenty of times. While your initial intent may have been to perform a linear search to ascertain information on a specific topic, before you know it, you’ve spent an hour reading about 10 different sub-topics. In one hour, you’ve gotten a broad, but relatively shallow understanding of several sub-topics.

If you had been performing research thru offline methods, you would have found an information source (a book, news article, thesis, etc.) on a single sub-topic and digested it thoroughly before continuing on to the next source. This pattern of information gathering is more similar to depth-first search. Using this method, in the same time as above, you may gain relatively complete knowledge of 2 sub-topics, but not even realize the existence of the 8 other sub-topics that you would have encountered if you had followed a breadth-first search pattern. In other words, you’ll know more about less. With the Web, you’ll know less about more. The curse of the latter is that you will have learned of the existence of many more topics which only further increases the magnitude of how little knowledge you have.

Anyway, it’s late and it’s likely that I’m just rambling, so I’ll cut this post off now. In conclusion, even though the Web has given me tons of knowledge, the most valuale knowledge it’s given me is the realization of how little knowledge I actually have. My guess is that by the time I’m an elderly man, instead of feeling old and wise, I’m going to feel old and dumb. Very humbling…