Paul Buchheit, the creator of GMail, and a founder of FriendFeed (which I wrote about earlier) wrote an interesting post describing his philosophy on the development approach of innovative products (typically in startups). I found his thoughts to be very similar to those of my own. My favorite part is:

So what’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that’s why you can beat them).

What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.

What I tell people over and over is that one can be the most accomplished product designer/manager/engineer, but when developing a new product, you are really just making an educated guess about what will resonate with your user. Sometimes what makes so much sense on paper just doesn’t jive with users. In a sense, the design+requirements for the initial product is the hypothesis and the v1.0 of the product is the experiment that tests the hypothesis on users.

What separates the winners from the losers is the analysis of the results, which in the case of web-based products can be efficiently done by looking at specific engagement metrics. This does not just mean pouring through Google Analytics data. Instead, I’ve found it to mean combining the analytics data with database queries that measures key application engagement metrics.

The point is that the development of innovative products must be both rigorous and methodical. Use the standard scientific method. The unknown question is “What do my users want?”. Start with a hypothesis, experiment by testing your products with real users, analyze what worked and what didn’t, modify your hypothesis, test, …

PRN (Paul, Rishi, Nick) just launched a new Facebook app called My Apple Life. It allows users to share the Apple products that they have and want on their Facebook profile. Also, users can find others that have the same products that they do and engage in discussions like “What’s the best waterproof case for my iPod Nano?” Check it out…

Seeqpod is a music search engine that crawls the web and finds music files. I have used it a few times recently and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Many of the songs that I was looking for were found. Full DRM-free mp3s. Where does Seeqpod find these files? From what’s often called “open directories”. Open directories are typically user directories on web servers that have inadvertently been made public. They often aren’t publicly available for long since once they are found, they are leeched like crazy by users, which drives up bandwidth usage on the user account (which eventually leads to the account being suspended).

Savvy users have been finding open directories for years. With the right search parameters, Google is a great tool for finding such open directories. However, Seeqpod is an ideal tool for this. Not only is it laser focused on finding music, it mashes up relevant discography data and can even stream the search results so you can listen before you download.

The problem is that Seeqpod is essentially a Napster for the Web. Whereas the real Napster searched people’s own local computers for music, Seeqpod searches the Web for music that people have uploaded to servers. While there may be some legitimate content that Seeqpod is crawling, I think it will be very difficult for the Company to defent itself against a new lawsuit from Warner Music which claims that Seeqpod directly contributes to copyright infringement by helping people locate pirated content.

As usual, I think the record labels are picking the wrong battles and need to focus their resources on figuring out how they can add value, and build closer relationships, with music listeners. The recent developments at Last.FM makes me hopeful that the record labels are in fact seeing the light.

I have to admit that I was excited to go to MacWorld today. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was expecting to see, but I do know that I was not expecting to be so incredibly underwhelmed. Few booths stimulated my interest. Even Apple’s own floor was pretty pathetic. Apple focused on two products: MacBook Air and iTunes rentals playable on the updated AppleTV. Of course there were the obligatory iPods and iPhones available for showgoers to play with, but I was shocked that Apple didn’t even bother to have any of their other computer products available. It’s possible that I missed it but I didn’t even see any of the new Apple Pro models. I guess it’s Apple’s way of telling owners of their existing products that they are no longer a part of the family unless they upgrade to the new latest-and-greatest.

As for the new products, here’s my take:

MacBook Air - When I saw it in person, I couldn’t help but marvel at the tremendous achievement in packaging that it represents. It’s amazingly thin and light. However, you do make compromises on connectivity and performance (opting for the ultra-expensive SSD option mitigates much of the performance sacrifice but it’s an option that few can afford for now). Since Apple already makes amongst the most svelte laptops on the market, I don’t think the Air is going to expand Apple’s market share. Instead, most sales will come from jetsetters and the tech-savviest who would otherwise be using a MB or MBP.

Time Capsule - No RAID, no care. It’s as simple as that for me. I want to backup and be all but certain that the data will be there if I need it. If the Time Capsule’s HD fails, you’re SOL. That’s not what I consider reliable storage. Come on Apple, give me an Internet-based backup onto storage in a robust datacenter. Until this happens, I’ll stick with Mozy.

iTunes Movie Rentals - I’m impressed. The prices are reasonable and selection strong. Will this finally convert the NetFlix/BlockBuster userbase into believers? I’m not sure. Will this sell more Apple TV’s? I think so.

iPhone updates - The addition of location via tower triangulation turns iPhone GMaps into a truly killer app. I am really looking forward to February to see what Apple is going to unlock to developers when the SDK launches.

Lowest moment at the show: Four people earnestly shooting photos of an unremarkable MacBook Air decoration that hung from the ceiling. What were they all using to snap the photos? iPhones! I couldn’t help but feel nauseous.

Finally, I’d love for someone to do a study of Apple’s market share in San Francisco. At every coffee shop I have been to in the city, at least 50% of the laptops in use are MacBooks. In fact, after leaving MacWorld today, Nick, Paul & I were doing some brainstorming at a coffee shop out near my place in the richmond and in between thoughts, I noticed that about 75% of the laptops in the shop were Macs. Of course, my observation is biased since I’m only considering people who live in SF and compute at coffee shops. For the most part, this is the college-age to young professional age. So right there, Apple’s market share is going to be higher than their overall market average.

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.

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.