It's Rishi

For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea of a friend activity feed for the web. With the explosion of social/ugc websites in recent years, the web is increasingly a 2-way conversation between a website and a user. At the same time, as the rate of growth of content on the web continues to skyrocket, the need to filter new content by relevance is ever greater. One bucket that defines relevance is the bucket which contains the content (I’m using content somewhat loosely here to include activity that doesn’t necessarily generate meaningful content) created by a person’s friends and other important contacts. Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the emergence of the feed – whether it be RSS, pseudo-RSS, email or whatever – in mainstream products. A lot of people “get” the idea of a feed. Put all of these trends together and the result is, essentially, what I refer to as “life streams”: a stream that represents the activity of a person’s life. To be a bit more specific, the activity of a person’s online life. Every person who does anything interactive on the Web implicitly has such a feed and the aggregate of our friend’s streams keeps us up to date with what our friends are up to on the Web.

Now, any facebook user is quite familiar with the concept of a friend activity feed. The Mini-Feed/News Feed feature launched back in the fall of ‘06. The Mini-Feed is a log of a user’s activity on facebook and the News-Feed is an intelligently filtered aggregate of all your friend’s Mini-Feeds. Although these feeds were met with much initial controversy, a facebook without them now seems impossible. For me, the primary entry point into facebook is the news feed. I can see what’s going on with my friends and click deeper into what I find interesting. I can’t imagine having to click on each of my friend’s profile pages to check for updates. Because the News Feeds allows a user to easily discover fresh content in their networks, engagement metrics on facebook increased dramatically.

Amidst the incessant facebook buzz, it can be easy to forget that there exists a social Web outside of the facebook.com domain. Yes, outside facebook is a glorious and interesting world, a world with countless social websites where hundreds of millions of people interact. These social websites collectively face the same problem that faced the pre-feed facebook: in order to find out what my friends are doing I need to go to each of my friend’s pages. Except on the Web the problem is an order of magnitude worse! It’s not just a matter of pulling up my friend’s page, I first need to navigate to a different website. That’s a huge pain in the ass. So much so that I don’t recall in recent weeks going to YouTube, Flickr, to check up on my friends. I lose because I’m surely missing out on interesting content. Websites lose because they aren’t engaging me as well as they could or should be.

Enter FriendFeed. I first heard of FriendFeed when it was written up on TechCrunch. Basically FriendFeed brings facebook’s News Feed like functionality to the Web. I immediately requested an invite and to my surprise was granted one in a few hours. Setting up FriendFeed is a two step process. First you add all the services that you use. Of course they don’t support every website out there, but they mostly support the ones I use. Adding a service involves clicking the icon for that service and entering either your username or your personal url for that website. I added all my services, from del.icio.us to LinkedIn to this blog, in less than five minutes. It really could not have been easier. The second step is adding your friends. Of course, a service such as FriendFeed faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem and it’s growth depends on users inviting (and even compelling) their friends to join.

Pro’s:
1) Easy to set up – Like I said, I had all my services added in just a few minutes and it all worked perfectly.
2) You don’t have to change your behavior for it to work. Unlike other services in the past which have attempted to do similar things, there is nothing special that you have to do to have your activity published to your feed. FriendFeed grabs the RSS feed of your activity that the website publishes. Many services in the past have followed the bookmarking paradigm and forced the user to install and use a browser plugin or bookmarklet to make the service work. And, because of this nuisance, (surprise!) they didn’t work. FriendFeed takes advantage of the fact that every website worth its salt publishes an RSS feed for each user.
3) Social websites will love this and want to be included. FriendFeed helps people discover fresh, relevant (following the assumption that relevance correlates with proximit on a social graph). The more you can push relevant content to users, the more they will engage with your site. This has been proven in many shapes and forms.
4) Privacy from the get go. As was learned from the facebook News Feed launch, . Even if it is the case that few users will really fine tune their privacy settings, FriendFeed’s legitimate privacy controls will prevent it from receiving damning reviews from users, bloggers and the media.

Con’s:
1) FriendFeed.com is not my homepage and may never be. This is possibly the big reason why FriendFeed won’t catch on. A key reason why the News Feed is so effective on Facebook is that when you go to www.facebook.com, you get the page with the News Feed. As I said earlier, it’s a starting point on Facebook. However, FriendFeed is not my starting point on the Web. I suppose it could be if I change my browser’s setting but it’s not yet. I suppose FriendFeed can start by developing widgets for the popular homepages, but I doubt the effectiveness of that strategy for a variety of reasons.
2) Adding your friends to FriendFeed feels a bit creepy. “Hey join this service called FriendFeed so I can stalk what you’re doing on the Web..k thanks!”
3) Content may not be just a click away. On Facebook, feed events from applications are only visible to users who have that application installed. On FriendFeed, that concept is not currently present. I see all feed items for each user regardless of whether I have added that service. Right now, I’m looking at my feed and I see a bunch of Last.fm entries. The headlines sound moderately interesting but I noticed I was hesitant to click because I’m not a Last.fm user and I feel like once I click I’ll eventually be nagged about registering. Not worth the hassle me unconsciously thinks.

My bottom line assessment of FriendFeed is fantastic product execution (great site usability and the product “just works” without requiring the user to change their behavior) on a concept that is sorely missing from the Web. However, I find it difficult to be super bullish because of the homepage issue. It’s going to take a while for the average user to warm up to the idea of making FriendFeed.com their homepage and without this presence, I’m not sure if will grab the mindshare necessary to demonstrate the same success for the social Web as the News Feed did for facebook.

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…

A friend pointed me to www.screenvader.com which uses a very slick Flash-based UI for navigation. While the 3D-axis isn’t very natural to manipulate with a mouse, which of course is limited to a 2D plane, one can imagine that this would be quite natural if human hand movement could be used as the control mechanism. In fact, this immediately reminded me of so many sci-fi movies, like Minority Report, in which users interface with their computing environment using their hands.

We’re already seeing a trend towards UI’s with 3D perspective such as the “Flip 3D” window-switching feature of Microsoft’s new Aero interface in Vista. In a sense, a 3D is more space efficient since the “depth” of a user’s screen can better be utilized.

This afternoon, Yahoo! sent me a friendly reminder that my Yahoo Music Unlimited annual subscription is up for renewal in a month. I had signed up for Yahoo Music right when it came out a couple years ago and I must admit it’s been an awesome companion for me. Having access to well over a million songs across all kinds of genres has introduced me to a lot of new artists that I hadn’t been famliar with and also given me the chance to listen to the full albums of artists I already was a fan of. The downside is that the Yahoo Music application is pretty slow and clunky. Also, while the star-rating recommendation system does an OK job at pushing me music that might fit my taste, it would be nice to have more help, such as having some better social features or more editorial content.

After reading reviews about other music subscription services that have launched over the past couple of years, I thought I’d do some quick research before renewing. A couple of my friends have Rhapsody and say really great things about the service. Also, in this CNET review from a couple weeks ago, they named Rhapsody their Editor’s Choice amongst competing services. One of the best features of Rhapsody is the team of music editors which write commentary on the various artists and genres. Rhapsody does cost a little bit more but the difference is only a few dollars a month. I became really tempted to make the switch – if for no other reason than to have a change of scenery.

Then it hit me. I have now rated over 2k songs, artists, and albums on Yahoo Music. Those ratings represents thousands of hours of music listening for me and represent a deep description of my music taste. When browsing music it helps me sort out music that I have and have not listened to. Furthermore, in a sense I’m sort of proud of my ratings. I’ve put in a lot of time creating those ratings and since my music taste is a big part of my identity, hence my music ratings are a big party of my identity. I don’t want to lose those ratings. As is typical of big portal sites, there’s no way to export my music rating data. In all fairness though, import/export is not supported by any of the services and since they presumably use different music databases, it’s not even clear if an import/export could reliably be done.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose my ratings so the switching cost for me is impossibly high (I’d have to manually transfer my ratings one-by-one).
It turns out that there is actually a very good reminder here for consumer services. The deeper a customer can personalize the service, the higher the switching cost is.

Anyway, in conclusion, for the time being I’m Yahoo Music’s bitch. I’ll be renewing for another year…

Forums are a big part of my online life. I spend at least 5-10 hours per week reading and posting on forum message boards. I’m far from alone. The largest forums on the web have well over a million members and have tens of thousands of posts every single day. Each forum, whether five hundred members or five million members, represents a community of people who enjoy sharing their thoughts, knowledge and experiences with one another. Some genre-specific communities, like Bimmerforums are focused on BMW discussions while many others are general interest and host discussions on a variety of topics.

For the most part, the only activity on these forums is the message board. There’s none of the other forms of interaction like blogging, photo sharing, friend networks, etc. that you’ll find on a typical social networking site. Where forums traditionally focus on topic-based discussion, social networking sites are all about connecting people in many different ways in order to foster interaction.

There’s thousands of forums on the Web which means there are thousands of these tight user communities. Each one of these forums represents sort of a cluster of interaction in the vast space that is the Web. So you have thousands of these clusters just floating in Internet space. Why not enable these forum communities to interact in the many different ways that you can on social networking sites? Furthermore, why not turn these forum communities into formalized social networks and then, for the first time, connect all these thousands of forum communities together?

Well, that’s what a new company called Zoints is trying to do. Zoints is very similar to your typical social networking site such as MySpace but it has a couple very important distinctions. The main distinction being that Zoints enables users to associate themselves with communities within the site. Each community represent an existing forum on the Web. Zoints has developed custom integration with many of the popular forum software packages. Forum owners who want to integrate Zoints into their forum can apparently do so quite easily. Once a forum has integrated Zoints, a forum user can browse the profiles of other forum members, add them as friends, and all of that other usual social networking stuff.

Zoints has already signed up over 200 forums, however only a few of those are large. Still, though, it looks like Zoints is doing a pretty good job hooking forums to sign on. From what I can tell, David Champan, the founder of Zoints, seems fairly well-connected in the world of forums so that’s going to help Zoints sign up communities. (Click here for an interview of David Champan on TheAdminZone forum.) The main selling points of Zoints to forum owners are that Zoints will help bring new members to the forum (Zoints claims that 50% of new Zoints users do not belong to any forums), increase ad revenue for the forum owner since the forum owner will get AdSense impressions on it’s own user’s pages, and helps to build the forum’s own brand and build a tighter community.

This all very much makes sense to me and I’m a big proponent of the power of forum communities. In my last company, Revunity, we built a product exclusively for forums, called Turf. Turf failed for a couple reasons: failed to effectively market it to forum owners and didn’t have forum software integration. It seems like Zoints is effectively tackling both of those issues.

I signed up on Zoints and, while not the prettiest site design, it seems pretty fast and has all the typical social networking features that you’d expect. Here are the issues I think Zoints will face:

• One basic question is do forum users want to expose their profiles to other members of the forum? Part of the reason forums are so popular is the sense of anonymity that users enjoy. You can be and act any way you want because people don’t know who you really are. All of the popular forum software packages already allow users to describe themselves in reasonable detail via user profiles. Yet few people do. Moreover you never see anybody using their real picture as their avatar. So will users want to publish their real-life photo albums for the rest of the forum to see?
• Will Zoints dilute the sense of community of each forum? For the most part, users on the larger forums that I’m on are very wary of new members (aka newbies or “noobs”) and generally fear mass influx of new members to their community. Each new member is seen as a small step towards the dilution of the existing community. Of course, some users turn out to be great additions to the community while others are detrimental. Right now, most new users to Bimmerforums likely come either from friends of current members or people who found the forum through a search engine while searching for BMW topics. In either of these situations, there’s a much better chance that the user will be a valuable forum member versus a user who stumbles upon Bimmerforums on Zoints. Ultimately, if the culture of a community gets diluted, this hurts the uniqueness of the forum and that is not in the interest of the forum members or forum owner.



• Right now Zoints is rapidly building its userbase by signing up forums and automatically getting access to all the members of each of these forums. The marketing pitch that Zoints makes to communities promises new members and ad revenue. While I do think that Zoints will help bring exposure to forums (this is especially important for small forums), I really doubt this is going to bring much in the way of ad revenue. As has been mentioned over and over, CPM rates on social networking sites is horribly low. Even at $1 CPM (which is very, very optimistic), a hundred thousand profile page views is only $100 in ad revenue. And since the forum owner only gets a portion of the total impressions, this is more like $50 (and again this is based on a very, very optimistic CPM). The fact is, Zoints is getting way the better deal out of its partnerships with forums. Zoints is getting the forum’s userbase for dirt cheap (the only cost is the ad-sharing). It’s a smart strategy but if forum members become dissatisfied, the forum relationships could quickly turn sour. Of course, once Zoints has sucked up the forum’s userbase, if the forum wants to walk away at that point, I don’t think Zoints will be too teary eyed. They’ll have gotten what they wanted: the forum’s users to become Zoint members.
• While forums are a big part of my online life, that is not true for the majority of Internet users. In fact, I recall a statistic that something like only 15% of Internet users visit atleast one forum on a regular basis. If even 50% of these users are on Zoints, that’s only 7.5% of the Internet population. For the rest of the 92.5% of people, I just don’t see any reason for them to migrate to Zoints from MySpace, Facebook, and other established social networks. Furthermore, if I’m going to invest time into building a profile, I’m going to do it on the social network that has the largest reach.
• This leads me to the biggest issue that I see for Zoints. MySpace (and other social networks) can easily add a “Forum/Other Communities” affiliation type to user profiles like they currently do with fraternities, clubs, companies, etc. Users could then add which forums they’re a member of and users could then search profiles by forum membership. Voila! You’ve pretty much got Zoints.

One of the most prolific symbols of the “Web 2.0″ generation has been the tag cloud (if you’re not sure what a tag cloud is, the top of the sidebar on the right of this blog is an example). Well, eat your hearts out tag clouds. I came across this at thebeststuffintheworld.com.

I’m not sure if these guys were the first to do it but it’s a very cool idea. This actually reminds me of the milliondollarhomepage.com.

Is a photo tag cloud more useful than a regular tag cloud? Not really. But then again, I often wonder if traditional tag clouds are really all that useful either. One thing’s for sure, photos are a helluva lot slicker looking than words.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine a couple days ago and while we were eating, I was ranting to him about how if you search for “Rishi Khaitan” on Google, itsrishi.com is not the first result. Before I knew it I started explaining to him how Google ranks results, SEO, etc. About a minute into it, he interrupted me and was like “I guess I never really thought about how Google does it’s thing. I love Google ’cause it just works.” I thought about what he said some more. It hit me that I’ve become accustomed to talking endlessly about how things work with my geeky friends that sometimes I’ve lost focus on what’s really important. Users universally want one thing. They want things to “just work”.

Sure, Google has a simple interface and is very fast, but what makes it so ubiquitous is the fact that it doesn’t require any specialized knowledge of its user in order to work well and reliably. You type in some search words, click Search, you get good results. That’s it. Everytime. When things “just work” you feel in control. When you drive, it’s the same thing. Gas pedal go. Brake pedal stop. Everytime. There’s a sense of satisfaction and control that people have when driving. Could you imagine if even 5% of the time, the brake pedal did something else? We’d have a lot less people driving that’s for sure. But this isn’t just an issue of reliability. Complexity of operation is just as important. Just about everyone today owns at least one camera. You press the button, it takes a picture. You don’t have to know jack about what’s going on. It just works. What if auto-focusing was never invented? If you had to manually focus every shot, there would be a whole lot less cameras sold. Things that “just work” make us feel confident and in control which in turn makes us feel comfortable and joyful.

There will always be successful products which offer lots of functionality because their primary market demands it, such as SLR cameras which are intended for photography hobbyists and professionals. Such products are complex and most people won’t be happy with it. But that’s fine. Most people will choose more accessible, mainstream options.

The lesson here is, if you’re aiming to make your product a household name, you gotta make sure it “just works”. I know this doesn’t sound like rocket science, but I seem to come across countless products which promise to be the next “big thing” yet violate this basic principle.