I’m a huge proponent of the idea that the newspaper, with it’s one-size-fits-all news, is dead. I discussed this in my prior post, Ok, I admit it one size fits all news will die. In this prior post, I discussed the fact that I consume most of my news today using my RSS reader. I’ve added several news feeds, from many topic areas, that I respect and enjoy to my reader and I check it every few hours. I have found that over the past couple years, my awareness of current events in topic areas that I am interested in has risen considerably.

However, there are limitations to the RSS reader. “Rolling” your own news feed takes time to create and maintain. I don’t expect that many will do this. More importantly, though, the scope of the news that is available to me is bounded by the content of those news feeds which I have explicitly included. I don’t doubt that every day I miss news stories that would be of high interest to me because they originate from news sources that I am not following. A news application that can show me news from both my explicitly chosen news sources as well as news stories that come by leveraging recommendation technologies (e.g. “Story X is similar to news stories which Rishi typically reads” and “Story X is being read by many people who have similar news tastes to Rishi”) will be the ultimate solution for me. What’s exciting is that I expect such a news application to be available very soon…

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, …

Well, as a sort of experiment, Paul and Nick were kind enough to help me whip up the Vouch For Me app on Facebook. Add it and start vouching for your friends and get vouches back.

Ad rates, in this case we’re talking in terms of CPM, generally correlate directly with context. Stronger context means a more focused audience. Targeted ads for this audience brings in high rates. For Facebook apps that have pages with real context, it’s likely that they can and should do much better than 12.5 cents. Depending on the content genre, it may take a bit more legwork on the part of the developers to find the right advertisers who will pay, but if the volume is there, it shouldn’t be too hard. However, for apps that have no real context (the majority of apps), 12.5 cents CPM may be about as good as they can get. Facebook itself sells its “flyer” ad space (the left column under the nav links) for not much more than this. In fact, I recently paid about 20-25 cents CPM for an ad and that was when I instructed Facebook to serve my ad only to a very precise demographic (matching only ~40k users out of the 50M+ Facebook userbase). Without such targeting, I would have gotten away with paying much less.

From my own experiences, I’ve found SocialMedia to be quite lucrative. SocialMedia advertisers, primarily developers who are buying installs for their own applications, pay 15 cents and upwards for a click. When SocialMedia first launched, when we published their ads prominently at the top of our canvas pages, we saw eCPM as high as $2 or so. Now it’s less, but still is above 50 cents eCPM. My hunch though is that applications which serve massive page views, particularly a large number of page views per user session, will see decreasing eCPM from SocialMedia. There’s only so many ads that each user is going to click in a session, no matter how many page views in length. Again, this is just a hunch though.

So, if you are one of the application developers that has a massively popular application which offers no meaningful context, then Lookery’s offer is probably pretty attractive. And this type of developer is exactly who Lookery wants in order to achieve their goal of adding a billion page views of inventory a month for the next few months.

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.

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.

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.