Galaxy of Emptiness

It’s been a while. A long while since I posted last.

I was going to only focus on writing about squash, not the vegetables, the sport. I couldn’t get enough of the sport until I hurt my foot. Now this wasn’t just a footache. It hurt! It really hurt and it didn’t go away. So as any good techie, I went online and diagnosed the problem myself. Why would I want to visit a doctor? I have all of the same medical information available online. No medical training, but lots of information.

I diagnosed myself with a stress fracture which if it was true couldn’t be diagnosed by the doctor for a couple weeks anyway or at least the fracture started to heal so they could see the healing fracture in X-rays. So I did what any good doctor would do. I recommended that I provide additional foot support and stayed off of the foot in general. You know take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

And as any good squash player, I adhered to some of my doctorly advice. I wrapped up the foot and generally stayed off of it. I put heating pads on it all the time. I wore shoes with excellent support that didn’t allow my foot to bend where it hurt. And on the court I only focused playing tight against the wall and avoided any big leaps landing on my left foot. My game suffered temporarily, since I couldn’t move. but I got accustomed to not using my left foot my game got a lot better. Much better. My rails became tighter. My court awareness became more acute. My movement became shorter but more precise. I should have focused on not using my left foot earlier.

My foot still hurts which is a problem of stress fractures–the problem can linger. It especially hurts in the morning when I wake up and stand on it for the first time. But my squash game has gotten much better.

Now, I know someone could say that I should have *not* played while my foot hurt. These people obviously don’t understand.

For all of those people who use a feed reader, I created a Folder within Bloglines Classic for anyone who would like all of the Forbes Web Celeb 25 feeds in one feel swoop. (I left the Bloglines News Feed in the OPML file. Feel free to delete.)

Access to an Reading List or OPML File is located here.

For those who haven’t tried Bloglines Beta, give it a test drive.

A while back, I was interviewed by Robert Scoble on video. During the interview I mentioned that sometimes I compare a feed reader to a time machine. Feed readers let you save time, by getting all of this content sent to you. One of Robert’s viewers, Colin a developer out of Pennsylvania commented that he had a better definition for feeds. He said.

“Feeds are kinda like email. When a web site is updated you’re notified of the change without needing to visit the site.”

He highlights one of the key issues of a new product–The need to get the product description right and value proposition right. In mature categories, you don’t need to worry about it. The categories are already broadly defined. But in rapidly emerging markets the definitions and value propositions are oftentimes totally new. It’s difficult describing something totally new.

At Bloglines, we’ve been doing some guerrilla testing and formal usability testing. So I mentioned to Colin that we should test the different positioning statements. We should test the following: his definition above, his definition above with a benefit (saves times) and something kooky like a feed reader is a like time machine, it helps you save time by getting all of your content delivered to one place.

This is basically a light-weight product positioning test which anyone can do and should do. You’re probably already doing it and with a little structure your positioning tests would be even better. CEO’s do this as the elevator pitch. Marketers do this in a little more structured manner with customer surveys or face-to-face interviews. What you do is write 3-5 product positioning statements that illustrate different positioning values. You then interview the customer to get qualitative feedback. You analyze the feedback for common themes.

Colin and I are going to do our tests and we’ll the post results back on our blogs.

Btw - if you’re a Blogliner check out 3-Pane View in Bloglines Beta. You’ll see some of our thoughts concerning feed reader positioning.

As reported in the NY Times, the debate continues about measuring web properties. It was perfect timing for me because, I was chatting with Robert Scoble at Web 2.0 about the size of the feed reader audience. Unbeknownest to him, I obsessively attempt to track the core feed reader segment (Bloglines and Google Reader.)

The NY Times article surprised me because, I didn’t think that the debate continue for top tier web sites. Surely, they are big enough and don’t have large discrepancies. I thought, most of the panel based approaches are fairly good at measuring at audience size. But I guess I’m wrong. For example, Forbes.com claimed 11.6 million United States visitors last month. Yet Nielsen/Netratings only counted 7.5 million and Comscore estimates were even lower, 5.8 million. The case gets even worse for smaller sites which can’t rely upon third-party measurement.

The problem is an old one for sites without registration. These sites track unique browsers which is some major flaws. The first is that I might use multiple browsers (PC and Phone. Or Laptop at work, Desktop at home, Phone and iPhone.) The second is that I might upgrade my browser which would count as two unique browsers. In short, the tracking of unique browsers needs to get collapsed to unique users. Withou a required unique user id, it’s difficult to be sure that a specific user is using a specific set of browsers.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a series of posts outlining the different data available from the various services and outline some of the caveats. I think this is important because most of the tech bloggers are comprised of independent developer types who generally don’t have access to paid subscription data services and therefore have probably not delved into the details of the services.

Yesterday, I was at the Business of API Conference where I ran into some old friends and new friends. Outlined below are some of my notes before I had to run and take off.

The key summary to me highlighted by several, but really brought home by Dave McClure. Your API strategy needs to be in alignment with your Business Strategy. I.e. Your API strategy needs to have your revenue model backed into the APIs.

Oren Michaels, CEO Mashery
Requirements for Successful APIs Infrastructure

- Reporting – who’s doing what?

- Monitoring – proactive ability to throttle or manage users to their appropriate service levels.

- Scalability – need to handle the vastness of the developer network

Twitter – 10x times as much traffic coming via the API than the front door traffic

An Aside from an Intuit employee -

67,000 developers with access to a synch API. Imagine what they will do with a full set of APIs.

Thomas McCarthy Howe, Consultant

A quick primer on generalized anxiety disorders. Hmm.

- Expectation of the worse becomes habitual behavior.

- You do not know how your APIs will be used. Let go.

Round Table Discussion

Quentin Hardy, Forbes
Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services
Michael Jones, Userplane/AOL
Bradley Horowitz, Y!
John Richards, MSFT

Y!
Flickr example, APIs enabled flickr to be distributed by the blogosphere.
Many of the Y! web acquisitions are badging APIs and not deep integration APIs. Badging was not a common practice 5 years, but has become the dominant model.
12-18 months vision – reduces ramp-up costs which distr

AOL
Extend services to 3rd party websites and then drive advertising models.
Moved from a fee model to a free advertising model with revenue share which also creates a need for fraud prevention.
12-18 months vision – many companies will need to move beyond APIs to real API strategy with monetization

Amazon
265,000 users in the web services community
Developers were already scrapping the data from the website to build sites which would send traffic back to Amazon.
Cost following model used to developing pricing for the web services.
12-18 months vision – radically reduces ramp-up costs

Asha Vellakial
Telco 2.0 – under attack from disruptive services and governmental regulations
Open APIs have concerns for Telcos such as risk to the billing relationship with the customer.
BT is the leader with APIs
Bobbletop – news aggregator
Wants more Open APIs from aggregator companies. I followed up with here afterwards. I’m still not quite sure what she meant by this other than the telco content experience should be more open.

David Cancel, former CTO Compete
6 months of open apis was greater than 6 years of marketing

Jia Shen, Rockyou
Positioned as the Social Platform API
Facebook is 7x the growth of Myspace – this is the seond time in a week to see that message. Look to see more direct comparisons of social networks going forward.

Dave McClure, former head o PayPal developer network
7 habits of highly successful developer programs
- audience - get one.
- product – better be cool, code examples in cool languages
- geeks – hire geeks, extroverted blogging geeks
- metrics – most important thing – “have some”
- biz model – api must have the business model built-in
- education – make it free and easily accessible
- marketing – sell the developers – give them respect

Due to some reporting outages by Google, some of the blogerati are questioning the size of the feed reading universe. There are number of false assumptions.

- consuming services are all feed readers.

- all subscribers are active

- subscribers between consuming services are unique

The biggest consumer of RSS/Atom is iGoogle which now accounts for 20% of Google home page traffic.

A subscriber doesn’t necessarily interact with the feed. Even if the subscriber does interact with the feed, it could be a very low level of interactivity.

Users can subscribe to multiple feed readers or consuming services.

The picture says it all.

Shoulder, magic middle, meaty middle.

Point is there is a group of producers who serve to support the current aggregation points. They are small, indie, pro-sumer. The advent of superior tools allows these indies to get audiences.

Successful sites have started targeting these producers as distributors of their services to the indie audiences. The key is that the producers are somewhere between b-to-b and b-to-c.

Would IBM call upon Om Malik?

I was Bebo-ed recently. I was tired and decided to test out Bebo to see why it is so popular. I went through the registration process, but didn’t pay any attention to the invitation from Bebo to spam my entire addressbook. I agreed and all 800 people in my address book received my Bebo invitation. Obviously, my in-box was overwhelmed with spam-back and questions from people on my address book.

It appears this type of aggressive user generated spamming is becoming all the norm. Flixster and SMS.ac are the two others getting some press lately. The biggest offenders are not being upfront.

SMS.ac - The practice had been to send an SMS to the friends every month until they signed up.
Flixster - doesn’t appear to clearly communicate the action to the user.
Plaxo - Currently getting more aggressive. I had to invite at least one person to get access to my plaxo list.
Bebo - Good feature. Vague copy about the invite action.

Will this be a short-term or will this be the method for all new sites?

I was hooking up w/ an old co-worker, Adam, who happens to work w/ Tantek Celik of Microformats fame. We walked back to my friends’ office where I got to meet Tantek. Adam is an old mobile and device computing guy and our conversation led to micro-formats and mobile. We tested out a few use cases of saving Microformatted data on a phone. Some worked and some didn’t. The data, the browser and the device are not all operating together yet. On the successful use cases, you could definitely see how Microformats will improve the user experience on all mobile devices and could extend the devices to handle more data easily.

Also, check out Microformats.org and combine it with On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace. Now that is a recipe for the future.

While everyone is watching the Internet, I think it’s interesting to see how technology is souping up old-media. In this case, radio gets a little Google magic. Bid4 Spots allows advertisers to bid on remnant air-time. For those not in the know, this is the unsold air-time that normally gets filled with a public service announcement.

Bid4Spots creates an auction marketplace for potential advertisers to bid on online and offline air-time.

Is this the end of the public service announcement?