Master of 500 Hats

NewsFlash: People Click on Banner Ads with Fake Dialog Boxes. (and also on Shimmying Dudes)

so i'm guessing most people won't be surprised by this "come-to-jesus" confession by Jakob Nielsen... which i came across because Jimmy Guterman's headline was a lot more interesting than the original.

however what's perhaps more interesting to discuss than the finding itself -- NEWSFLASH: people click on banner ads that are made to look like buttons / checkboxes / dialog boxes... who knew? -- is Nielsen's reason for withholding the data for ~10 years.  Basically, he believes (or believed) the information could be used unethically & successfully by morally ambivalent advertisers to the detriment of Joe Sixpack User.  SHOCKED, i tell you i'm SHOCKED!

In a change of heart, Nielsen more recently came clean & decided that making the truth known / disseminating information outweighed the potential damage that might be caused from black hats using it improperly.  i'm a bit surprised he took so long to come to this conclusion, as it's oft-quoted territory:

• "knowledge is power"
• "power corrupts", however...
• "the truth shall set you free"

and last but not least:

• dumbass users tend to click on shimmying motherfucker dudes

...which of course is what led to the downfall of the Roman Empire, why Faust sold out to Lucifer, and why Bill Clinton mistook Monica Lewinsky for a cigar holder.  and perhaps why you recently refinanced your home and why LowerMyBills got stinkin' rich off lead-gen revenue & got bought for a cool $330M samoleons.  but i digress.

so back to the interesting matters at hand here:

• mildly interesting: deceptive banner ads that use fake dialog boxes really work well
• lots more interesting: jakob nielsen, someone who makes a living as a usability expert and regularly dispenses information about online user behavior on his blog, has been holding out on his readers on this deep dark secret for a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry loooooooooooooooong time.

now doesn't that make you go hmmmmm.

---

btw, thought i'd conduct my own highly non-empirical sample survey about whether people find the fake dialog box thing annoying:

Jeremiah Owyang is Forrester Research; great Web Strategy.

Congratulations to Jeremiah Owyang on his new Web Strategy gig @ Forrester Research; as well to Forrester for scooping up someone with his prodigious research & blogging talents.  Jeremiah will be a great fit with other top-notch analysts there such as Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff. 

Both Jeremiah & Charlene are personal friends, and i've been fortunate to have them speak & moderate at tech conferences & user groups i've helped run such as last year's Web 2.0 Expo and the SDForum Search SIG.  With luck, i'll still be able to get both of them to participate in future events too!

It's good to see a firm like Forrester adding talented bloggers to its research staff... they need more folks like Jeremiah & Charlene & Josh who blog regularly, to ensure they remain relevant as a resource for tech strategy & analysis.  All too often great content & research gets buried behind paid access or subscription-only login, and unfortunately the companies that choose this web strategy are missing the Forrest(er) for the trees ;)  Better to give away some valuable & insightful content, and use that to gain interest & clients for higher-end research.

Facebook = Platform + Graph + Feed. It's that Simple. (& so am i)

(reposted from Facebook Note i wrote earlier today... btw, anyone know how to syndicate a Note out to a blog automagically? see me in the comments)

sometimes I can be the dumbest geek around.  

but fortunately, that kind of stupidity actually serves me well.  after getting over the fact that i'm no longer the smartest person in the room anymore (used to think so; still do occasionally), i'm now pretty open with my ignorance.  I have no fear of asking dumb questions in front of large audiences, or of asking people to repeat themselves 3 or 4 times, and then say I still don't get it.  this forces me (& others who waste time talking to me) to keep it simple [stupid]. but it's still easy to flip back to alpha geek mode & make it too complicated.

re: facebook, sometimes I feel like i've discovered some deep truths about social networking and a whole new 'web 3.0' revolution... then other times I realize 'hey Stupid! it's just a damn News Feed & some tags!' and that of course is the wakeup call to know i ain't god's gift to tech analysts. 

but here's the thing.  

everyone seems to be pointing to the Platform (& the API & Apps) as the amazing Facebook innovation.  and they're not wrong, but imho they're missing the true innovation... because amazing as it is, the Platform really isn't the hard part.  other people can & will copy that (but it may take longer than they think or hope).

no, the REALLY hard part is engineering the change in human behavior that Facebook has achieved with the News Feed.  *that* is what will truly be most difficult to copy.

even getting all the data together to create a 'social event stream' like the Feed is challenging -- Plaxo & others are trying -- but then getting people to put info *into* it & getting them to *look at it* regularly... well it's one thing to build good tech; quite another to get people to make a fundamental change in their behavior.

so that's why I think what Facebook has done is so incredible... it's not just Platform, Apps, & APIs.. it's the Social Graph & the Feed, and how the Platform drives viral behavior on, around, & thru the Feed.

or in other words: 

people see shit other people are doing in the Feed, and then they click on that shit.

see?  so much better when you Keep It Simple, right?

and of course I do... because I am ;) 

'nuff said.

Brad Fitzpatrick: Google on the Social Graph Warpath?

Competition is good.  and right now there's a lot of it going on around the Int-ar-Web.

Altho Facebook is currently King of the Social Graph , it will be interesting to see what folks like Brad Fitzpatrick put together now that he's left SixApart and is working for the GOOG. 

See his recent presentation on Social Networking Portability (1MB PDF)  for the "open source" answer to Facebook's "gated community".  Pretty interesting stuff... Samuel Jackson was certainly correct. 

Roundup of other posts & articles on the Social Graph (yep, you're right too BradF):

• Dan Farber (ZDNet) [channeling Mark Zuckerberg]
• David Sacks (Geni.com) on the New Portals
• Dare Obasanjo (Microsoft) and Roach Motel followup
• Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) on Privacy
• Joseph Smarr (Plaxo)
• Brad Feld (Feld Thoughts)
• Brian Oberkirch (Like it Matters)
• Andrew Mager
• Jeremiah Owyang (Web Strategist)
• Tantek Celik @ BarCampBlock
• Microformats site on Social Networking Portability
• A distributed centralized Social Graph for us all (Marc Canter)

(definitely people-tagging the hell out of this one & spamming your Facebook feed something awful ;)

Oh the Humanity!

  Oh the Humanity! 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

not feeling particularly geeky today... since we're going back east for family visits & weddings, thought i'd bust out a shot of Dante from a few months back.

broken banana -- Oh, the Humanity!

;)

Holy Shit. Bill Gates is on Facebook & HotOrNot?!?

  Bill Gates on Facebook & HotOrNot?!? 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

Bill Gates seeks tall, dark, sexy philanthropist who hails from Omaha... on Facebook/HotOrNot ?

"i have had an opportunity to do a lot of interesting things in software and philanthropy.  I get to travel a lot and learn about the world.  I haven't actually met anyone face to face that i met on Facebook but it could be interesting."

Confessions of a Facebook Feed Spammer. (Facebook Notes = Blogs. People Tagging = Feed Spam.)

  People Tagging = Feed Visibility 
  uploaded by davemc500hats

Recently i've been playing around with Facebook 'Notes' & people tagging.

altho i guess it's obvious, i had sort of overlooked the fact that 'Notes' are pretty much the equivalent of 'Blogs' for Facebook (see my earlier brief post on Status = Twitter, Share = Del.icio.us). 

However, there are a few important differences i'm still discovering... one diff is that it's very easy to 'people tag' a Note, and provide a very visible way for your blog post Facebook Note to get discovered by your friends & contacts.

i think this mirrors some points i made in another previous post on Marketing Facebook Apps... namely that it's REALLY IMPORTANT to people tag content in Facebook so it has association to specific individuals, which thereby connects to the social graph & provides relevance.

I don't know if Facebook has anti-spam algorithms built to prevent excessive "people tag spam" in Facebook, but some of my experiments tagging people on Facebook Videos and Facebook Notes are showing up in other folks' feed rather obnoxiously (sorry atish), similar to Dare Obasanjo's post about Scoble hijacking his feed (note: Scoble claims to have over 4,000 "friends", whereas right now i only have ~600, still pretty large but not extreme, and about the same amount i have in LinkedIn). 

i'm pretty sure the reason i'm N Yr Feed so much (even when the "volume" is dialed down) is due to the fact that i'm "over-clocking" the normal Facebook feed prioritization algorithm by adding lots of people tags to selected content, and then magnifying that effect even further due to the slightly larger-than-average friend network i maintain (guessing average is ~100-200?).  also possible Notes & Videos aren't used as often as other content, so i'm "dominating" less frequently-used feed story categories more than most folks (except Scoble).  not sure about that, but seems plausible.

my guess is eventually some alpha-geek Facebook engineers will dial-down the magnification on the high-end, and i'll only be slightly more visible than average.  also, other folks will discover these tricks, and the market will 'settle' a bit further.  still, i'm pretty sure this technique will work well for some time to provide above-average feed visibility. (note: you can also use cocoa krispies for eyeballs, and that will also attract attention ;)

in any case, i think it bears repeating:

* If you want your content / apps to get distributed virally (ie, show up prominently in the feed), you don't have to go all Super-Spammer on the invites... the feed works quite well to promote item visibility via the social graph. people discover items via the feed and/or tagging, and they adopt. 

simply include people tags so that the item has reference points to the social graph.  this provides visibility both to the people you tag directly AND ALSO indirectly to other people connected to the people you tag.

having performed this experiment manually with Notes & Videos & Share, i'm more convinced than ever this can be simulated in Facebook Apps by choosing the right frequency & content for app notifications / requests with embedded people tag references.

(again, sorry if my tinkering is jamming your feed.  it's only because i care ;)

Pulling a Scoble on Atish... oops.

as Scoble is to Dare, appears i am to Atish.

sorry, about that... will try to calm down a bit.

(nice open source bug reporting tho, atish ;)

Startup Metrics for Pirates (Redux) @ Ignite Seattle

Last night at Ignite Seattle i gave a more compressed version of my Pirate Metrics talk... i just revised my slides a bit, and this version is a little more together:

(say it with me now: AARRR!!!)

Spock launches public beta; instant Top 10 lists

i've been an advisor for Spock for almost a year now, and i'm really psyched they are finally launching publicly and moving into open beta.  the site started getting pounded by visitors yesterday due to some early French television coverage, but i think this morning will be the real test when the site is live for everyone.  hope all their scalability prep is able to handle it, but regardless it will be an interesting day... heh.

one Spock feature most people haven't seen yet is the ability to use Spock widgets to display "mini-profiles" of people, or groups of profiles based on a search term or phrase... what i like to call "instant top 10 lists".  these are pretty cool to use on a blog or website, and enable viewers to click thru to the associated Spock profiles and "vote" on any tag (up or down), or add new tags.  (note: now that Spock is in open beta, anyone can view Spock profiles or search results without being logged in to Spock; however if you want to vote on a tag or add a new tag, you will have to login... this is done to prevent tag spam, so there's no anonymous tagging of anyone as a "facebook fanboy"... ahem)

Here is my Spock mini-profile:
(please feel free to vote up the "facebook fanboy" tag)

Here is a list of top 10 "web 2.0" people according to Spock:
(surprised john battelle isn't #1 or #2 on this result; guessing once the community starts voting he will rise to the top)

more Spock coverage by VentureBeat, Searchblog, Mashable, TechCrunch, and on Techmeme soon.