Master of 500 Hats

All About The Facebook Feed part II, by Nick O'Neill

quick hit from Nick O'Neill's great post on 'Top 5 Viral Facebook Techniques', point #3:

News feed - The news feed is the most powerful component of Facebook. Period. 
There are two ways that applications can leverage the news feed. The first is naturally built in. Most of the time, when a user adds an application it is displayed in their friends’ news feeds. While it is not a guarantee that it will show up in other people’s news feeds (due to a number of factors pertaining to news feed optimization), this is the primary thing that helps applications spread virally.

When I launched my Bush Countdown clock I added no viral components and relied completely on people’s news feeds. This has spread the application to close to 8,500 users. While not spectacular, it is hardly something to sneeze at.

totally agree with Nick's first sentence above. as a followup to my previous Marketing Facebook Apps post & Justin Smith's News Feed Optimization (NFO) post, i'm going to try to do more posting in the near future on Facebook News Feed & mini-feed... as soon as i figure out some more interesting shit to say. 

(ps - don't hold your breath.)

Declaring Facebook Bankruptcy, or Sticking Your Head in the Sand? (or elsewhere...)

Sorry Jason... you're way wrong on this one.

burying your head in the sand -- or elsewhere -- isn't the solution.

definitely you need to play around with your Facebook message notification setting defaults -- and they should probably do a better job choosing a lower default ''ambient noise level" -- however, to close yourself off to your *entire* social network is not the answer.  dialing down the priority / volume level might be, but that doesn't mean you need to declare bankruptcy.  just means you need to filter better.

love ya brother, but yer throwin' the baby out with the bathwater.

peace out.

Pimp Your Ride... er, Facebook Email?

so again, maybe i just missed this earlier... or not? 

i remember seeing "add a link" at the bottom of the Compose Message dialog, and then "add a video" & "add music", but i didn't really stop to consider how those buttons had gotten there. 

then i noticed the "Send a HotList Gift" button tonight, and i realized the Facebook Apps i've added were somehow able to modify the default Compose Message function in Facebook.  (right?  gotta be, can't see any other way that happened... but i don't remember seeing an app opt-out setting to "let this app modify your Compose Message functionality", so i'm guessing it's built-in?)

hmm, interesting.  so do i really want to Pimp My Ride Facebook Email? 

what do you folks think -- innovation or overkill?

(and what happens when 50 apps try to add their button to the bottom of my email message?  guess the market will self-correct, but still...?)

User Engagement is a Depth, not a Breadth, metric (and # UV's / # Facebook App users are crappy UE metrics)

I don't have all my thoughts on this organized very well yet, but regardless of whether i have the stats to back it up yet, i'd like to make a rather sweeping statement about measuring user engagement :

User Engagement is a depth, not a breadth, metric.

what do i mean by that?  i mean that to truly understand if someone is using your product / website / facebook app / feature, you probably want to measure adoption based on more than just initial exposure.  that means  >1 page view OR >1 click OR >10 seconds per session, and >1 visit per 30-90 day period.  forced to generalize, let's say "active user" is indicated by session behavior >=3 page views, >=3 clicks, >=30 seconds, and repeat visit behavior >=3 visits per month (note: your mileage may vary). anything less might not indicate true user activation; it could just mean someone was just being a tire kicker.

to use the disease analogy: if 1M people catch cold, but everyone "recovers" in 2-3 days and no one dies / has to stay home from work... you probably don't have the Black Death on your hands.  similarly, if lots of people walk into your store and look around, but don't stay more than 2 minutes and don't buy anything, i wouldn't go crowing about all the foot traffic you generated.  your conversion still SUCKS.

now true, if you get 1M people to catch *ANYTHING* -- like say, a Facebook App -- and you can tweak the cold into a REAL virus, you might have something.  similarly, if you use all the foot traffic to your door (or website), and give away a door prize or taste test (or landing page), things might get more exciting.

still, as a product manager / web developer / product marketer, it's a lot more relevant to your job to note depth of adoption or conversion % to a more significant metric that helps you decide a) what features to build or modify, or b) what marketing channels to emphasize / buy traffic from.  ultimately, isn't that what you should be using those metrics for, really?  (ok, so i'm ignoring metrics for advertising  or fundraising purposes... but i hate those use cases anyway. and i'll leave monetization to a later discussion, once we've determined you actually have usage adoption first).  more on this after we come up with an appropriate Lab Experiment.

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so here are 3 rough observations i'll make about user engagement metrics:

OBSERVATION #1: top-line # Unique Visitors (for websites) or # "Active Users" (for Facebook Apps) are crappy measures of user engagement.  while they may indicate some level of initial usage (= acquisition) and perhaps some level of virality (= referral), they are not very good metrics for measuring depth of interest (= activation) or repeat usage (= retention), and can lead to incorrect conclusions for product managers or marketers about how active and valuable a user base you really have.

OBSERVATION #2: # page views is probably a better user engagement metric but still kinda sucks; due to Ajax, other rich media / applets, and also the use of video, these metrics are also not the best ways to determine user engagement. that's why even ComScore is moving away from this metric. if measured accurately, time-on-site is probably a better way to determine engagement, altho it may still leave the question of whether the user was doing something else (on the computer or off), or whether they were truly watching/thinking about the page in question.

OBSERVATION #3: active clickstream time within a session (= time-on-site combined with a "minimum time between clicks" (MTBC?) =60-180 seconds or something like that), and repeat sessions over time (= multiple visits per week / month) are likely best-case broad-use user engagement metrics.  however, for most product & marketing decisions, you'll probably still want to use more custom metrics relevant to your business & customers, such as conversion % from initial states of user activity to deeper states of user activity. 

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like i said, this still feels like too sketchy definitions for me to be comfortable with, so i'll keep working on some better ways to describe this that can be applied practically. in the meantime, i've provided an example of a sample conversion dashboard report along with some pretty pictures in my previous post: Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR!). 

there's also a rough powerpoint below here (updated w/ long version):

other links / sites / reports (please add notables i've missed in comments)

• Appsaholic on Facebook
• Appaholic.com on the web / described on Inside Facebook
• Jeremy Liew's reecent blog posts on user engagement
• Jeremiah Owyangs blog posts on social media measurement
• Jeremiah's interview of Eric Petersen on attention & engagement
• Compete.com's Attention Metric
• Comscore new "Visits" metric
• GrokDotCom on Web 2.0 Metrics / Persuasion Metrics

Update: VentureBeat has an interesting piece up on how Slide, RockYou, & HotOrNot are converting Facebook app usage into traffic back to their own sites... again, the top-line #'s are decent indicators that something is going on, however not clear how those users are converting to deeper engagement. 

Update2: Jeremy Liew also has an interesting post on VB about Behavioral Targeting.

Three Firsts for 500 Hats: Techmeme, Mom, & a Troll. Awesome.

  Master of 500 TechMemes 
  Original navel-gazing by dmc500hats

note to my fan[s]: i have officially hit the big time.

three firsts this morning, 7/20/07:
  1) @ 5:27am, my Mom emailed me to say she joined Facebook
  2) @ 7:20am, my latest post was in the top slot on TechMeme
  3) @ 2:57pm, michael called me a stupid tottering idiot

yah, i am most definitely teh shit.

friends & fans: please encourage michael, my new personal troll, if you see him in the comments.  i am desperately in search of an arch-enemy, as the Guild of Calamitous Intent has informed me my application for D-list Blogger is not complete w/o one.

michael: we ain't done by a long shot son. please keep coming back. 
i really need those page views. kthxbye.

'New York' (nee Tokyo) Subway Map of the Internet

  Subway Map of the Internet  (aka Tokyo)
  uploaded by Orli Yakuel

pretty cool "visualization" of the major internet companies, overlaid using a map of popular Tokyo Subway lines.  the original photo is here, from a Japanese division of Information Architects.  (larger pics here & here)

it's fun picking out different companies... kind of a trip down memory lane for me.  after 10+ years of Internet insanity i actually know a friend or two at most of the "stops" ;)    i added a few company tags, but there lots more. hopefully Orli Yakuel doesn't mind if we add a few.

(btw: the pic is currently titled "New York Subway Map of the Internet", however that's definitely Tokyo.... the Main Line is the Yamanote Line, which is the main circular route in downtown Tokyo.  i use that subway line pretty often when i visit my wife's family in Japan.)

UPDATE: The original IA.jp site has a lot of inside jokes on where the Company stations are located, and how they relate to the cultural (or not) activities & people going on in those Tokyo locations.  Google & YouTube are at cool, hip locations like Shinjuku & Shibuya, while Yahoo & Microsoft are in more mundane locations like Ueno & Ikebukuro ("Yahoo is in Ueno, a nice place but nothing going on there").  ouch.

oh well, my wife's family lives near Ueno, and one time we took Dante to a really wonderful aquarium in Ikebukuro... and i still like Yahoo & Microsoft :)

Kottke is wrong -- Facebook isn't AOL; it's Visual Basic.

For about a year or two, i've been meaning to do a followup piece on how Google, Microsoft, & Yahoo all screwed the pooch by not building out a REAL web application OS worth developing apps for, but i'm too late.

GYM is Old & Busted. 

Facebook is The New Hotness.

It's really astonishing how much opportunity the big 3 GYM had to do something truly innovative, how many assets & properties & APIs they had to turn into great platforms, how many brilliant geeks & architects & programmers could have laid out a BIG VISION -- and yet how PATHETICALLY & AWFULLY they missed the mark & overlooked the biggest potential for the IntarWeb since Clarke & Andreesen birthed Mosaic.

(and btw eBay & Amazon also effed up too, but they never really had the right geek DNA... tho Bezos came closest with AWS/S3/EC2. Jeff really doesn't get credit for how brilliant a tech visionary he is.  Still think he should have kept A9 in, spun AWS out instead of the other way around, but whatever he's still as much of a  genius as Gates or Jobs)

But at this point, talking about how each of those 3 huge companies fucked up and missed the boat is really old news.   Facebook is the New Hotness, and everyone else is simply Scratching at the Door of Cool.

So i'm doing a different take on this one.  Kottke is dead wrong about Facebook being AOL, and even his wimpy backtracking is off the mark.  Jeremiah & Robert, i love you guys but i think your concerns are overstated.  Duncan Riley has it pretty close, but not quite...

Facebook isn't AOL.  It's Visual Basic.

Let me explain. 

I may act like a young turk/geek, but i'm actually over 40, so i might as well pull out the old skool.  Back in the day, i used to be a no-talent pc database developer. I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag.  My first paid programming gig was hacking dBase III, and when i came out to California in '89 i barely managed to score a job doing Sybase DB SQL app dev (& later got fired for writing poetry... long story, another time).

But in 1991, something happened that changed my life: Microsoft released Visual Basic.  Sure, it was probably a half-assed ripoff of NeXTstep's Interface Builder -- a truly beautiful & groundbreaking app dev environment, btw -- but with Microsoft pimping VB out to 100,000+ overachieving Excel jockeys like me, it was a GodSend.  In one resistance-is-futile Borg minute, i was EMPOWERED.  Suddenly i was on a level playing field with all those egotistical mofo C++ programmers who looked down their noses at Delta Geeks like me.  Why?  BECAUSE NOW I COULD PROGRAM IN WINDOWS.

and because of that, i was teh Shit.

I could drag & drop forms.  I could create multi-select listboxes.  I could create butt-ugly gray menu buttons, big as Rosie O'Donnell's ass.  I could create garish color schemes that only Richard Simmons would love.  And i could click on one simple menu option, and create an .EXE that was a windows app.

In short, Microsoft Visual Basic brought Windows Programming to the Huddled, Unwashed Masses (= me).  No more coding to the Windows API, no more reading tomes as thick as a telephone book to figure shit out, no more second-class geek citizen who got paid $20/hr for dBase III coding instead of $50+/hr for REAL MAN Windows development. 

And in the ensuing next few years, boy were there a lot of shit apps delivered.  I mean some real god-awful crap was built. And people paid good money for that garbage.  I'm not just talking about the excrement i created, but there were people who had NO GODDAMN BUSINESS doing programming who could all of a sudden build windows apps.  Folks who could barely fucking write an Excel Macro to sum a column were creating Windows programs.  Oh.  Mi.  Gawd.  It was TERRIBLE.  and yet, it was wonderful.

Microsoft gave all of us aching to be the alpha geek the chance to Live the Dream.  When Visual Basic was released, a hundred thousand n00bs like me got the equivalent of 6-inch heel lifts in our shoes. 

We were somebody, dammit.

And THAT was the beginning of the end for everyone else in the industry... NeXT, Apple, IBM, Borland, you name it.  Those other companies created wonderful, beautiful, incredibly awesome OS's & programming languages & tools.  But they DIDN'T CREATE A PLATFORM for the Everyman Joe Six-Geek to develop on. So they floundered.  And they lost market share.  And they ultimately FAILED -- at least, in becoming the platform that everyone ended up using.  Not because Microsoft was better.  Not because they cheated.  Not because they played hardball.  BECAUSE THEY CREATED A PLATFORM.  A simple platform.  A butt-ugly, pissant simple, just-good-enough app dev platform.

Fast Forward to May 24, 2007.

A few months ago, ~16 years after Visual Basic shipped, ~14 years after Mosaic shipped, ~12 years after eBay & Amazon & Yahoo created Act I of the Internet Revolution, and ~6 years after Google Adwords rolled out, Act II of the Internet Revolution just happened.

Kottke, you've got it wrong.  Facebook isn't AOL, cause AOL was never a simple platform.  It WAS a walled garden.  But it was also a piss-poor environment for building & developing apps. (but since no one had "email address fwdg", the lock-in was incredible).

Facebook -- or more accurately, the Facebook Platform -- is the equivalent of Visual Basic for the Web.

Because it provides a simple & easy way for anyone --ANYONE -- to build a quick & dirty little app that can be deployed quickly on Facebook.  Hell, i haven't coded anything more advanced than HTML in over 10 years, and *I* even got the basic tutorial app to run.

And that's why Facebook is going to dominate the Web. 

That's why they blew off Yahoo for a measly $1.6B.  That's why they'll bury Microsoft, and turn Ballmer down even if he offers $10B before the IPO.  And that's why they're even going to "fucking kill Google". 

Because Facebook is the first REAL web services platform worth building apps on.  Not to mention, their API has all the social graph info no one else has yet enabled.  Not to mention, the News Feed enables a whole new world of viral marketing.  But social networking mumbo jumbo aside, it's enough they've simply made it possible for anyone to build & deploy apps.

That's why they're not AOL.  And that's why they'll win. 

Welcome to Renaissance 2.0 :)

Facebook Widget Empire SocialMedia.com launches; also AppRate

Justin already has the story on SocialMedia.com here. 

(Seth, you owe Tina bigtime for that domain name...)

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also just launched: AppRate.com, by Jeremy Toeman of Live Digitally fame.  Jeremy talks on his blog about AppRate and what he's up to re: facebook app raviews.  lots more coming in this space i think.

i'll say it again: i can't believe how fast this whole industry is moving. 

i'm with you Robert... what else is more interesting except perhaps the iPhone?

Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the New SEO... and Renaissance 2.0 has Arrived.

I knew Justin Smith over at Inside Facebook was a pretty smart guy, but he just blew me out of the water with his recent post Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new SEO.  It's effin' brilliant.

If you thought my piece last week on Marketing Facebook Apps was anywhere close to on target, then you better darn well read his stuff... it's a hundred times more thoughtful than my earlier analysis.  And his thoughts on optimizing the News Feed as a parallel to search engine optimization are right on target.

I expect we will quickly see a whole new viral metrics & viral marketing optimization industry emerge due to social networking (if not Facebook exclusively), mirroring the rise of SEM/SEO over the past 5 years due to Google & Yahoo.  I bet Slide & RockYou & HotOrNot & Ning are looking at it closely.

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What is blowing me away on all of this is that it's happening at lightspeed: this stuff has come down in just the past 3-6 months.  When i went to a Facebook open house back in February, i had the barest inkling of what was about to happen.  Since the launch of Platform under a few months ago, the world has turned upside down.  Every startup, VC, and platform company i talk to has Facebook on the brain (or if they don't, they've got their head up their ass).  There are 25 apps on Facebook with 1M+ users, and ~100 apps with over 100,000 users.  Renkoo's business model went from dustbin to greenfield in less than 3 weeks (Booze Mail is at 350,000 users as of this morning).  The blogosphere has exploded with discussions on Facebook in the past few weeks.  I had my highest traffic blog week ever last week... by a factor of five.  It's incredible. 

I've been talking to people lately about how Facebook Platform is the most important thing that's happened on the Internet in the past five years, possibly the past ten... surpassing the development of AdWords and the birth of social networking in general.  People sort of look at me like i'm stoned / crazy, but i don't think so (okay, maybe the latter... but i quit toking over 20 years ago).  Now we're about to see it get even more amazing.  The emergence of a whole ecosystem of new apps built on the social graph is just over the horizon.

We're not in the middle of Bubble 2.0 -- rather, we're in the middle of Renaissance 2.0.  Northern California is Italy.  Palo Alto is Florence.  San Francisco is Venice.  Sequioa Capital (or Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman) are the Medicis.  Ev, Biz, Ben, Mena, Matt & Toni are the Gutenbergs. And Mark Zuckerburg is Da Vinci.  Bene, molto bene :)

Jeremy Liew on Viral Marketing; Andrew Chen on The Viral Loop (+ Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!)

  Jeremy Liew 
  picture by TedRheingold

i don't always agree with everything Jeremy Liew says/thinks, but regardless i read what he writes on the Lightspeed blog regularly.  he always has thoughtful analysis & interesting points of view. 

i asked jeremy to speak on the viral metrics panel i moderated at Community Next this past weekend, and afterward he wrote up this analysis & review of two competing memes we seeded with the audience to use as discussion examples.  great post & thanks for participating jeremy :)

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i also got to hang out and chat with several cool, intelligent entrepreneurs at the event -- Eric Nakagawa, Ted Rheingold, Hiten Shah, Adam Rifkin, James Currier, David Weekly, many many others as well -- and really had a blast...  thanks noah great conference!

one person in particular noah introduced me to a few months ago who i also enjoy reading & who's smart as a whip is Andrew Chen.  Andrew wrote a post on his blog Futuristic Play recently called What's your Viral Loop that i thought was just fabulous... in particular, his observation on how designing a Facebook app is much like doing an inductive proof in mathematics is friggin' brilliant & right on target.

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highly recommend you add both these guys to your RSS readers, and/or visit their blogs frequently.  you're bound to learn something!