There's a fine line between brilliant and idiotic: I may have just crossed it with this contest
Did you know that today was Abstinence Day?
Yeah, no kidding.
Well, to celebrate, we came up with a contest for Voki.
Basically, you go to Voki, create an account, then send your sexiest avatar over to contests@accounts.voki.com.
Here are some ideas for the kind of thing we're looking for:
- Describe your steamiest encounter... (or imagined encounter, for those of you who are waiting for wedding bells)
- Long distance love? Send us a note for them that will help pass the time until your next encounter.
- Tell us your sexual fantasy.
- Fake an orgasm...or...don't fake it! (Does abstaining pertain to when you're on by yourself in front of a computer?)
- Tell us about your secret sex crush!
Yeah, this is the kind of thing where if it gets 20,000 new users, it's brilliant... or if you get fired, maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
Voki by the numbers (and a little good natured poke at the competition)
In a little over a week of our Alpha launch, Voki had 1665 non-Oddcast employed users this morning.
How's that for transparency?
Now Mayka, the intern from Meez, will know, and you'll see her little cartoon head appear in my MyBlogLog and she'll go take that stat back to the management of one of our competitors. Hey, at least they participate in the social web and use their own product.
Anyway, so what if they know? So what if you all know?
Registered users are an absolutely meaningless number and in the early going of a product, I think most companies play it way too close to the vest with this sort of stuff.
For example, our goal is 350,000 registered users by the end of the year. Is there anything different that we're doing to try to get to 350,000 that we wouldn't do if we were trying for a million? No, absolutely not. We'd love a million. We'd love ten million. In fact, we're actually shooting for 350 million, but the bottleneck there is the pain we would experience upon extracting these numbers from our own business ends.
The reality is, you don't really know how many users you're going to get, but you just want to pay very close attention to who is signing up, how they find out about it, and what they're doing with it, and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly.
For example, I've noticed a lot of users posting Voki in their MySpace blogs as a way to speak to their users, rather than as one of 100 widgets on their profile page. (Makes sense... since your Voki can talk, as opposed to just thrash in silence, crowd surf in silence, or ride a bicycle in circles in silence.) Is this better or worse? Certainly the blogs get less traffic, but in terms of engagement and placement, very rarely do you see many widgets posted in blogs at all, and when your friends subscribe and see a new post, they get notified right away and will come visit. So, it's actually not such a bad place to be, but of course, we'd like to see Voki on the profile as well, too.
As for the number itself, one might think that's on the low side. We're used to seeing big launches that lots of people buzz about because of a TechCrunch feature... and since TechCrunch has 350k subscribers, having a little over 1500 after a week of alpha seems sort of low, no? Actually, no... because TechCrunch registrations are often a blip... noise generated by a highly engaged and curious audience that has 180 other widgets to play with. We're happy to never get mentioned on TechCrunch because those users aren't by any stretch of our imagination our target audience. I don't know any 15 year old girls with 600 friends in MySpace who develop in AJAX and read TechCrunch religiously. (Not to mention the fact that I already know they like Gizmoz better because of their technology. Me personally, I'd rather my avatar platform not have terrorist characters with guns and ski masks available for use. I don't exactly find that sort of thing amusing. Gagz!)
When I look at these e-mail addresses of users, I'm really happy with the 1500 we have, because we've got mostly "imaprettygurl85@domain.com" and "suchandsuch@college.edu"... On the surface, definitely the audience we want to hit.
Plus, it all depends on how you're marketing. We're working on little bugs and site improvements here and there... getting feedback from the early adopters, etc.
Growth is an interesting thing. So, we need about 24% weekly growth to hit our target... but obviously, its a lot harder to go from 100 to 124 than it is to go from 100,000 to 124,000, right?
Well, let's think about that actually. Sure, I could power my way to another 24 users with some e-mails to friends and of course that doesn't scale. However, that's not a I'm likely to get repeat, sticky usage. You might thing that it would be hard to add on another 24,000 users, but when you already have a base of 100,000, some good marketing to your users, some contests, viral feature improvements, etc, can be very powerful.... not to mention the fact that new people are that much more likely to have seen Voki elsewhere, maybe multiple times, and have a strong desire to get one because their friends are using it. There's a tipping point in there somewhere, buried among all the network effects.
Plus, we never really got into the idea of what being a user means. I mean, I've created a WeeMee and posted him to my blog, and that's all I've done. I don't think I've changed him since I first made him. Do I count? It's also getting lots of pageviews everyday, so its not like I have a totally stale account. It would be really interesting to see how I get counted in their user numbers.
So, we have a lot of work to do to identify key metrics. How to we compare a posted Voki out on the web to one send as a message via e-mail? What do we want people doing? Just recording new audios? Messing with characters? Is a Voki created with our Text to Speech engine inherently less valuable than a Voki with a real voice?
Lots of questions, lots of Voki out there, lots more still to go... but one thing's for sure... headline numbers don't mean a damn thing.
I mean, Zwinky has like 4 million plus registered users by now, I think... but how many of them still use it versus how many can't figure out how to uninstall the Ask.com toolbar that comes with it?
Seen those commercials yet? Get Zwinky! Get Zwinky! Get Zwinky! It's enough to make me want to throw the TV out the window.
Avatar Humor: The 5 Worst things you can hear from a Voki
You should definitely check this out... If nothing else, to hear the cameo by my grandmother, who recorded her scene totally ad libbed and on the fly.
Things that really suck: Getting your minivan crushed by a tree in Bay Ridge
I went to go move my car last night and I happened upon a really unfortunate sight:
Some poor shlub got his car buried by a bunch of fallen branches. At first, I pitied the owner of the little black car, until I went around for a closer inspection:
Turns out it wasn't the black car that got the brunt of the damage, and it was, in fact, the whole damn tree that game down. Actually, what I didn't show here is that the tree actually completely missed the little black car, other than a few light branches here and there... by inches!
The whole damn thing got yanked right out of the ground at the roots:
Man, if I would have come out to discover my car like this, I'm pretty sure I would have cried.
Product Managers? We don't need no stinkin' product managers!
The role of a Product Manager varies company to company so greatly, especially in an early stage startup, that anyone applying for PM jobs still has to ask, "So what will I be doing?" It's not like being the left fielder for the Mets where you can pretty much narrow it down to, "We'd like you to hit, field, and run the bases."
In some companies, you're not so much a Product Manager as you are a Project Manager. Features and ideas come from business, marketing, or upper level management and you're just the translater of functional specs to tech speak, checking boxes in MS Project as things get done. This is a helpful coordination function as a product is being built but often has limited usefulness once something is up and running. At that point, you might see folks from the business side take over the running of the product and its direction.
Other times, the PM is shaping core strategy and really living and breathing all aspects of a product, not just coordinating, but inspiring and collaborating with Engineering, Design, Marketing, Business, etc. They're the ones that let the CEO go to sleep with a clear head because PMs dream of their products.
The interesting question is trying to figure out what, if any, kind of PM your company needs and at what stage. Some would argue that you need a distinct Product function as soon as you start building, not only to be the eyes and ears of the Engineering side. Sometimes, swimming in the open water of deep code, the tech team might not poke their heads up often enough to make sure they're not swimming to Jersey. (As a swim support volunteer in kayaking for Manhattan circumnavigations, I can attest firsthand that this is very important.) Also, it may be important to have a PM insolate and shield the product from the pull of business demands. It's important to insure that your scaleable product business doesn't turn into a custom development shop with the addition of every new business development partner.
What has often surprised me is how often engineers seek out someone in a pure product role. I would have thought that the people doing the building would naturally want to lead the direction of a product, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, engineers become PMs, but its a difficult thing to do both sides at once.
That often happens in startups, and I believe it is to the detriment of the end product. You can do all the user testing you want, but its important to have a fresh perspective on a product, especially when it comes to interpreting user feedback.
So what should the background of a good product manager be?
First of all, you need to have extraordinary communications skills. You not only need to coordinate a lot of different areas, but you need to make sure everyone feels like their feedback is important and you need to be able to synthesize a lot of different needs and goals. After all, listening is half of communication.
I think the next most important thing is empathy. You need to have a feel for what users want to do with your product and how they want to interact with it, even if you yourself don't necessarily represent that demographic. A lot of this comes with knowing a lot of different types of people pretty deeply and being genuinely curious about the human condition and how people operate.... being aware of lots of other "selves".
Breadth is important, too. You need to know a little bit about a hell of a lot of things...kinda like a utility infielder. (For the record, on my softball teams, I've played leftfield, center, short, third, first and pitched and that's only in six games so far.)
Attention to detail is important, too, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Products change and no one gets every last detail right the first time, but I think it's more important to be deep in your work and not just comprehensive. So, if you're creating a suite of tools, one damn good one is better than five so-so ones. That will at least hook some users who will anxiously await the development of the other tools.
Is it fun? Sure...but I have to say that one of the most difficult things is not just being able to sit back and be a run of the mill passionate user, because you're too busy bug fixing, speccing the next feature and thinking about marketing to participate as much as you'd like to in the community of users.
The Doghouse
You ever just complete drop the ball with something in the worst possible scenario, have no legitimate excuse for it, and of course, you do it for the second time with the only other person or group you've done it to before.
Brain, why do you mock me?
Ugh.
XM Radio Suspends Opie and Anthony for 30 days: 1 Amendment Down, 26 to Go
Unless, of course, what you want to listen to is morally objectionable. Then, you'll just have to go on the internet, where morally objectionable content is pretty much free. We won't feature that trash no matter how much we're charging you for "premium" radio.
XM just suspended Opie & Anthony (You know those guys who featured people having sex in a church on their show, who told everyone the Mayor of Boston died in a car accident...) for comments made on their show last week by a homeless person who referenced some despicable sexual behavior directed at Condi Rice and the First Lady.
If I was an XM subscriber, I'd cancel my subscription today... not because I find that particular thing funny... I don't... It's wrong and it's awful... it's the hypocrisy.
The last time I checked, we have Freedom of Speech in this country, right? Well, sort of. You're not allowed to scream fire in a crowded theatre, because your speech might cause harm to others.
Well, sort of... because, it is a fact that when the media portrays high profile murders and suicides, there are identifiable instances of copycatting that lead to people's deaths... I mean, we know that the Virginia Tech killer referenced the Columbine kids by name...
But then, we go and cheer on David Blaine when he wants to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Wanna start making bets on how many kids start jumping off bridges in this country after that gets televised?
So then it becomes more about offending people than causing actual harm to others. If you are offended by something, and you have a good PR firm working for you, you can basically get anyone else fired or off the air... even if those airwaves aren't public. Suspending Opie and Anthony from XM is like suspending porn actresses from the Playboy Channel. Certainly there are lots of people offended by the Playboy Channel... shouldn't we be taking away people's right to smut in that situation, too?
The firings of Imus, JV and Elvis, and now the O&A suspensions are a snowballing witch hunt. Do I support what those people say? No... but I support their right to say whatever I want. It's the same with flag burning. I don't support anyone burning the flag in this country, but I wouldn't stand in the way of anyone's right to burn it. That's what freedom is.
And really, how in the hell does Howard Stern avoid all this?
This is a really dangerous precedent we're setting here. We expect all this Web 2.0 user generated content to be successful in the face of this culture of fear? Who in their right mind would opening share their thoughts with the world in this climate. We're a bunch of crazy people... we must be, because its only a matter of time before the bandwagon shows up at your door.
I mean, as it is, I can never run for President because of this post and I'm sure there are others like it that people could pull apart out of context and fuel the media machine with.
And the worst part about it... XM and all these other radio stations totally knew what they were doing when they hired these folks... and what you never see are executive's heads roll. It's not the fault of the talent. You want to suspend someone... suspend the people that oversee the talent.. because what they realize is that nice doesn't drive revenues on the radio, and these stations are hiring these shockjocks to generate cold hard cash. It's a business and they knew exactly what they were getting, so they shouldn't act all surprised and offended when stuff like this happens.
Look... there will be people in your life you won't agree with. There will be others you will be offended by. Others will try to hurt you with words. The best thing you can do is ignore them. Ignore them and they'll go away. If people ignored Opie & Anthony they'd be off the air in a heartbeat... but that's not happening. People are listening. People want to hear.
I don't want to be censored, protected, etc... Just give me the tools and I'll do it myself, because I don't trust the religious right, special interests, or least of all the government to do it for me.
In other news, the Rev. Jerry Falwell was so happy over today's news that he kicked it. Also, our soldiers are now banned from participation in the conversation, so sit there in the desert and like it and whatever you do, we don't want to here or watch a peep out of you.
Open? Participatory? Free? Yeah, right.
Testing out Meebo Rooms...in this post
There is now a Meebo Room in this post... Click through on RSS to check it out...
Ok... I took it off b/c it kept autoplaying the videos...
What's next for Twitter?: 5 possible directions for everyone's favorite SMS crack
Now that Twitter has been spun off into its own company, and the team there is hustling to keep up with scaling, you gotta figure we'll here a funding announcement sometime soon. It's not like Twitter is free to run. All these SMSs are costing the company money everyday.
First off, who are the likely VCs... or rather.. where would the money come from? Sometimes, when deals are this hot, you almost expect them to take money from some completely unexpected source. I could see all these bigshot Valley VCs marching in trying to throw endless amounts of money at the company at ridiculous valuations (you know, because of that big hockey stick) and I imagine that's probably somewhat of a turnoff. (Hopefully anyway.) I wouldn't be surprised if you see a big band of angels get together and pony up a million dollars to solve scaling issues and get this thing scalable.... and if that's the case, Calcanis would be all over it. As it is, he wants to pay for a premium level of the service. Plus, given is "Entreprenuer in Action" role at Sequoia, whatever that means, he certainly has a connection to deeper coffers if they so desire. Sequoia would also be a prime candidate because of the Google funding, and Google bought Evan William's first big success, Blogger, so I'm sure there are probably some connections there.
Ok, so once the money gets raised, what are the likely things that Twitter goes off and becomes?
Neat del.icio.us tip: Tagging for yourself vs. readlater
From Hannah the Instigator...
Instead of tagging something "readlater" in del.icio.us, a tag you're not likely to ever go back to again and without a way to check if you actually read it, tag it "for:" yourself. This way, when you tag stuff for:yourscreename", it sits in your "for" inbox until you actually click on it to read it.
I don't trust any of you people
Tara wrote a post about trust yesterday that struck me. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what social means and should mean in terms of technology, especially as our social technology starts to make its way into the more private areas of our lives, like our finances. Do Web 2.0 philosophies hold up in the design of social software for the most important parts of our mainstream lives? I am sensing from my non-techy friends a kind of Web 2.0 backlash against all the openness and sharing, and while I still believe that open is better, I believe that when, where, and how are key questions that Web 2.0 has yet to flush out in order to start moving away from the bleeding edge.
So, back to Tara's post. She wrote the following statement:
I disagree and don't think that's how it actually works. People aren't actually good. They're self interested.
However, it is generally in your own self interest to be a good person most of the time, because then other people will be good back to you and then you also don't have to deal with the penalties for being an asshole (poor reputation, retaliation from others, alienation, prison, perhaps...).
That's a key difference, especially when it comes to the design of social software. Take seller ratings, for example. I bought some nice pieces from Bethany Cooper the other day. Do I trust her? Not particularly. I don't know her. Although, if I had to make a bet, unless she's an idiot, if she's interested in succeeding in such a public platform, she's probably not in the business of screwing people over on a regular basis. So, she's probably good, but since I don't have any reason to trust her, I'll make my judgment based on the 1200 positive experiences that people have had with her according to her seller rating... which amounts to 100%. In this case, while people are likely to be good, technology doesn't force us to depend on trust.
She could still, however, steal candy from babies in her spare time, so there's also context around trust. I may not trust her to drive my car, but I trust her to send me some beautiful handmade stuff on time.
Open source works the same way. Are people involved in the open source community generally good people? Maybe, but not always. Are they contributing to the open source community out of selflessness or some interest in the greater good of humanity? Maybe, but not necessarily. In fact, many open source contributors are writing code that solves their own problems. At that point, giving that code back, so that others might improve on it and also share code with them in the future is of greater value to them than hoarding code and not sharing. Sounds "good" but what's really going on is that they've recognized that they're simply better off, from a utility standpoint, sharing.
It's the Prisoner's Dilemma. Two prisoners are being interrogated separately and if they squeal on each other, they have a better outcome than if only one of them squeals. However, if they both keep their mouth's shut, they both get off easy. Without communication and information on what the other person has done before, it isn't likely that these two will cooperate, but if you repeat the experiment a number of times, eventually, they'll learn that the better outcome is to work together. Is that trust, or just two people maximizing utility in a world of free communication and discoverable information?
Trust has nothing to do with it. It's about incentive, reputation, and access to information. Don't ask me to trust you... give me the tools for you to figure out whether I'm trustworthy... or tell me some friends we have in common.
That's why, for example, when social applications like Facebook and Vox were built, they focused on privacy... making sure that the right people saw the right information about you. Privacy is going to be a huge factor in the mainstreamification of Web 2.0, especially in the current culture of fear that's being spread.
Trust me.
It's about time... David Blaine to jump off Brooklyn Bridge
I'll be there right under the bridge with my kayak to smack him on the head with my paddle on the off chance he actually pops back up alive from under the water.
I think it's just a trick to get rid of this idiot once and for all. We'll let him jump, and then he'll realize there are no boats in the water to pick him up... no rescue divers. Hopefully, we'll just get swept out to see and we'll never have to hear about his next idiotic stunt.
"I don't see any boats under there..."
"Trust me, they're under the bridge... they just don' t want to get in the way."
Perfect weather for kayaking this weekend
A few slow mornings at the boathouse, but I did get visits from Matt Myers from 30elm and Josephine Dorado.