A note about UTC time, which we use for internal stats — peak hours in the US, which our data tends to be highly correlated to, are roughly 13:00-02:00.

First I looked at the daily chart of pageviews from iPads.

I noticed that it didn’t look like most pageview charts, which typically follow long peaks and short valleys for weekdays and weekends, like our aggregate pageview data for WordPress.com.

If you look at the main pageview stat by hour, you see that there are spikes basically when people are at work — during the day in the US, Monday through Friday. This isn’t really news, and it’s very, very common across most websites.

iPad pageviews, on the other hand, look totally different on an hourly basis.

There are two important things to notice here:

1. Weekends spike, not weekdays
2. Intra-week differences disappear almost entirely after 21:00 (1pm PST/4pm EST)

The explanation for this is actually quite simple — iPads are primarily used outside of work, which is where people tend to be on the weekends and at night. If you were to translate the last chart into a story, it would basically be this:

On weekends, people wake up and use their iPads throughout the day, well into the night, but on weekdays the iPads are stuck at home alone while their owners at work, and thus dormant[1].

I don’t think this is a particularly important revelation (maybe we should promote iPad stuff on the weekends?) but I do think it’s a cool example of how showing the same data in a different form (line chart vs hourly grid) tells a different and much more useful story. Also interesting is that the use of the hourly grid here is probably not what most people assume it’s good for, which is seeing data on a really granular level. It’s actually the near-exact opposite, it’s the best way to view this data on an aggregate level.

[1] Though the modifier is dangling, I meant the iPads were dormant, not the people — but I suppose from our overall pageview stats, that may not be completely true.

SOPA & PIPA don’t attack the real problem, do nothing to build up the services that do solve the problem, and won’t work from a technological standpoint. And that’s just if we look at the what these bills are supposed to do.

From TechDirt’s “Definitive” Post SOPA And Protect IP

Of all the changes in 2011, the people are overwhelmingly the high order bit. There are the impressive coworkers, the generous WordPress community, and the strangers who, through travel and shared interests, have been maybe the most consistent part of my life this year.

Alternatively, assume that once you delete something, you (and only you) will never be able to recover it.

Everything else will be simple.

I was actually thinking about this earlier today, and Nik Cubrilovic’s post on yet another way to secretively store data just reminded me of it. There are a few reasons why I think the concern over this is mostly misguided.

First, it’s not new. Store owners can write down your shirt color, your height, your race, the time you came in, what you bought, etc. They can track plenty of “personal” information, which I put in quotes because I think the whole concept of some special class of information leads to more confusion than awareness. The key difference, obviously, is that computers make tracking this information cheaper and faster. I tend to think that we shouldn’t legislate against actions based only on their relative efficiency, so I don’t see why this should make a difference. Worse yet, it’s far more likely that real world businesses can connect your actions to your real “personal” information, like your name, family and address.

Second, it’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse. There are limitless ways to store data and acting like anyone can stop it is foolish. The whole thing seems eerily similar to the war on drugs, a failure I think we’ll have a hard time contending with any time soon.

Third, for the overwhelming majority of people there is nothing to worry about. Awareness of risks is great, but confused fear based on misinformed media reports is awful, and that’s mostly what we’ve created.

I’d liken responsible web security education to something along the lines of wearing your seatbelt and not driving drunk. What we have today is much closer to fear-mongering along the lines of urban legends about exploding engines or murderers at drive in movies. Those things can certainly happen, but I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to treat them as likely consequences of driving a car.

To be clear, I think it’s great if websites and web services don’t do these things, but some of them will and you should probably assume all of them do, particularly if it’s something that concerns you.

At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them every staff meeting, my people intensely focused on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result.

via When Employees Misinterpret Managers // Ben’s blog.

You don’t want people using your product because it’s cool, because then you’re a fad. What you want is people using your product because it’s a part of their life and they can’t stop using it.

-Sean Parker

To the extent that any educational facilities teach you how to find a place in the labor force, that’s it. Pretty accurately, you could call this “How to get a job.” That is, how to get offered a job. With the national unemployment rate at whatever it’s at, that’s certainly a valuable skill these days, but lots of people have the chance to aim much higher — at least high enough to get two job offers. Then what?

You’re pretty much flying blind if you rely on the same folks that taught you about one page resumes and how to talk to recruiters at job fairs.

I think every college student would be well-served to have some guidance on how to choose a job or a career. And the problem starts way before college; high school students pick colleges, which are long-term expensive decisions, basically on a whim. It all seems kind of insane looking back.

Company cultures, hierarchies, job roles, products, businesses and dozens of other factors that will impact your daily life, probably making the difference between being happy and miserable at work, are never formally taught or even discussed. I think it’s one of the reasons that startups seem so magical to so many, because they appear to break rules when they just do things differently and the rules were never there in the first place.

I’m not convinced that a vocational education is the best fit for most, but I do think that some sense of practical decision-making would be immensely valuable and hopefully prevent a lot of people from finding new ways to kill time for eight hours, five days per week.

I think the idea of test-driven development is pretty cool. It forces you to set specific goals, makes it clear when you achieve them, and hopefully makes achieving them even easier and faster since the scope is so clearly defined. Thinking about it more, there are probably other parts of life and certainly work that would make sense to approach this way. One that came to mind and made for a catchy title was testing itself, in the product and user sense.

Surveys, A/B tests, multi-variant tests and many other methods of learning from customers have become wildly popular, and rightly so, thanks to the work of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis (who first taught me about it) and others in what’s generally been termed “The Lean Startup” movement. Like any good fad, I think that some followers have fallen victim to function following form — in other words, I’ve seen a bunch of people use these tactics for the sake of using them. One instance of this that sticks out is running tests where virtually no result is going to teach you anything.

The most egregious offender has to be surveys, I think because they’re the easiest to create and the most vulnerable to lazily copying from others. Every question on a survey — like every line of code in an application — has an implicit, real cost. Usually it’s a lower response rate, which means you get less information and it takes longer to get it. So a great deal of effort should be put into eliminating unneeded questions, just like a great deal of effort is often put into eliminating unneeded code. Or (here comes the theme) in a test-driven development world hopefully the unneeded code is never written in the first place, because you’re writing code based on test requirements and writing tests requirements based on what’s needed. It’s a beautiful system.

Back to the surveys. There are several “standard” survey questions that I see almost everywhere and have a way of creeping into new surveys as you write them: gender, age, income, location, referral source, etc etc. Certainly all of these can be valid survey questions, but they’re probably not all important all of the time. Unfortunately it’s really, really easy to add them to your product survey and some services like SurveyMonkey will even automate it for you. Pretty soon this turns into survey-by-committee and you’re asking 30 questions with boondoggles from every part of the company added. Biz dev wants to know about the users’ favorite websites, marketing wants to know about age and gender, sales wants to know about purchase intent for mid-size cars (wtf?) and the list goes on. Meanwhile, if the scope of the survey had been properly defined, it would be clear that none of these were actually required; or, if these were actually required, it would have been made clear sooner and maybe someone would have fought against it, thanks to a test.

This is a trivial example only to make a point, but I think it’s an important point that comes down to two ideas for me:

1. Keep in mind that just because something is easy to do doesn’t mean it’s low risk
2. Upfront investment in making sure everyone agrees on the goals can pay huge dividends later

Testing to accelerate learning is great and more companies should do more of it, but adding unneeded complexity (for you and for your users) through more survey questions or button colors doesn’t always improve your tests.

People get up in arms about these things. They post on Facebook and Twitter, often promising to never buy the offender’s products again. But it’s nonsense, more often about showing off how upset you are than actually being upset in the first place.

I’d like to ignore whether or not any of these things were good ideas (for whatever it’s worth, Facebook’s and Groupon’s almost certainly were, Kenneth Cole’s almost certainly was not) and instead focus on whether or not it makes any sense at all to be upset about what they said or did.

I think the most reasonable litmus test for these kinds of things is whether you’d be offended (even a little bit) if someone said it to you at a party or if you learned about it in isolation.

In the case of Facebook’s privacy mess last year, I knew many, many people that were up in arms about it. Most of them thought it was unethical, immoral and downright mean-spirited. But for all the wrong reasons, I’d argue. They were all (every single one, among the people I personally knew) fine with their own use of Facebook; some changed their settings, most didn’t, and all went on with their lives. But, boy, were they ever worried about everyone else who wasn’t as smart as them and able to avoid making asses of themselves on the internet. I’m sure it’s all good intentioned, but it tweaks me in the same way that any evangelical religious people attempting to spread their morality to others does–it just seems like a lot of overreaching without a lot of logical thought.

In the case of Groupon and Kenneth Cole, I’m hard-pressed to believe that anyone wouldn’t laugh if similar things were said at a party. “How about those Egyptian riots? Like a Black Friday sale, right!” “I’m sick of all these daily deals, how about something new like 2 Free Tibets for the price of one!?” This is pretty harmless stuff by any reasonable measure. Except when it affords you a soap box to preach from.

And that’s really my biggest problem with all this. That the complaining isn’t really complaining, it’s preaching and it’s often baseless. If you’re legitimately offended by any of this stuff, I really do think that’s fine. But if you just want to protect the less-refined masses, then it doesn’t make any more sense to me than censorship.

In any competition, having more information about other players’ motives strictly dominates having less. That is to say, it’s always beneficial to know more about what other people or companies in your market are doing since it gives you the opportunity to ignore that information or act on it. Now we know more about AOL’s strategy and there are a couple key things that people trying to get coverage from AOL publications can exploit.

I think this is really valuable to people who work in PR in two ways.

1. Any organization that relies on a large number of people doing a large number of things is inevitably going to struggle with internal communication. Ordinarily it’s very tough to get repeated attention from a single media outlet; in other words, it’s really hard to get TechCrunch to write about you 10 times in a month, which you’d like to do because it decreases the unit cost of learning how they work, what they like and how to pitch them. With hundreds of reporters writing hundreds of stories per month, AOL’s staff is hardly going to have time to chew their lunch, let alone cross check who has covered whom. It’s going to be much easier to double (or triple or quadruple) dip in multiple press hits on AOL properties, all of which are motivated by the same high level goals of SEO and pageviews. Let’s say the upfront cost of researching how to pitch a new outlet takes 5 pieces of coverage to recoup — on TechCrunch that might take 2 years, on AOL you might be able to do that in 3 weeks.
2. PR is a historically difficult idea to get companies to rally around when they’re early-stage, resource-limited and engineering-driven. PR is notoriously difficult to measure and relies on a lot of soft value props like “branding” that make anyone who knows how to use Vim want to shoot anyone who likes writing emails. With AOL producing content and making decisions based on pageviews and SEO — hard metrics and measurable tactics that any news.ycombinator reader can appreciate — the internal pitch to invest in PR is a little easier. If AOL is measuring their success by things that you like, you get a bit of associative property help in justifying its existence (PR, not AOL).

If I were doing PR right now, I’d be turning a lot of attention to understanding AOL as it grows into Tim Armstrong’s army of bloggers.

Messaging and positioning

Three weeks ago I took a look at our messaging and positioning for my new company, Insidr. In other words, I had to figure out how to optimally present our company and product: the words to use, the example to cite, the feelings to emote, etc. I wanted to be very analytical about it and arm myself (and my team) with as much data as possible to inform decisions (and let us call bullshit when needed). What follows is the process I used, from start to finish, to make an analytical decision about an emotional question.

Cast a wide net

I wanted to force myself to try lots of things and at least allow for the chance to be surprised. I wrote (read: stole from someone else) a 5 part sentence that included all the key elements I wanted to test: our target customer, a reference point to explain what we do, our point of differentiation, why customers should believe we can do what we claim, and what benefit our customers will get.

I think it’s safe to say that if you can nail all these things, you’re going to be in a great spot to communicate what you’re all about. I wrote 3 ideas for each of these 5 pieces and made sure they could be plugged into the following sentence model:

For [target] [company] is [reference] that [differentiator] because [believe], so that you can [benefit].

Here’s a (made up) example: For [people that like hamburgers] [Hamburgler] is [a way to eat more often] that [has indexed the world's burger joints] because [we had a great idea about finding burgers], so that you can [avoid overcooked beef].

With 3 versions of each piece, I suddenly had 243 versions of positioning statements for Insidr!

Multi-variant testing

Next I needed a way to test all of these ideas and measure the results. I wrote a small app that would create two versions of the full positioning statement using randomly chosen variants (without any overlap) and let a respondent vote on which one they preferred. Here’s what it looks like:

Each time someone choses an answer, the winning and losing variants for each piece of the sentence are logged in a database for safe keeping.

Next I setup a Mechanical Turk task that gave Turkers a short explanation of what they were about to see, then loaded the voting app in an iframe. I turned it on and went to sleep.

Because I wanted to avoid people randomly clicking over and over to make money, I limited it to one vote per user. I also limited the task to people in the US, Canada and the UK. This meant it took about 3 days to get reasonably significant results. To my mild surprise, there were clear winners and losers.

Refining and more testing

There were two themes that emerged from the multi-variant tests for Insidr: positive and goal-oriented statements did best. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Until this point our positioning for Insidr had been, in many ways, exactly the opposite. We were, if not negative, at least confrontational in regards to the companies we were supporting. We were also very tactical and thought it was important to make it immediately clear to customers exactly what we did and how we did it. The data seemed to be suggesting the exact opposite.

I got 168 results from MT after a few days and in each case the results were pretty similar, with the best variant winning 65-70% of the time and the worst winning 30-35% of the time. I did the confidence intervals on these and got back between 85-99% confidence that the best version was beating the 2nd best version. That was enough for me to move on to the next step.

Next I setup a new and more detailed test. This time we created three short positioning statements: one using our existing (tactical, confrontational) positioning, one with a purely positive and goal-oriented positioning, and one hybrid of the two. We used these statements as a basis for demand testing asking respondents if they would use the service described, how often and whether or not they would pay for it.

Again I used Mechanical Turk to drive responses and now added SurveyGizmo to the mix to handle the questions, which let’s you do a little bit of scripting using custom URL parameters to change pieces of the survey. I setup a custom redirector to split test traffic to different survey versions that each used one of the three positioning statements to describe a “hypothetical website.” Another Mechanical Turk task and we were off to the races.

Again, there were clear winners and losers, and the data from the multi-variant test held up. Positive and goal oriented was the way to go with about 95% confidence.

Acting on the data

Now that we had a clear signal about what to do, it was time to roll the changes into our product and marketing. First up were our front page and search ads. Both were updated with new messaging (and the front page got a new design) that was positive and goal-oriented to the point of being almost vague. Before the tests that led to this point I’m pretty confident we never would have thought this made any sense, but we trusted the data and tried it anyway.

The results were shocking. Literally overnight our search ad click through rates went up by 135% and our front page bounce rate went down by 36%. The combined effect was almost a 200% improvement on what we were doing before. To add some icing on the cake, the improvement in the quality (CTR) of our ads resulted in the CPC’s dropping by about 50%. Not bad for a couple weeks’ work.

Here’s an example of an old ad. It’s pretty tactical, and maybe a bit negative (certainly not overwhelmingly positive):

And here’s a new ad. It gets rid of the details about how Insidr works and focuses just on a benefit to the customer, even to the point of being unclear. The new ad KILLS the old ad:

Here is the old version of the front page. It’s pretty detailed and leads with a very negative question. We thought this was a great way to empathize with a frustrated consumer:

Here is the new version of the front page. It’s got a big, happy looking image and makes a lot of nice sounding promises without much information to back them up. It KILLS the old front page:

If you wan to see the code I used for the multi-variant testing, it’s on Github here.

Wikileaks could be called the first organization to scale muckraking, but it seems like newspapers did that decades or really centuries ago. So I think it’s interesting that Wikileaks has created such a ruckus.

It seems that one of the big differences is the extent to which Wikileaks injects itself, the organization, into the story when it releases information. For me, it makes it nearly impossible not to question their motives. At a high level, I think it’s hard to make a case that more transparency (in anything) isn’t generally good in the long run. And yet, Wikileaks has never managed to be seen, at least in the US, in the way that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are, who basically did the same thing.

I’m very curious to see what people will think of Wikileaks in 20+ and 100+ years. My guess is that they will ultimately be praised, but they might have to walk through hell to get there.

I am working with the fine folks of Social Venture Partners on a new startup that we’re calling Insidr, at least for now. After getting some feedback on my initial pitch, I’ve settled on this: we’re trying to make it easier for customers of big companies, like AT&T, to cut through the red tape when they’re dealing with customer support. We want to connect customers with people inside the company, hence the name, to answer questions that standard customer support channels suck at answering.

The idea is that big companies have very little incentive to provide good support because the cost of churn is incredibly low relative to the cost of adding more customer support reps or giving them more time to help customers. So we think there’s an opportunity to do something better, and we think customers will pay for it. At least that’s what our research so far suggests.

I’m working on all things marketing, most notably how to accelerate our growth. This is super early stage, about 2 months in the making and a lot of part time help from friends and consultants. Should be fun, we’ll see where it goes.

Empirically, this seems to be false.

There are a few assumptions made in these startup-killer stories. The logical argument usually goes something like the following. For whatever it’s worth, the illogical argument is usually “That’s a feature, not a product” or something equally silly that no one has been able to explain to me yet. Anyway, the logical one…

1. First, motivation. Startup competes, or could soon be competing, with BigCo. BigCo wants to own all the value that Startup is targeting.
2. Second, actions. BigCo will launch a competing product. Advantaged by size and capital, BigCo will use its reach, money and staff to attack Startup.
3. Third, results. BigCo, still advantaged by size and capital, will quickly gain more users and copy or eclipse Startup’s product. Startup will die or wish it had.

Replace “BigCo” with “Facebook” and “Startup” with “Foursquare,” and that’s the last few months of tech news. Feelings about quality and insightfulness of journalists aside, the story above appears to almost never actually happen.

1. Motivation. I think this one is actually pretty accurate. Big companies (and small companies) do and probably should worry about competitors stealing either current or future market share. I don’t have any issues with the logical argument on this point, though a case could be made that big companies usually don’t figure out that a startup’s market is valuable until it’s too late; there are plenty of examples to support that.
2. Actions. I haven’t gathered any data because I’m not really sure how to measure this. Counting every startup that “could” compete with a bigger company, then counting the big companies that have launched a startup-killer, seems too prone to errors. Even if data existed, it would be near impossible to interpret since I have no idea what any result–let’s say it was 10%–would actually imply. Lack of data notwithstanding, I bet this one is false. To make an even bigger unsubstantiated claim, I bet that acquisition is more common than competition. If I can make the leap of faith that any company that’s acquired is seen by the acquirer as competing with something they are either doing or would like to do, that’s pretty important.
3. Results. This is where the logical argument really comes off the rails, in my mind. I see three problems with the “logical” results. First, size and capital are not always an advantage, maybe not even usually. Second, big companies’ paths to quickly doing a good job on something new are strewn with skeletons of fallen comrades. Third, even if everything so far is true, it doesn’t mean the startup dies or even does worse.

Full disclosure, I already have a counterexample. Microsoft killed Netscape. It used its size and capital to do it. At the end, Netscape died. However, that’s the most recent counterexample I can think of and it happened 15 years ago.

Facebook vs Flickr/Photobucket. Facebook Photos is the biggest photo sharing product in the world, with 50+ billion pictures. Flickr and Photobucket launched before Facebook Photos. Facebook did compete and they clearly won, but both Flickr and Photobucket are still kicking and have been acquired (Photobucket for $300m). I’m not sure exactly when Facebook Photos launched, but I’m pretty sure that it was before Flickr’s acquisition and I’m positive it was before Photobucket’s. Summary: Facebook attacked photo startups, photo startups didn’t die.

Google vs YouTube. According to Wikipedia, Google Videos and YouTube launched just a couple weeks apart. Google wanted Videos to be exactly what YouTube is, according to everything I’ve ever heard about it. So it’s basically a given that Google did compete. As the hottest public company at the time, they had massively more people and money than YouTube. Of course Google Videos sucked and they quickly acquired YouTube. Summary: Google competed with YouTube, failed, and bought the company for $1.6b.

There are other good examples that I could have used instead, like Google vs Admob or Yahoo! 360 vs WordPress. The point is that I really can’t think of a counterexample to the idea that startup-killers are bullshit since Microsoft and Netscape. There’s probably something out there that I’m missing, but the fact that zero come to my mind or the minds of a few friends I’ve asked doesn’t justify the amount of time that gets spent talking about the idea.

Jeff Jarvis recently wrote, “I’m not [a conspiracy theorist], because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire.” Accurate, in my opinion, and relevant here. If big companies whacking startups was a successful strategy, it would mean that the big company would have to move quickly, acquire new skills and devote significant resources to something that is tiny in relation to their main business. They typically don’t do those things, and that’s why the startup exists in the first place.

Today we talk about “getting on the Internet,” but with iPad you can have a persistent online connection

Yesterday Dan Lyons wrote that in Newsweek. The iPad may be an undisputed success and it may happen very soon–personally I think it will be a let down and have a bet that it will sell fewer than 4m units in the first year–but if that happens, it will certainly not be because it changed the idea of “getting on the internet.”

I do not believe that anyone who buys or otherwise acquires an iPad will have their idea of the steps needed to access the internet changed. Normal people aren’t dialing up to AOL anymore, much less people interested in a $500 computer without a keyboard or any of “their programs.”

The iPhone and the App Store are great and I sincerely love them both. I’m willing to believe that on an issue as passionately debated as yet-unreleased technology products from Apple, there are valid ideas that don’t fall in line with my own. But alleviating the actions needed to “get on the internet” isn’t one of them.

I think few people who pay attention to startups could argue that Foursquare is one of the most beloved web services today, and MG Siegler of TechCrunch is probably responsible for that in no small part. It’s in that light that I hope people remember this quote from today’s Paul Carr missive.

Last year those same people were so desperate to find the new Twitter that they mistakenly handed that crown to Foursquare on the basis that a relatively small number of Web 2.0 scenesters used it to find out where their friends were partying. And yet, despite that auspicious start, and a shit-ton of publicity since, Foursquare has failed to capture the imagination of even most early adopters, particularly those outside of San Francisco and New York. Foursquare was resolutely not last year’s Twitter. Last year’s Twitter was Twitter.

The point being that it’s very easy to see all that is vindictive and ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary if you’re even the least bit motivated to do so. About 6 months ago MG wrote a post asking whether TechCrunch was a kingmaker, to which I replied saying that they indeed were biased. But that is, as they say, a feature and not a bug. It seems to me that the ideas behind that post have really escalated since then, and I’m not really sure why.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that part of my job is to get the people at TechCrunch to write about my company, so mine is not an unbiased opinion in the least. Nevertheless, I don’t think any of this is unreasonable, unfair or inaccurate.

* TechCrunch here is really a wildcard for any tech blog, as fewer each day are immune from or deserving of this treatment.

Anyone who’s anyone in the startup world can tell you to “launch early and often.” “Iterate!” they’ll say, and “your first version should suck!” These things may very well be spot on, although I’d guess like most free, generalized advice, they’re to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, Apple, the shining star of the tech world, is praised (and this is putting it gently) for “never putting its logo on anything that isn’t perfect.” Many people will say that’s why it is the company it is–let’s ignore, for now, whether or not you think that’s a good thing. Obviously any startup would kill to turn out like Apple, but it’s interesting that these ideas so fundamentally clash.

Now, there are obviously structural differences in the markets and customer bases of seed stage startups and global supercompanies, I get that. But still, when do you stop fearlessly launching brave new ideas that may (should?) suck and start only releasing perfection whose names attain the status of proper nouns? More importantly, when does making a mistake on one side become more costly than the other?

It’s sort of become a game of chicken. It’s cool to say you want people to ask questions whenever they don’t understand something–the people that legitimately feel this way are exempt from this post–but way more often than anyone admits the asker doesn’t understand because the askee doesn’t either. Far too many conversations lately have gone like this…

Me: I don’t understand that, can you explain?
Someone: Ya know, something like xyz.
Me: I still don’t know what you mean. Can you give me an example?
Someone: [completely ignores request for example and uses the term "ya know" again]
Me: [slaps self in head]

The real frustrating thing here is that this only happens because people are lazy and try to give instructions without understanding the task themselves. This, of course, is a waste of time. Most often, you will get back a shitty (or maybe mediocre) product that isn’t really what you wanted. If you’re lucky, you’ll get asked enough questions to make it clear that whatever you were hoping would happen is a waste of time–if you’re really lucky, this will take less time than would have otherwise been wasted. Some of the time you’ll get back the same shitty product as in the first case, but you’ll still have through so little about what you actually wanted that you don’t realize it sucks. In this case you’re blissfully ignorant. Many would consider this the best possible outcome.

It occurred to me tonight, while waiting impatiently at Fedex, that lots of communications tools use awful verbiage–actually, awful verbage, if only that was a word, since the offending terms are nearly always verbs.

“Do email.” “Make calls.” Ick!

One that seems to avoid the train wreck is IM’s, where we “chat.” Oh, maybe if we get the noun out of the sentence we can make some headway.

When we search we “Google.” Everyone likes that!

Of course we can “email,” or “call,” but I think those have already been spoiled (1) because of tradition (2) because they’re somewhat uniquely communications mediums that people try to pass off as real time commitments. “Can’t talk right now. I’m doing email.” Oh, sounds official.

I want someone to come along and introduce the “Google” (v.) of email. I don’t care so much about phone calls–I’m already brainwashed to not really mind when people “make” calls–but if you want to fix that one too, be my guest.

One of the most common nuggets of crap I hear when people talk about using social media–especially companies using social media–is that you have to use every aspect of the service possible or you might as well not using it at all. This is retarded.

There’s nothing divinely right about any given service’s design that means that you need to use every feature they offer. If you run a corporate blog, you should probably enable comments, although not necessarily. It’s probably a good idea to have a blogroll or some kind of link group, but it’s not a game breaker if you don’t. It doesn’t really matter much if you install and wizbang plugin, but most of them won’t hurt. There’s nothing plutonic about any of these things though. Certainly none of them are worth investing in simply because the software you chose to use allows them.

On Twitter, it’s probably a good idea to reply to follow other users, but it’s plenty easy to get lots of value out of the service without doing that. There are even more proof points of this than you’d think, because many of the accounts that “follow” lots of users don’t actually follow anyone, in that they don’t pay attention to the incoming streams. That’s fine if that’s your strategy. It’s not what I’d recommend, in an ideal world, but who cares?

There’s nothing wrong with only using select features of a social media service just like there’s nothing wrong with only using select features of your word processor–except tables, for the love of God please use tables if you’re laying out anything that is remotely grid-like.

If Twitter (or WordPress or Digg or whatever) removes a feature tomorrow, were the people using it idiots or the people avoiding it geniuses? Nope.

For some reason these two (totally different) things have become irrevocably associated. It bugs me to no end and not just for reasons of etymology.

-A relational database
-A calendar
-Meant to display all the data from your hard drive horizontally on one screen
-Word with graph paper
-Meant to be copied into a powerpoint

For instance, you have some even like a wedding going on. Lots of people are traveling and the guest list is big enough that there’s a good chance you don’t know or can’t think of everyone you’ve met that’s going.

If the host uploads the guest list somewhere I’d like to be able to see which members I’m friends with on Facebook or have in my Outlook contacts (or whatever). Then once I’ve found my relevant subset, pull in other data like where we all live from Facebook, when we’re traveling and staying from Tripit, etc. Then it could intelligently suggest activities like sharing a cab from the airport.

The high friction point is obviously getting the source of the list, but so much of that is done via Facebook, evite or some other system that has (1) very broad reach (2) naturally unique identifiers (3) a pretty good idea of who I know.

If this exists I guess I’ve missed it. If it doesn’t, then I hope someone makes it.

I doubt that more time flipping through dictionaries would have helped much, but I’ve never thought schools put enough emphasis on basic common sense. Maybe this would be a good happy median for the educators among us.

I’d read several books on self-publishing and writing non-fiction, and I could have a really good conversation about them, but I’d synthesized the information for knowledge-sake, rather than to act on it. That made a big difference.

That line alone was pretty interesting to read. I’ve felt that way at a lot of points in my life–knowing a lot about something but being virtually clueless when trying to actually do it.

I do question the inherentness of the “consumer” and “producer” characteristics, but the post is informative and interesting nonetheless.

This is either a relief or a real pain in the ass.

It’s pretty cool to see something like that grow from the spark of an idea to a live product in just a week or two. I had nothing to do with the site except for exchanging some ideas with Salim (both pre and post launch) but it’s still fun to have been there to see it develop along the way.

I’ve always tried to work smarter, rather than harder, whenever possible. If nothing else, it’s a creed that fits well with being somewhat apathetic about many things. That said, when it’s something I care about, virtually every time, there have been circumstances where I’ve run low on smarter and had to resort to simply throwing more time at a problem than others in order to “win.”

That’s always seemed a bit lame. But Gladwell’s examples point to that being closer to a rule than an exception, and he’s about as witty, and therefore authoritative, as anyone else. It’s comforting.