• Focus and Purpose of My New Product Management Blog
• The Right Goal Against the Right Metric
• Offense vs. Defense Projects
• Is Your Goal Aggressive Or Crap?
• How Could This Product Fail?
• Why Some Ideas Should Die

• apophenia - Danah Boyd's blog featuring formal and informal research on social software and social networks. I won't call out specific papers. Instead, just go to Danah's best of page
• Read/WriteWeb - Good analysis of Web Technology news in general with frequent coverage of Facebook and social network happenings, including the initial Facebook Platform launch
• The Facebook blog (official blog)
• FaceReviews - Facebook news and application reviews
• Inside Facebook - Facebook news and application reviews

• List of social networking sites, including description, user count, and registration type (open, invite, etc.)
• Facebook entry
• MySpace entry
• LinkedIn entry

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Tags: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Social Networks, SNS

I've been playing around with Twitter recently and my experiments have led me to two different conclusions.

Thinking vs. Doing vs. Disseminating
Twitter asks, "What are you doing?" as a prompt for each update. Right now most of the people I'm following on Twitter are my team members and it's useful to know when they're taking long lunches during crunch time or busting ass on a Saturday to hit code complete, but these updates are less interesting to me than ones that answer the question, "What are you thinking?" These 'thinking' updates are often funny or ironic, and sometimes even edifying. I welcome more of this in my life, and probably need less frequent or granular information on people's whereabouts. Maybe this is just a function of my advanced age (35) or inability to take advantage of a friend's proximity due to family responsibilities.

My favorite thinking updates are serendipitous insights, sort of mini Aha! or light bulb moments. I don't expect people to Twitter about the secret sauce or their new business model, but people have interesting ideas every day that are interesting, but that they are never going to execute upon. I'd like to see the flow and velocity of those types of ideas increase and I think Twitter is a great way to accomplish this.

Yet another Twitter type is the dissemination update. For me, these updates often duplicate pieces of news or blog posts I've already consumed and digested via my regular news sources: WSJ, NewsGator (my OPML), and recently, Topix.net. I primarily read Twitter updates on my phone and even though I have a browser I'm unlikely to open up and read blog posts on it.

I'd love it if people had separate Twitter feeds for their doing, thinking, and disseminating posts. If they did, I'd subscribe to the thinking feeds and probably skip the others. I'm sure Fred Wilson gets many more subscribers to the VC/technology feed of his A VC blog, as opposed to the music feed, for the same targeting reasons.


30 words vs. 300 words, vs. 300 pages
Next time you have a good idea, think about whether you can get the point across to intelligent folks in 30 words or less. If so, then maybe a Twitter update is the way to go, or a blog post with "<eom>" at the end of the subject line so people don't have to read further. Most 300 or 3,000 word blog posts could have been better said better in 30 words (perhaps this post is an example). Excellent, well-written posts by Kathy Sierra, Richard MacManus, and others are the exception.

I've read a number of technology books over the past year that should have also been much, much shorter. Tip: If you are writing a book and this table of contents would fit...

Chapter 1: Great idea
Chapter 2: Examples
Chapter 3: Examples
Chapter 4: Examples
Chapter 5: Examples
Chapter 6: Examples
Chapter 7: Examples
Chapter 8: Recap of great idea

...then maybe you should just write a long blog post or a pamphlet instead. If Gregor Mendel can explain how heredity works in 41 pages then you can explain first impressions or how technology makes outsourcing easier in less.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was rambling on about how I often start blog posts but never finish them because I know they are going to become too long-winded and I lack the time or energy to make them more concise. Either that or I just don't think they deserve a full blog post, let alone a whole book. From now on, I think I'll just Twitter most of them instead.

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"Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray."

I've been completing some Mechanical Turk HITs, trying to look for anything out of the ordinary in the images. Using Mechanical Turk is easy, but scrutinizing the images is hard. Please take a break from watching 24 on your Tivo and do a few yourself.

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Tags: Jim Gray, Mechanical Turk

1. Community Content
Does the content on your Web 2.0 site (the collective intelligence that has been harnessed) come from users? If so, have you made it portable/exportable and notified them that they might want to grab it before you turn off the lights? Good RSS readers make it easy to create an OPML file of your feeds. You could do the same for your content in the relevant microformat: hReview, hCalendar, hCard, vCard, XFN, etc.

Your first instinct shouldn't be to license or sell the content to other companies unless your users have knowingly (not just in the fine print) given you that right and doing so would be in their interest. If you do, then they should have the same ability to edit, delete, or claim authorship for the content at its new home that they did on your site.

2. Reputation
Are reputations portable? There's a real lack of consensus here. Would there be any value in persisting or porting reputations from a failed site or service? If the reputation system is vibrant then real value has been created, no doubt, but the value of those reputations once the site is gone is questionable. The right of a site owner to port reputations is even more tenuous. I don't know, maybe the best thing to do here is let the site-specific reputations die.

3. Web Services
You'll probably shutter your web services along with your site, which makes sense, but do you have any web services that could be considered a public service and that don't depend on the same community or changing data that your site depends on? If so, then perhaps someone else would be willing to take over and power the service.

4. Widgets
Are you going to break someone else's site or blog by shutting down the services that drive your widgets? Not cool. Perhaps you can avoid doing so by at least persisting a snapshot of data that drives personalized widgets or forwarding requests to a different service for generic widgets.

5. Links
If Technorati or Wikipedia failed, how many other links across the web would break? Note: I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia will ever fail. Is there some action you could take to redirect those links somewhere that would be useful to users following the link without violating the intent of the linker? Maybe not, but if your site is link-bait maybe you can do better than a 404 or canned We're Closed page.

Summary
In short, even if your business (revenue) model didn't get traction in time, there might be other portions of your business that were successful and that constitute value, either to partners or to your users. If you can take that which is valuable and license, sell, swap, persist, port, redirect, forward, donate, return or give it away without violating the rights or intent of your users or other stakeholders, then maybe you should - and maybe you should plan ahead.

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Tags: Web 2.0, Web2.0, deadpool, mylackey.com, startup, community, Technorati, Wikipedia, microformats

ZPrinter 310 Plus	Spectrum Z510
Examples

With the increase in the Maker community I would think there might be a good business creating a virtual 3D printing service bureau. Indeed there are some including Proof Of Concept, Inc. The key would be tapping into the hobbyist community in an effective way. This seems to be the target audience for Fabjectory who does 3D printing for Second Life avatars.

The reason I'm interested in all this is because I have several consumer product ideas I'm interested in prototyping and then perhaps licensing. I've been playing around with SketchUp (why is this owned by Google???) CAD software but I'll surely need to partner with an engineer to get the product ideas ready for prime time.

It looks like 3D printing is making inroads in the art world as well, according to a recent BusinessWeek article titled The Edge of the Possible.
 

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Tags: 3D Printing, rapid prototyping, ZCorp, maker, Proof of Concept, Fabjectory, Second Life, SketchUp

• [SM] As the Web gets bigger, search results contain more irrelevant stuff. In many cases, it's getting harder to find what you want. Appreciably harder.
  [IM] People tend to think spam in search indexes is a huge problem and it is, when it shows up in the first few pages of results that users see. If my query returns 1,860,000 results then I'm less concerned if the bottom 1,500,000 are spam/irrelevant. Investments in core search relevance that make sure the best results for a query dominate the first few pages of results are key. This means good spam classifiers that penalize spam but doesn't necessary mean a bit that dumps a doc out of the index when flipped.

• [SM] "...it surprises me that the presentation of Google's main search results pages barely changed in the two years from one edition of the book to the next."
  [IM] I wonder if companies that measure everything and take notice of small dips in clickthrough/conversion are less likely to make bold changes to the user interface of key features. Nisan Gabbay cites another case on Startup Review where HotOrNot, a successful company (though on a different scale), became more conservative over time once they had cash flow to protect. I know that when I worked at a startup we were much more likely to make big changes on a whim than at bigger companies I've worked at. Perhaps that's why we see the large players opening Labs to try out and validate new ideas in isolation before attempting to integrate them.

• [SM] "Other search companies are doing some cool stuff with their main results."
  [IM] Windows Live Search, especially Product Search, is definitely trying to differentiate based on UI with features like infinite scroll, inline answers, related searches, refinements, etc.

• [SM] "As search results get more unwieldy, recommendation engines like Amazon's or iTunes' could become more important tools. (Bonus: they're an iteration of the architecture of participation, so we can claim some kind of credit. ;) Presumably, implicit relevance (based on search-result clickstreams) is going to be a big part of this if it's not already."
  [IM] I think we'll see clickthrough by keyword data in the aggregate used well before any kind of collaborative-filtering for general web search. The engines will track which results get the highest clickthrough rate for a given keyword and then play SERP king-of-the-hill based on that data until results stabilize. This will be a challenge but should be possible in the next several years. I actually think this type of technology will be pioneered by smaller vertical search players because scale won't be as much of a blocking issue due to less load, smaller indexes, and less stringent response time requirements.

• [SM] "I wonder when/if search is going to be real-time (i.e. live Web) rather than index-based. And I wonder if the main barrier to it now is hardware or software (to the degree you can separate them). At Web2, I met a woman from Intel R&D who's working on a continuous refresh data system that would allow real-time searching but for which you need multi-core processors that aren't yet ready for primetime. Still, an interesting glimpse of the possible future. [Sidebar: I brought up the idea of real-time Web search with Tony Stubblebine, and he thought it was hilarious. Totally unrealistic viz computing capacity. I thought it was laughable that he thought we wouldn't eventually have the bandwidth and cycles to do it. Tune in in 10 years for an update.]"
  [IM] Only when we have a ping system for all web pages will we have anything approximating real-time search. Site Maps is about as close as we come today. Even then we'll only have realer-time search. We already have a tiered system today with important, frequently updated sites crawled daily and less important, less-frequently updated sites crawled on closer to a monthly-basis.

• [SM] "When do the implicit conclusions of hardcore data-mining and analysis become part of search results? For example, Marc Smith's newsgroup analysis can point to potential experts on a topic. If I want to find an SEO guru, when will search results from a major engine contain implicitly derived info from Marc's project?"
  [IM] I agree Marc is doing some cool stuff. It comes down to cost-benefit and we'll need to wait for some product group to find a data-mining scenario of such clear value to outweigh the scale headaches necessary to implement it. Someone is going to have to meet Marc half-way. The same goes for any research prototype or incubation idea. Successful evangelism by the researcher/incubator is a start, but the spark has to be lit within someone in a product group to move it down the sometimes long path to production. Given the tall odds, many of those ideas find their way into startups where they have a better chance of seeing the light of day.

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Tags: Sarah Milstein, Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar, Search, Marc Smith

• Users should receive value for their contributions
• Successful sites like Flickr and Digg shouldn't pay users
• Flickr and Digg are successful because users do get value for their contributions, the value is just not in the form of currency
• If Flickr and Digg started paying top users money it would lessen or eliminate the value they are already getting
• I put more trust in content created for reasons other than money. If you met someone who recommended a product to you would you trust their recommendation more or less if you knew they got paid to do so?
• Regarding as yet unsuccessful sites (too many to name), all bets are off. They need to do whatever is necessary to get over the cold start but if they don't provide some value other than money then I don't believe their model will be successful or sustainable.

I won't try to describe what I mean by "value" above because it is different for every contributor but, in the absence of monetary compensation on those sites, we can assume they are getting some value out of contributing. Use terms like "desire to connect with others" or "reputation" if you like but they are over-simplifications.

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Tags: user generated content, Flickr, Digg

• Click-fraud is not a systemic imbalance, it is human made
• Click-fraud doesn't create a fluid market. Each instance of fraud has perhaps 3 (AdWords) or 4 (parties), each with different information and motivations. In currency arbitrage, many parties have access to the same information.
• The arms race nature of click-fraud execution and detection means there won't likely be a stable equilibrium. At best we might see some stairstep equilibria, that's assuming Google and other ad networks make enough progress on detection to actually leapfrog the click-frauders once in a while, which seems unlikely based on recent experience. They're always trailing.

I don't believe ad networks with click-fraud can be truly self-correcting if individual parties have the ability to create imbalances and if there is not free access to the data by numerous parties who have the ability to take action to erase those imbalances. If click-fraud were just systemic rather than human made then there might be an opportunity to create a market and allow click-fraud arbitrageurs to correct it but as of now, Google and the other ad networks are in the lucrative position of being able to passively pocket the imbalances without actually correcting the problem.

 

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Tags: Eric Schmidt, Google, click fraud

More than 10,000 non-perishable grocery items. Selection is growing every day.

All items are eligible for free Super Saver Shipping and Amazon Prime

A new “Shopping List” feature. Like Wish Lists, but designed for things you buy repeatedly.

Here's the FAQ:

• We offer more than 10,000 non-perishable grocery items--and our selection is growing every day
• We can ship all products for free via Super Saver Shipping or Amazon Prime
• We have great everyday prices plus special offers on your favorite brands
• We make it exceptionally easy to find products you buy routinely, or to discover new items we think you'll like

As an Amazon customer, you expect to find an unparalleled combination of selection and value, no matter what type of product you seek. That's exactly the premise we started with in building Amazon Grocery. To that foundation, we added features that would create a new kind of shopping experience, one where it's easy to keep track of the groceries you want and easy to discover new favorites, and then have them delivered to your door free via Super Saver Shipping or Amazon Prime.

Selection
At Amazon Grocery, you'll find longtime staples, from Kellogg's to Jiffy Pop. You'll find new entries, such as Kashi cereals and Kraft Easy Mac microwavable snack packets. And when we carry a brand, we'll try to carry every flavor available: not just the most popular flavors of Jell-O, but all flavors, from apricot to wild strawberry and the 70 flavors in-between. We're also making regional favorites like Andy Capp Hot Fries available nationwide, and making hard-to-find specialties like Zico Pure Coconut Water a standard part of our mix.

We also have an extensive selection of natural and organic products. If you haven't heard of Immaculate Baking Company or Bear Naked, let us be the first to introduce you to these earth-friendly brands and their fantastic products.

Value
Our goal at Amazon Grocery is to make sure you find the products you want, available at a competitive price, shipped free via Super Saver Shipping or Amazon Prime. To do this, we're working with our manufacturers on ways to keep per-unit costs low. For example, items you purchase might come in larger packs than you see at a traditional grocery store, and we might ship a product in a manufacturer's original case.

Because we only carry products when we can offer great prices and free shipping, we don't carry everything (yet!). For example, we don't currently offer perishable items such as milk, fresh meat, or peaches, because we can't ship these for free. But, we work on improving our selection every day, so check back often to see what we've added.

A New Way to Shop
Along with this new category of products, we're highlighting a feature we call Your Shopping List, which you'll find under the "Your Lists" link on the top of every page. Your Shopping List makes it easier to locate and keep track of items you purchase routinely--products such as coffee and tea, cereal, paper towels, and cookies. You can order one or all of the products directly from your list, and you can add and delete items with the click of a button.

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Tags: Amazon, Amazon groceries, Kozmo