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Congratulation to Pursway (formerly Datanetis) and Elery Pfeffer

February 9, 2010 Leave a comment

image A little more than a year ago I wrote here about Datanetis, a cool company and technology that helps its customers to identify influencers within their customers database.

Datanetis just got funded with a $6 million Series A investment from Battery Ventures, and changed its name to Pursway. It also seems like there are new large customers on board.

Elery is a good friend and I’m very happy for him and his team.

Here is the press release.

Congratulation!

Real-time search – the missing piece

November 11, 2009 Leave a comment

Shifting the problem from finding content to finding people for search, discovery and filtering is not enough.

The evolution of finding new and engaging content:

Step 1: We started by searching for engaging content using search engine like Google or blog search engine/directory such as Technorati. These search engines operates web crawlers scanning the web for new information, then index (categorize) and rank web pages using different algorithms. As time went by we started adding blogs  feeds (using the RSS and ATOM protocols) to our feed reader of choice like Google Reader.
Results: with some effort we managed to find great bloggers to follow, but new content was slow to arrive, it was slow to discover, and even after awhile we ended up with not enough variety. No wonder it was a dead-end!
Step 2: step #1, plus finding the people behind the content, following their feeds on social media tools (twitter, FriendFeed, facebook etc.).
Results: initially, we got faster and richer content , but it got messy very quickly (especially when we auto follow back), it was also overwhelming at times, and lots of people share the same content (whether it is lame or great).  Add to the feed stream cacophonies the fact that people are using these channels for chatting with their peers, sharing thoughts and feeling, promoting their business/products/services and we end up with yet another dead-end!
Step 3: step #2, plus lists. Now we can group people into categorized twitter lists, and follow their tweets.
Results: Now, the content is a little less messy because we have more control over the data filtering. The process for building your own list is very slow and tedious at the moment, but you can use other’s lists via listorious or tweepml. On the flip side it requires coming up with a new process for scanning the lists timelines (how frequently? whom to give more attention? adding/removing tweeps), and you can easily end up with too many lists. The worse part is that the people on the list not always share just about the subject that matches the list category.  Bottom-line, it is somehow better than step #2 but not by much – another dead-end?

Content by people

In steps #1 we let the crawler to find and categorize the content and it was up to us to find it. In step #2 and #3 we shifted to people search and then we let them drive content to us. This time the crowd took care of the categorization tasks; finding and matching people to domains of knowledge. People categorized themselves and others, built many great lists, follow other lists (indication of popularity) and shared them for us to grab.

The shift

imageIn the process from #1 to #2 we shifted the content discovery problem to people discovery problem.  Due to this shift we gained big time in scale, arming the entire web community to search for new content. We accelerated discovery and knowledge gain. We also gained speed over RSS or the web crawler. Among the changes, going from steps #1 to step #3, the focus shifted from filtering content to filtering people (lists).

Small pause to recap: we have categorized content thanks to search engines and tags, we have people grouped by categories thanks to the people, but we still have a lot of noise.

The missing step

In my opinion, we are missing a step.  I think that we ought to get back to the computerized categorization. We need a crawler, to categorize and rank the data in the context of the list.
I would like to be able to filter list timeline view by: links only, discussion threads only, and even more important by content that matches the list’s definition in the first place.
If I follow a list that discuss mobile phone technology I want to see only mobile phone technology related content.

Picture credit orangeacid

Do you think that you can live without Google?

March 25, 2009 1 comment

InfrastructureHere is my latest guest post on AltSearchEngines blog.

Google’s search engine is the 21st century infrastructure.

A quick summary:

  • Search is a very large task
  • Search is costly
  • Search has become essential to the modern economy
  • Google is effective but it is a monopoly

It is similar to infrastructure on a large scale like roads, train tracks, ports, and utilities – all things that are essential to the smooth running of our economy.

Today it is so mission critical that we need to watch it closely or maybe even break it up.

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Twitter killed the RSS reader

March 20, 2009 1 comment

First, I stopped using my favorites, then Digg, Delicious and other social rating/bookmarking websites,  now I found myself using less and less the RSS reader, Google or Netvibe. I find great content on Twitter, Twitter search Trending Topics and recently even greater quality content using Twitter based search tools. These are services that mine links from Twitter updates, using different algorithms and post them in an organized fashion. I will refer to these as real-time news search services like Feedly, Microplaza and others.

RSS readers limitations:

Limited selection – it takes time to find and build selection of great blogs.  What if the selected blog did not produce any good content lately?

Scalability – it requires the time to organize feeds into tabs or folders. Also some readers, after adding more content grew slower (some more than others).

Social rating/bookmarking websites

I do use delicious for bookmarking of great information and some time for search but I rarely visit the Popular Bookmark page. Submitting content to Digg is too slow and I think that rating is not as powerful as retweeting.

Email subscription

There are some blogs that I follow constantly and I find the email subscription option to work best. This way I know for sure that I’m not missing new content on a daily basis.

The new feed

I now count on Twitter and a growing number of real-time news search websites to feed my curiosity with links.

Feedly – the irony is that Feedly is actually taping into your Google Reader feeds and tags, but it also brings content from other sources including Twitter. You can even see Hot topics via Twitter i.e. trending tags and hashtags. Read more here

MicroPlaza – this service looks at popular links posted on Twitter by the people I’m following (my timeline view). You can also see popular links posted on the public timeline. There is a new feature called Tribe, it is in the work but this option allows me to filter/organize popular links by grouping (enrolling) different people whom I follow on Twitter, into different Tribes. I wish I could use Twellow or WeFollow to speed up organizing my personal list into categories and use them as Tribes in MicroPlaza but this is still better filter than TweetDeck grouping option. In MicroPlaza I only see the popular links from the tribe and not other useless chatty noise – this is a great filter . There are more features and I do plan to cover this service more thoroughly in another post but here I want to focus on the new Trend.

MicroPlaza

There are growing number of similar services out there. I’m monitoring an additional one but I won’t mention the name yet (giving them a chance to improve). The key feature for me is the quality of the links. How good is the information that the service successfully managed to mine from all the noise on Twitter. The speed is important too. So far the two mentioned above are doing fantastic job.

Using Twitter timeline for the content source pool, employing millions of human web crawlers, filtered by the people I trust (follow) and other mining technics seems like an improved method for finding the best content out there. It truely gives me an edge over RSS feed reader.

Did you stop using your RSS reader too?

I owe it to Sagee Ben-Zedeff for helping me to become aware of this change in my habits and the new Trend. This is another great thing about Twitter – I now reflect more rapidly:)

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Search Engine is the 21st century infrastructure!

March 17, 2009 Leave a comment

Search is infrastructure

IndustrialNight Should we start looking at investments in building and maintaining search engines similar to other investment in infrastructure systems? I see two similarities. The first is that it is the next important thing in our digital lifestyle today after the hardware and software that connect our computers together. The second is because of the huge cost required for building and maintaining one.

The next most important thing

If you stop for a second to think about how many times a day you employ a search engine to accomplish a task you’ll notice that life could be way harder without it. If you need to find a place, a person or a  job online search is your starting point. It is the same case when looking for information about a disease, a company or a product. Modern search engines also helps to find directions, contact info, stock quotes and many more. I can’t think of a day without using a search engine (Google or others). When I think about infrastructure on a large scale I think about roads, train tracks, ports, and utilities. Metaphorically search engines take us from one place to another and if done right can save us a ton of time and energy. If done poorly it is a big waste!

Do you think like me that search engine have an impact on the world economy?

The mighty task

The web is big and expanding. In February of 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites (not pages). In March of 2009 Netcraft found 224,749,695. New blogs are popping up every day and blogs post in some cases multiple times a day. Recently with the introduction of microblogging services like Twitter and other personal life streaming tools, content is growing even more rapidly. The information is also dynamic: websites go down and pages are being constanlty modified. Blogs allow people to leave comments over time. Content is way more than text and includes video, audio, and images.

Search consists of many steps and usually it starts with crawling – getting the data. This is a mighty task that requires building an army of web crawlers to spider the web. It requires a crawling plan using sophisticated algorithms looking for new content and also for keeping the stored ones up to date. It requires huge number of storage place and heavy computation resources.

The other tasks include indexing, lingual processing and ranking (for relevance and popularity). If you are interested in learning how Google scale this process by breaking down tasks even further read the following blog post about Google Architecture.

It is impossible to compare but it seems like building and maintaining a large scale search engine is as hard as building a new power station and probably costs as much too.

Do you think like me that search engines have an impact on our energy resources and our environment?

Question and concerns

The purpose of this section is getting you thinking about my analogy and what it might mean.

The Monopoly question – do we need more than one?

In some aspect the search engine industry fit the Natural monopoly dual definitions:

  1. “…it is the assertion about an industry, that multiple firms providing a good or service is less efficient (more costly to a nation or economy) than would be the case if a single firm provided a good or service.”
  2. “It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands”

Google could be explained as a natural monopoly.  It now has now more than 70% market share.

The first definition raises the question: why do we need to more than one?  The second could explain why only one may survive.

If you noticed in my language here I leave plenty of room for alternative options – it is on purpose. I know software and technology too well to surprise me. IBM was almost invincible at the time, Sun was not far from it too. Even Microsoft does not look as intimidating as it use to be. And if you believe that real-time search is the future than you already know that maybe there is no need for deploying such a huge crawling tasks in order to find great content.

I personally don’t have much concerns about Google as a monopoly now. As a consumer I don’t feel any pricing power:) but maybe the companies that pay for ads do.

I do have concerns about the cost of maintaining a search engine or duplicating the effort in a large scale.

High Energy cost

Here is an excerpt from Data Center Energy Forecast – Executive Summary – July 29, 2008.

“As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nation’s servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Between 2000 and 2006 electricity use more than doubled, amounting to about $4.5 billion in electricity costs. This amount was more than the electricity consumed by color televisions in the U.S. It was equivalent to the electricity consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households (which represent 5% of the U.S. housing stock). And it was similar to the amount of electricity used by the entire U.S. transportation manufacturing industry (including the manufacture of automobiles, aircraft, trucks, and ships)”

Google is making an effort to reduce the cost of their data centers’ energy bills. My concern is that having multiple search engine companies around seems as wasteful as pooling multiple power lines to every home. I also think that the energy consumption should be distributed across the globe since the search engine serves the entire world and not only one country.

Yet, what will happen if Google goes belly up?

I know that this seems radical and almost unimaginable at this point but what if one day advertisers will find another place to buy ad-space other than SERPs? Our lives are so dependent on Internet search technology that if no one can pay for the cost of maintaining one that could be a big regression with direct impact on world economy.

Should we do something?

Regulations

One way to deal with Natural Monopoly is to turn in into some sort of Government-granted monopoly. In this case it is not the government but some sort of world organization that can enforce regulations and demands like:

  • More energy efficient data centers
  • Improving crawl technics (Cuil claimed it has one)
  • Crawl to cover more ground -  deep web
  • Accounting governance and building cash reserves.

I know that this is radical – please remember, the purpose of this article is not to support going back to controlled market but to get us aware of the cost, power and dependencies associated with search engines.

How to break Google the right way?

I read somewhere that maybe Google should be broken up by the functionality it provides like search, email, maps etc… Another way to break Google is to take away the crawl and leave the rest. Something like the Yahoo BOSS model. The crawl should be done by a single non profit organization founded by multiple governments (i.e. tax money). In the same way as we pay for our education system (I know…it is not that great). Again, just think about it differently for a moment:)

The New Deal

I know that this is the most radical idea in this post but if search engine is such an important part of our infrastructure should our president, Barack Obama, include it in his 21st Century New Deal? At the least listing maintaning search engine as another infrastructure system. Maythe one that function relativly the best at this point.

Summary

The points that I like you to take from this post are:

  • Search engine is more than software
  • The tasks of building and maintaining new search engine on a large scale have an impact on society
  • Search is a global problem
  • We are heavily dependent on this technology
  • Google is a monopoly – for good and bad.
  • Maybe it is time to rethink the old way of crawling the web
    • How much data is collected but never used (SERP #200)?
    • Can people replace crawling (Social search engines/Twitter)?

Picture credit to my favorite artist Ron Shoshani

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Glue, the Firefox addon that wisely links people, things and relationships from all around web

February 14, 2009 2 comments

Short Introduction

Glue is a Firefox addon that uses semantic analysis to connect people around books, movies, music, and other common things across popular sites. Glue can understand and map both structured and unstructured data and then become the bridge (or better the glue) that connects people looking at the same object from multiple web sites. There are few good blog posts that have covered Glue already. This is the reason that I’m keeping this intro short. I prefer to focus on the value of using Glue.

glue1

 What to do on glue?

Start Glue-ing by visiting a page on one of the many web sites that Glue supports like Wikipedia, Amazon, Last.fm, O’Reilly books, Yahoo! Finance, Citysearch, Wine.com, IMDB, Last.fm and many more. When you’re looking at the book, music, movie, star, artist, stock, wine, or restaurant you will see the Glue toolbar slide down from the top of the web page. Glue’s toolbar shows you friends and other Glue users that visited the same object. Glue shows you friends who liked the object and you can read their “2 cents” – a short comment about the object (140 chars long). At this point you are presented with lots of ways to benefit (actually, more than I realized the first few times I use it). Here are some of the things to do next:

  • Read a summary describing the object
  • Check which other Glue members visited the same object (anywhere on the web)
  • Read others’ comments (two cents).
  • Take action
    • Object specific actions – find it on your preferred web site, read a review, compare its price, find similar objects, and more
    • Sharing option – use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Delicious to tell the world about it
  • Learn more about the people that liked it by looking at their profile
  • Follow people and become friends if they follow you back
  • Say that you like it – by pressing the heart shaped button
  • Add your two cents
  • Grow your knowledge and network by moving from things to people to things to people and stop only to connect, comment or to take an action.

What else to do on glue?

  • Grow your network on other social networks like Twitter or FriendFeed – most Glue members have their Twitter and FriendFeed accounts linked to Glue. Glue allows you to find out more about their interests before following them on these social networks.
  • If you are into the stock market you can use a new service called StockTwits. This is a Twitter mashup that lets you follow discussions about stock trades, find active members to follow on Twitter and build your own portfolio to use as a filter for finding related conversations. When you select a stock to read related twitts you’ll see the Glue toolbar sliding down with all its glory. Now you can see other Glue members that were interested in the same stock and connect on both networks.

Explicit values

  • Your network is built automatically as you browse your favorite web site without leaving it
  • It is a single, web-wide network that works on popular book, movie, and music sites
  • It replaces both search and bookmarking – Glue brings you the information when and where it makes sense
  • It’s easy to move from object to people to object. This helps you find great books and music – this is what that I found myself doing on Glue.
  • The option to take action no matter what web site you are browsing helps to complete your search tasks faster.
  • Glue is very intuitive and simple to use. It takes not time to get on-board.
  • Crowd wisdom – you can see what is most popular with friends and other interesting people

Implicit values

  • The building of the network is driven by objects you like. You connect to likeminded people around common objects automatically, regardless of the website visited. Since there are lots of objects out there and many curious people looking for them it makes Glue a network building machine.
  • Contextual lifestream filter – it shows users relevant information from friends about things they visit. Other lifestreams have a lot of noise and require work. Glue brings you a filtered lifestream of valuable information i.e friends activities wrapped around object and people in the context of an object. 
  • Connect around the rare stuff – connecting around objects that are loved by many is a rapid way to build your network but some times it is meaningless, like joining the Facebook beer lovers group :) . Using Glue you have a good chance for finding new people that are interested in objects that are not so common like this amazing British TV series from the 90th that I like so much – Cracker (I did find a few Glue members that liked it).

AdaptiveBlue

AB-logo

AdaptiveBlue was Founded in February 2006 by Alex Iskold and has 11 employees working from their New York Office. The company has two products: Glue and SmartLinks (patent pending). In its short existence it earned industry recognition and top press and blogs.

Glue use two methods to understand meanings from data on the web. The top down approach using its semantic engine to understand some of the most popular web sites out there that don’t use any of the known metadata format (like RDF). AdaptiveBlue also collaborated on a new format to describe objects attributes on the web called ABMeta. Sites like Oreilly books, UGO and others have already adopted it. This is referred to as the bottom up approach, which is a more robust way to make web pages easier for machines to understand.

 Additional thoughts

After using Glue for sometime now I have a few features that I hope to see in the future. The first one is coming soon and it is the option to discuss with friends about different objects.

  • I also would like to get an alert when someone was looking at one of the objects that I have visited in the past (set selectively on certain objects)
  • I think that Glue needs a landing page. The toolbar is cool and subtle yet there is a place for presenting some aggregated data like:
    • Most active people on Glue (sorted by object type)
    • Most looked at objects – most liked objects
    • Most connected people on glue – featured users
    • Recently joined and recently visited objects
    • Promotions – Glue knows what people are looking for and like. This informarion gives an opportunity to get some nice deals for its members.

Glue is a simple to use application with great benefit supported by very complex technology in the back-end. It manages to bring a lot of value to the front-end without scarifying usability and ease of use. Is Glue the first consumer application that’s showing us the semantic web finally fulfilling its promise?

Datanetis – highly scalable solution for finding influencers mathematically

December 28, 2008 1 comment

  I recently noticed on LinkedIn that one of my old friend is now the CEO and founder of a new start-up company named Datanetis. I sent him an email because I was intrigue and it was also a good opportunity to catch up.  Elery Pfeffer and I worked together few years ago in a small start-up called Nester Software (later the name changed to Plataine) he was a student back then and I was thinking about moving to America. He is one of the brightest people I ever met.  Elery graduated from Tel-Aviv university in computer science and in a country with so many bright people and very few universities, it is as hard to become a student in Tel-Aviv university as it is in one of the Ivy League education institutions over here. Yet the thing that makes Elery a great friend is his strong integrity and generosity. Later he become the President of Nester, I made it to the state and we kept the friendship and mutual respect going.

Elery was kind enough to spend an hour with me over the phone and through GoToMeeting session he presented his new creation. Now, I was even more excited. Datanetis is the real thing! It is not another dot com web2.0 bubble company. The company has a real product with multiple patent pending applications describing algorithms for finding influencers, highly complex (real barriers to entry), and scalable. Datanetis is selling it to the enterprise as a hosted solution and providing new data about whom should the bushiness focus his best marketing effort on – leads to influencer on other leads. And they already have large customers around the world.

Elery view of the new marketing is revolutionary.

“The new marketing is not just about customer’s monetary value but also about the customer’s social value to the organization.”

For someone that has been working building software for the marketing automation industry over 8 years now and is familiar with multiple solutions for finding the right prospect out of many, it was an eye opener. I’m evidencing the progression from mass email campaigns through marketing to target individuals with a matching/relevant offers (data mining, behavioral pattern, collaborate filtering, recommendation engines) to finding customers that can market for you – agents.

Finding subtle connections between individual and causality.

Followers buy only in networks where influencers buy first

Quoting Harvard Business Review:

“The only path to profitability growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department”

So who are these loyal customers?

Datanetis’s software is capable of both automatically generating social networks from low level CRM data within the customer database and to mathematically identify influencers and followers. This information could be used to increase the return on every marketing dollar spent on new product adoption(x5-x70), new customers acquisition(x12), churn prevention (x10-x30), conversion, product cross sell(x6), higher product virality, and significant cost reduction.

From Datanetis’s experience, social network marketing using influencers is comprised of two cycles. The first is the closed friends cycle, from the results it seems as if they almost decide simultaneously to follow the leader. This first wave peaks around 4-5 weeks from the beginning of the campaign. The second wave peaks around 9-10 weeks traversing through the rest of the social sphere. This may indicate that the customers are going through different decision making processes at different locations on the social network graph (influencers affinity). This knowledge offers Datanetis customers ways to fine tune their campaigns over time.

In my opinion this disruptive technology will force changing some of the operations and thinking in the marketing department going forward.

Viral marketing is not just hit and run but a multiple acts campaign.

Another interesting finding that Elery shared with me is the lack of influencers trivial characteristics. Any attempt, so far, trying to map influencers based on demographic, product adoption or any other factor distinguishing them from the population failed.

This is what Datanetis found about these individuals only after finding them using their software:

  • Social Influencers are not celebrities and resellers
  • Influencers typically
    • represent 7-15% of the total population
    • has influence in 3-5 different subject areas

Datanetis successfully executed hundreds of large scale social marketing campaigns and is globally active in Retail, Telco, Gaming, Internet, and Hospitality industries.

Here is what that Elery suggests to the marketers out there:

“Don’t focus only on turning leads into sales, focus on turning influencers into ambassadors for your company.”

The influencers phenomenon is covered vastly on the web ever since the invention of digital social networks and the social graph. From what that I read so far it seems to me that we are still in the experimental/research phase. I was excited about finding a real application with proven method for finding influencers. Maybe Datanetis will help pushing this new science forward.

Groundswell technology test – entrepreneurs take notes

December 28, 2008 4 comments

I’m currently reading a book called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (1 edition- April 21, 2008). This book was written by two Forrester analyst, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff . In this book the authors are  advising companies about the power of social technologies and how to see it as an opportunity instead of a new threat. The book objective is to educate marketer working for different size corporations about social networks, crowd sourcing, social bookmaking, forums and other people empowering technologies. As I’m reading it I’m realizing that this book is also a very useful resource for entrepreneurs contemplating about building applications engaged in social objects. It is also a good resource for VCs that are about to invest in these kind of endeavors.

Groundswell In the second chapter of this book the authors suggest a brilliant test to justify the existence of a new social technology. They name it: The Groundswell technology test

This test consists of five questions and in the book the authors ran Twitter through the test. Twitter passed with flying  colors as you can imagine.

Anyway here are the questions:

  • Does it enable to connect with each other in new ways?
  • Is it effortless to signed-up for?
  • Does it shift power from institution to people?
  • Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
  • Is it an open platform that invites partnership?

Could this be the recipe for viral product?!

We know that a product requires more non-feature requirements like being scalable, having good performance, better than average usability, being secure, supporting global adoption, well designed (looks good) and more to be successful, yet the justification for its existence could be found in the answers to the questions above.

So run your new creation through these questions, find the gap(s) and make it better along these five dimensions.

This chapter on Google Book Search

This book on Amazon

The "chicken or the egg" problem in social web applications – is it real?

October 27, 2008 Leave a comment

I keep hearing this phrase describing the problem in the way for social networks and services success.

What is the “chicken or the egg” problem in the context of social web applications?

  • The chicken: people will only be able to see the true value of the web site when there is a large user base
  • The egg: till people see the true social value of the web site they will not use it

Really?

*Since the order between the chicken or the egg is still in question we can replace and call the first condition egg and the second chicken.

chicken or the egg

Examples: Digg (web-site) is not worth a Digg (verb) if there are not enough participants. Delicious will not be able to bring great knowledge to the surface without having enough people submitting their bookmarks (same case for any other social search engine). Technorati can’t rank blogs without the vast majority of the blogsphere claming their blogs over there.

The problem that I have with using the chicken or the egg logic explaining why a web site is not growing is, if that was completely true there was never a chance to any social media web site. If I can’t understand the true value of the web site right away why should I recommend it to my friends. This contradict entirely the virality phenomenon.

I understand that there is a cold start phase. I realize that not everyone can get on Techcrunch radar (it is not that hard though). In the first pre-alpha phase when your mom, cousin and the good old friend are the entire user base not much is happing. Yet, there are few things that goes for you these days.

There are lots of free self PR opportunities. Your blog, Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, StumbledUpon, tones of social networks, and many “the very next things bloggers” (like me) and more.

What that is common between the examples that I mentioned above (Digg, Delicious, Technorati) is that they were first of their kind. They came in with a new original approaches and “somehow” people dug their value quickly, with enough excitements going telling their peers about it.

I once heard that the difference between smart man and wise man, is that wise man does not get into the troubles that a smart man knows how to deal with. One option is not to get into this so called catch 22. Leave the social features to be the icing on the cake and not the initial driving force joining in. First, focus on the message. What is the value? What can be done here that could not be done elsewhere? For instance in the case of delicious -  saving bookmark on the web so one can access them wherever they are: @work, @home and @yourFriend’sHouse was good enough. Having lots of bookmarks shared, saved by others, and tagged so you can find great content – priceless:)

Make your initial value as clear as possible. Make it not socially dependent.Then find a way to bring data and people from the outside. People could exist in the system without registering. Content could be available without manually submitting it. Later data and profile could be claimed. Having people and content around will make the web-site not looking like an empty store. Leverage search engines API like Yahoo BOSS to augment the web-site dull content with live data.

There are other cases like listing web sites that the Chicken or the Egg problem applies. You need to brings both demand and supply almost at the very same time. It took craigslist some time to catch fire but this is not a social network web-site (yet).

Finally, as it takes time to farm a chick out of an egg it will take time to grow the community. In the meantime it is best to find a way not relying on heavy social use as the single way for growing the community. Focus on the value proposition for the individual instead.

What is this?

October 7, 2008 3 comments

I recived 18 trackbacks (and counting) to my List of 10 blogging patterns you can discover using Google Analytics post.

These are not blog reactions!!!

I guess that using the word SEO or Analytics in blog post is a kind of Splogs Bots Optimization (SPO?) . 

They all share the same IP though!!!

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           ? SEO [...]…

           Helpful Seo Expert
           Tips – Welcome

           July 1, 2008 — W [...]…

           Great Search Engine Marketing
           F.A.Q.S And More

           March 14, 2008 — [...]…

           Informative Website Optimization
           Blog

           Bringing well targeted [...]…

           Helpful Marketing
           Material Here

Hmmmmmmmmm…..

At this point I can only thanks Askimet for capturing these.

Categories: Method, Monitoring, Software Tags: , ,
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