Misc Links
John Battelle talks to Eric Schmidt
- Google announced a powerpoint like web-app – this completes the line up of the ‘office suite’
- John is funny
- “Mobile Mobile Mobile”, Eric Schmidt
An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts – http://cal.web2expo.com/talk/view/71
- widgetbox.com
- google adwords – the most successful ‘widget’
- widgets must be easy to add to your page
- ‘small pieces, loosly joined’
Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users – Ted Rheingold, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Biz Stone
http://cal.web2expo.com/talk/view/83
Areas your customers/users/fans can input:
- Quality assurance
- design
- Submitting content
- Market research
- Customer support
- talent pool – you can hire from your ‘fans’
- word of mouth
- guardians – eg, speaking out in public places where you might have some trolls or upset people.
Other notes:
- If you have an API, that is the best way to get external help
- Fans help a company/service not to increase your company value, but for the social aspect of recognition for their contributions. “if you help someone, it makes you feel better” – Stuart Butterfield
- This kind of help is free due to these social aspects
- Very risky to listen too much to people who really love a product. You will get really deep requests that take a lot to develop and miss fixing usability issues for new users. These deep features are likely to positively impact less people in the end.
- del.icio.us do about 3 feature/bug releases a week
- a common thing flickr hears is “i had a fucked up childhood, i don’t cope well with change, please change back!” – In relation to rolling out updates/new features.
- Direct interaction with customers with the makers/founder of a product/service worked well for flickr – They would be activly looking and commenting on photos and generally welcoming users.
- with webapps, it’s a constant battle of features VS performance (mostly scaling the servers/database).
- over half of del.icio.us traffic is over RSS now
- for hiring – try having them ‘consult for a month’ to see how it works out for both sides.
Birju Patel from radialpoint.com
- ‘churn rate’ drops when a customer has more services from a company – (Me: ahhh, “churn reduction” – thats what they call making it annoying to get out of a service..)
- The ‘mass market’ want a ‘trusted brand’ to guide them due to worries of security, no phone support, multi billing and complicated experience
- Service providers commonly ask ‘want fries with that’ – figuratively
- Service providers typically choose one partner per product category
- Fulfillment of services is a big issue for adoption. if it’s hard to get something, people get unhappy and don’t buy/download/get. Has to almost be funneled to them. (Me: I’d then think, if it does have to be funneled, do they really want/need it?)
- “Nice experience” preemptive message saying – “you look like you are having problems, contact us”(Me: you would run a fine line between helpful and clippy-hell)
Watched a great demo by Carlos from scrapblog as part of web2open. Slick web app!
Afterwards, I went and had dinner with some lovely aussies from Minti and Tangler, then off to the party plasq co-sponsored @ Varnish.
The other sponsors: Viddler, Ma.gnolia, Citizen Agency, JanRain, WineLibrary.tv, FaberNovel, Facebook and Scrapblog.
Thanks for helping out with the party – we had a great time, hope you did too.