Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavs and sometimes polemic blogger, gives some great advice for entrepreneurs in this “bubble 2.0″ kinda world. Most of this probably applies in the downtimes as well. In summary:
I can definitely relate to number 1 and number 3. Number 2. seems like its part of number 3.
Esther Dyson, in her post here, talks about a company called Seriousity. Its been a while since I saw something this creative and seemingly applicable.
Giving “small company” like accessibility to larger organizations. This could even lead to some sort of digital reputation building within organizations.
The true future of the internet is not content devliery…. its pizza delivery!
Folllow up on my post Why Facebook is better than Myspace
Facebook has the opportunity to do something that very few other companies have the opportunity to do: Literally grow and mature with their users.
Many kids, high school and younger, start off with social networking sites like Myspace and Piczo. As high school kids get to college, a great social pressure pushes them to move on to Facebook. “Like, totally, Myspace and Piczo were so senior year of high school. We’re all on Facebook now!” These users may keep their old accounts to keep track of their old friends, but chances are that most of these high school friends will move on to Facebook as well. It is a right of passage, and it would be uncool not to follow the rest of the crowd.
These users then spend four years of college interacting with all their new college friends (on campus) as well as their high school friends that are now at other colleges (off campus). The Facebook addiction is reinforced by the collegiate atmosphere. “Facebooking” someone has become a standard part of the college experience and it has 4 years to sink in.
Now, as users graduate college and begin to outgrow their college needs (i.e. Where’s the party? What was that cute girl’s name? What are people doing this summer?), they will continue to use Facebook to interact with the people they met in college, but now they’re going to need a whole new set of tools as they face the real world. They are young professionals now, and the priorities will change.
One problem was, “Wow! I have a lot less time now, I can’t spend hours keeping up with people on Facebook.” Problem solved. Facebook news feeds, though polemic, take care of that in one fell swoop. I can log in, and directly on my front “home” page I can see the last days worth of activity from my friends. Sneak a peak at work, or scan it for a few minutes every night when you get home, and you can catch snippets of all your friends’ lives.
Next, I need to get my non-Facebook friends on Facebook. I am right in the gap where people any older than me did not catch the Facebook wave, so in order to not be stuck communicating with just the younger crowd, I’ve got to get everyone into Facebook. Well, Facebook is one step ahead and already took care of that by opening their network, and extending it to the workplace. They’ve even gone a step further by enhancing their picture posting functionality and offering a notes/blog feature for you to publish things to your friends.
These features are definitely a sign of Facebook growing with their audience. At the same time I’ve even noticed the generation gap being closed. People that were older than me in college and missed the Facebook trend are signing up for accounts as they realize they can reconnect with everyone. Reaching out beyond the “college only” crowd could greatly expand Facebook’s user base, and hopefully they’ll do this in such a way that it doesn’t alienate the college crowd, which is their core base.
From what I can tell so far, they are not relaxing any of the visibility privileges, and Facebook for colleges is still retaining its exclusivity. They need to do what MySpace can’t seem to avoid, and that’s keep out the creepy people.
Now that they still have the users attention in their new professional lifestyle, they need to take the next step and move into the enterprise/job space. Time to compete with the Craigslists, indeed.com, Monsters, Jobsters, and Linkedins. Not only can they compete with them, but also they have the opportunity to do it right. None of these sites have a strong and as demographically focused social network around it as Facebook, even if Facebook can touch the same number of people as Craigslist. In a recent post Steve Poland, a blogger at TechCrunch, writes about how bad current job websites are. He says,
In all honesty, finding a job online sucks. Indeed and SimplyHired have taken it to the next level by aggregating all jobs into one search, but I want to see a company come out and eHarmony-ize the job market. Make it so candidates go through a 15- to 30-minute application process that might include various tests related to their claimed skillsets. Allow recruiters to specify what skillsets are required and make them somehow rank the importance of the required skillsets.
I’d also like to see some social networking aspects along the lines of LinkedIn — allow people to refer their friends to jobs. Yahoo! could integrate HotJobs with their 360 service. Monster.com could integrate with the Facebook API to add some social networking. IAC has put a hault on acquisitions, but a jobs website seems like a good addition to their extensive consumer portfolio — their own Ask.com search engine doesn’t offer a vertical job search. Possibly an Indeed or SimplyHired acquisition?
LinkedIn never worked for me because there was no focus in my social network. On LinkedIn I have a few random people from a variety random encounters I’ve made in a variety of separate social networks. I don’t share a strong connection with these people and I don’t use Linkedin on a regular basis. Every once and a while I check the site when I realize that someone new I know is on LinkedIn, or that I need to update my profile/resume (which I haven’t done in months). But it doesn’t nearly have that stickiness Facebook does, which it could easily apply to provide the critical mass needed for a liquid professional job search/job referral site.
Whats the next question? Are these companies worth all this money?
Here are a few resources I’ve found on the topic so far, and I’ll do a full post on this sometime soon.
I have been having trouble with Del.icio.us lately.
All of the bookmarklets where too slow to tag on the fly, so i moved to using Pukka. This took care of the speed issues, and I was able to tag more material faster, and to multiple different accounts.
The big problems began when it came time for retrieving information from my database. When I’m looking for “that article that one guy wrote about that one thing that one time?” Then I can barely remember a tag or two, so what I really need is a fast way to scan through all of the bookmarks containing certain tags. I tried cocoalicious and delicious director, which where closer to what I wanted, but still not quite fast or flexible enough.
Then after another one of my rant’s about how delicious addressed the user’s selfish needs for better bookmarking first, before trying to sell the user’s on the social aspects, I decided I wanted to track down the blog post where I had originally read the idea. After a couple minutes of frustrating search through my delicious account, I decided to call for help. I went to the research machine. The guru of efficiently consuming and archiving data across the web. Rob Finn, of Ventureblogalist.
So, using gmail, I sent him an e-mail that went a little something like this:
Me:
Rob,
Quick question about an article we talked about during tech crunch. I was talking about delicious, and how you needed to have a service that speaks to a users selfish needs first before you sell them on the social aspects. AKA, the hook, the service needs to be useful on its own because people don’t go to delicious to share, they go to have a better way to manage their bookmarks, the social benefits were just an side effect.
Anyway, I’m trying to track downt he article that first said all of that. Any idea where it was?
Then His reply a few seconds later:
http://bokardo.com/archives/learning-more-about-structured-blogging/
How did he find it so fast!! He certainly didn’t use delicious. Well, I’ll attempt to get to the point. It turns out he had set up Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine to search through all of the blogs he reads. As with me, most of the articles/links that get tagged into delicious probably came from these feeds, so its a safe bet that the Google Co-op search will turn up what you were looking for.
Sure enough. Search for two words “delicious” and “selfish”, and you get the Bokardo article as the first result! Hmmm, maybe that’s why Google is a verb. I love finding what I need with a few keystrokes.
Thanks for the great tip Rob. Google Co-op based on my feeds can be found below. I’m sure none of this is totally new or original, but I just didn’t have the time, energy, or brains to put this together sooner.
An acquaintance asked me to take a look at an application called Webstractor by SoftChaos. He told me that it was a way to capture webpages for research, and then to export the results into word.
Here is the Webstractor product tour.
Pros
- The Radar feature seem like a useful one that other similar services don’t offer. Though, services that notify you of changes in a specific website already exist, and some of them are free ( see changenotes).
- Webstractor browser preview along the right hand side is very nice, and allows you to move through your captured web pages rather quickly
- The editing features are usually not included in apps that capture website
- It is nice that Webstractor captures long pages, but that can be done with other apps too
- The product shows up pretty high in google searches, there are not many easily found alternatives
Cons
- The html interpretation in the editor mode is not precise
- It does not export to microsoft word, just to .pdf, which doesn’t offer the differentiation that word would have.
- Is capturing every page you visit useful for research? it seems like it would be more useful from a search perspective. the model is to just bookmark them from yo
- Technical people will use a web-based solution, and if this is going to be a solution for less technical people it needs to be much much easier to use
- Print and share doesn’t count as collaboration these days. Exporting to pdf is something these others don’t do, but its pretty easy to do by just printing to pdf in your browser.
Suggestions
- the actual applications of the software are unclear, what market? what people, what would they actually do with the software?
- needs browser plugins for Firefox
- needs to be completely web-based
- needs collaboration features so multiple people can work on a project
- needs sharing features so people can share their work after they are done (aka publish to a private website)
Alternatives
Another big problem with webstractor is that there are many convenient alternatives.
Zotero
http://www.zotero.org
Yojimbo
http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/
Slogger
http://www.kenschutte.com/slogger/
Scrapbook
http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
Google Notes
http://www.google.com/notebook/
DEVONthink
http://www.devon-technologies.com/
Social bookmarking is also a very viable and popular research tool, and potentially has more powerful side effects. Here is a great resource on social bookmarking, and here are several popular tools:
- http://del.icio.us/
- http://www.furl.net/
- http://www.spurl.net/
Other Reviews of Webstractor
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live–save-and-annotate-the-web-with-scrapbook-168744.php
Overall I think webstractor definitely tries to solve a valid problem, but does so in a clumsy way. The jury is out on desktop apps, and the main survivor here is your web browser. The application has to be web based, and currently there are some good alternatives. Hopefully I will follow up with some review of these alternatives shortly.
Screensteps is a great little idea for making fast software tutorials using screenshots. It is for both Windows and Mac.
Here is their product demo video.
Pros:
Cons:
Requests:
Overall a really good idea, and a very simple execution. I think the fact that it did a few things very well helped me create my tutorials faster, and left me asking for a few more features. Hopefully I’ll get time to post a sample tutorial.
Here I want to begin an outline of all the personal information I encounter or take in as an input:
Real World (offline) - here we take in information from people directly through word of mouth, or we discover new information to track from our own original ideas, or by being prompted or informed through media (books, articles, commercials, signs, flyers, etc)
Online - here we take in information through e-mail, rss feeds, traditional news sites, etc
Regardless of where it comes from here is an outline of all the different types of data I might want to take-in or track:
Now I know this story has been covered over and over again, but Wired Magazine wraps it up nice and neat into one high impact story about corruption, video games, models, businesss strategy, and fast cars. All of this without an MBA?
Check out this story about the Gizmondo scandal and the infamous wreck of the Ferrari Enzo. I was shocked by how easy it was for Stefan Eriksson and his crew of mobsters to game the system. In a frenzied market thirsting for high growth high tech companies it seems that people will give their money to just about anybody. Are there more stories like this out there? Do other corrupt executives make it as far or father without getting caught?
This story definitely makes me wonder how well our system works, and what the difference is between guys like this (who defend themselves by saying that they did in fact actually build a product, albeit a bad one) and the rest of the high tech world trying to make a buck.
Definitely entertaining and worth a read.
As per the request of Rana Basheer, the creator of GuruLib , by way of commenting on my article, I'm doing a followup post on Cataloging your media .
I never made it to GuruLib the first time around, and I'll have to admit up front it was the user interface (even just the front page) that turned me away. With so many other services to review, one that had this dated of an interface didn't seem to deserve my attention.
After giving it a second chance, and after getting a good feel for where all these other services where, I feel GuruLib is right on par with the rest of the services out there. From a features perspective it can do anything that they are doing, while in some cases it adds extra features such as being able to create multiple shelves for you media storage.
Pros:
Cons
To give some specifics of how the UI and the navigational experience can be changed here are some suggestions:
The registration screen is too much work for someone who just wants to try it, and hasnt seen the app yet. To get users to come in and sign up easily, you either have to show them as much of your app as possible without them having to register, or you need to make a really simple quick registration process.
It won't be clear to users that genres are effectively tags. You've built the functionality, so label it and explain it. This way new users will be able to start using it more easily. Also, if you want people to really use the tagging features you can't bury them in the edit details page of an item. They should be able to tag items right as they add them to their collection. Tags are only useful if you are tagging everything and using a good amount of tags. This is impractical to do on a large scale unless the tagging is really really easy. Every click counts.
When i was updating a book by editing the details, it was not clear that the "update book" button was the one i need to click to save my new data.
While editing an item's details It was not clear that the browse button next to the pic of the cover was to load a new picture
Theres no need to bring up the "serach by isbn" first, and especially with movies, ISBN is just for books. Most people will want to search by titles first, so this is what should come up by default.
Explain the shelf in your FAQ. Same with your wishlist, trash can, and borrowed items. You've built these feature, now explain or teach the users how to use them to capitalize on your efforts.
While adding items to my library, it was not clear how to get from the search screen back to my library. These kind of navigational issues need to be cleared up for the application to be an attractive choice for novice internet users.
This list could go on for a while because it is the little thinigs that count when it comes to user interface. Each and every click of the mouse matters, and users will feel those things in the overall experience of the application. Now that you have a great framework for a solid application, go through and remove all the little points of friction, and you could turn this into a very interesting web app.
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and product!
By day I'm working on a betaworks project called Allify, making tools for mobile app developers.
On the side I've just launched an iphone app called Matchbook with my buddy Jason. Its a new easy way to remember the restaurants, bars, and shops people recommend to you.
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