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Oct 27 2010
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Email is Dead – Long live Email

Brief bio background – I’ve been doing email in some way shape or form since my address was:
…!uoregon!chemstor!koblas
or
…{ames,decwrl,pyramid,wyse}! mips!koblas

If that means something to you, then you probably have a clue that I’ve done this for a while.  If it doesn’t here’s some other tidbits, I can write a sendmail.cf file from $* rules, and written SMTP servers, managed 200M++ mailboxes for internet companies…  Mail is in my blood, but at this point it’s just something that I know, from GUI, Spam and Servers it’s not a challenge it’s just an hour here or there to get it working.

Point: I get email.

Now what’s totally funny is that about two years ago I decided to break the mold and really get Facebook, be an engaged social user.   Over the years I’ve posted status updates, read about who’s sick, etc., etc.  I don’t wonder what it’s for, it’s part of my life.

Point: I’m a Facebook user.

What’s interesting is that while I’ve got an address book with everybody in it, LinkedIn to manage those infrequent contacts, this that the other thing.  I continue to find my self sending more and more messages via Facebook…  Why?

Pocket theory, thanks Ryan for helping with the thinking:  We all have friends, when we want to reach out to them how?  Ok, so I’ve got three email addresses for you, one of which I’m 99% sure is no good (it’s your previous employer).  So, I’ve got at least two now..  Which one do I send to, which one do you check, do you check any of them…  This is where Facebook reigns, I know that if I send you a message on Facebook you’ll get it in at least two places without feeling like I’m spamming you.

Not only that but since you probably do want to receive messages from Facebook, you’ve got a good email address registered with them, so I now can totally ignore those “I’ve decided to change from Comcast to Pacbell and I’m not clueful enough to change to a free email account”.  I know I can Facebook you and you’ll get my message regardless of where you read your email…

Now if we could only convince Facebook to give a serious rev to the messaging GUI (should have said no to the mgmt job and come in as a geek, but that’s a story for another day).

ps.  Sometimes I wish I was a writer/editor…  These thoughts would be better framed.

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Oct 21 2010
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Groups – Google vs. Facebook vs. (Notewave, Brizzly, Fridge)

Small rant attached – though it’s over groups which I’ve been thinking about for years

Facebook groups launched a short while ago, I’ve been using Google Groups for ages (along with Y!Groups).  Brizzly launced their groups product (though they didn’t call it groups) TheFridge has their view and Notewave (my own weekend project) has it’s view.  Groups is a necessary space, so much so there are fields of “mom-and-pop” startups doing it around pictures, sports teams, etc, etc.

Fundamentally I want Facebook to win — ok not really, but yes I do.  I wouldn’t mind if Google would give them a run for the money, but they appear to be going backwards.  I just received an email that says “were’ removing features from Groups — use other services”.  This really sucks google.

Long ago when I was at Yahoo I wanted to re-work groups, since the phylosophy was for groups of more than 500 people it didn’t work for “small” groups effectively, some ways Google didn’t either — but it was a trade off…

Here’s my necessary feature list, comparison matrix:

Feature Yahoo Google Facebook Notewave/Brizzly/Fridge
Mailing list Yes Yes Yes Yes
Calendar Yes No No No
Events Sort of No Yes No
Shared Docs No Going Away Yes No
Photos as 1st class No No Yes Yes
Privacy Yes Yes Yes Yes
Able to invite non-friends by email by email No by email
Public Facing Yes Yes Yes No

What most services fail to realize is that if they can nail groups of 20 people (soccer team, etc.) That they will become more much indispensable to people, sure I need groups for lots of anonymous people on the Internet (I’m a member of too many), but if you think that’s the core businss of groups you’ve missed one primary use case everybody has (their Friends/Associates). I’m not friends with my soccer team parents, but I want a group with them in it (Facebook fail).

Facebook — If you can fix a few little issues with groups you will rule my world:

  • Have a calendar — sync it via iCal to my phone/google
  • Allow me to invite people via email address

That’s it, then I’m yours… Don’t get caught up in “Databases”, “Poll” or other crufty features.

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Jun 08 2009
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Facebook vs. Google

Had a great discussion this morning with a co-worker.  The crux of the conversation is Google vs. Facebook — who is going to win. Is Google Wave the game changer that will kill facebook?

Nope.  We’ve really created three different product spaces in these organizations.  We’ve got Google which is “defined” as an applications company (gmail, docs, apps, etc.) and facebook which is social.

Can Google beat Facebook or Facebook beat Google — probably not — I don’t quite see how my “who’s got prettier eyes”  news feed item has any meaning on my “apps” page on iGoogle.  Sure, in a tab, etc, etc.  But, at the same time should facebook be a news feed, platform, or ???  Fundamentally, I don’t see why facebook isn’t pushing it’s platform harder and harder than Google.   It would be nice to see every site offer a login with facebook, let me move my data my personality around the web.  Make my friends part of my web experience, cut down on the “do you want to give permission” gunk.  Go for two-tier access — anonymous FB vs. logged in FB.

That way when I click on the “who’s eyes are these” trivial quiz, I can participate without sharing all of my data, but then they can impose the “join” functionality when I feel like it.

Side note — the funny part is that facebook is great for accepted bi-directional friendship, but twitter proves there’s a solid marketplace for uni-directional friendship.  Which is handled — weakly — by “fan” pages on Facebook.   It’s probably a topic unto itself to discuss how business can utilize Twitter/Facebook to market their “fan” tendancies to deliver new customers.

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Nov 21 2007
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Facebook Ad Performance Day #2

Well, it looks increasing they CPC rate to $0.55 has improved the impressions.  I’ve logged an additional 1,200 impressions in the last day.  I’ve also now gotten 12 clicks (up from 800 impressions an 0 clicks yesterday).  This now is showing a total over the run of a 0.73% CTR.

The good part is that I’ve also picked up an additional 100 views of the page, so hopefully this means that somebody is passing it around at Google to look into the problems at wink.

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Nov 19 2007
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Getting attention via Facebook

Background:

Wink has had no end of problems with Google.  It roots back to our book marking service which was overwhelmed with spammers.  At one point I estimated that 75% of our new user registrations were link farm spammers.  Over many months I’ve cracked down on these abuses and with the re-launch of our service they should be a distant memory.  Reality check, I’m sure they’re there, but just not productive anymore. 

We the re-launch of wink.com I was hoping that we’d get "re-discovered" by Google and indexed.  Not happening, for that matter they’re indexing pages around 200 a day (compared to 2000 a day by Yahoo!), we only have nine pages in the google index.  Really thinking about it, they’ve only indexed the "about" section, not the developer section which is pretty much the same (text content). 

Experiment:

In total frustration, I’ve gone a placed a Facebook ad targeted at Google employees.  It’s pretty simple, basic units — $10 budget with a $0.10 CPC… The subject of the ad is "GoogleBot is lame" in an attempt to get some eyeball share from Google employees.  According to the Facebook ad system, this should target about 5,000 people. 

What’s lacking:

I’m not a copy writer, so "GoogleBot is lame" is really a lame headline, should it carry more punch.  Should it do other things? 

References:

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