Category Archives: Internet/Online

Economy Drives Ad Innovation Once Again…and Direct Marketers Are Back in Full Force

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It’s happening all over again. Check this out:
OPA Members Strive For Higher Impact In Online Ads
Members of the OPA are launching new ad units, much larger than current IAB sizes. Here they are (quoted from previous Mediapost article):
1. The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), intended to appear naturally embedded into the page layout, and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user goes up or down the page.
2. The XXL Box (468 x 648), providing page-turn functionality and video capability and expandable to 936 x 648.
3. The Pushdown (970 x 418), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66).
Back in 2001 when the dot-com bust was upon us, I was at Yahoo! and we worked with the IAB to roll out and standardize new larger ad sizes, which you see at the IAB ad size standards page. In fact, the industry had grabbed hold of a lot of the new ad units already and Yahoo! was painfully behind in adopting the new standards until the industry had just tanked, and the major source of ad dollars during the dot-com boom had disappeared – other over funded dot-coms who all but died in/around 2001. Yahoo!, along with all the other publishers were forced to adopt new larger ad sizes and introduce new ad experiences to woo advertisers onto their sites.
It worked great. New larger ad sizes were standardized, new ad experiences were conceived and offered like expandable ads and floating ads – we gave advertisers more opportunity to do what they do best: create WOW.
As time goes on, these ad units became commoditized both in the eyes of advertisers and users. They weren’t special anymore, so prices that advertisers will pay dropped and users got used to them and starting ignoring them.
But it seems like it took yet another economic downturn to create innovation in ad units. Isn’t this dumb? It would seem to me that publishers should take an active role in managing the roll out of new ad units and ad experiences on a regular basis to keep interest in them high from an advertiser and user perspective, and thus prices and value are also kept high. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. At least now the industry is forced to introduce new things into the marketplace.
The other funny thing that is happening again is the rise of the direct marketer in graphical ads. When all the dot-coms died back in 2001, ad units from known brands disappeared and all that were left were ads from direct marketers. These ads were the best of the best in deception – there were tons of ads that looked like dialog boxes and read “Your hard drive is deleting! click here to stop”. They were also just inapprorpriate – I remember an ad that had a picture of an old lady lying on the ground that read, “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Awful stuff. At Yahoo! we created strict content guidelines that just got rid of all these ads AND we worked super hard at bringing traditional brands onto Yahoo! so that we eliminated our revenue dependence on these direct marketers.
But they’re back:
Ad Recession Brings on the Belly Fat
While these ads aren’t deceptive, they are pretty offensive in their design. But yet, they are effective at driving traffic to lose weight websites as they offend the rest of the population. And they aren’t all that wonderful at creating a great brand experience within anyone’s website. This is why all the male enhancement ads are placed all the way in the back of popular men’s magazines; if you saw them in within their main content pages, you might think that this men’s magazine has an undesirable perception amongst its readers.
The same will happen to websites if these ads are found on their pages. Do you want your brand tarnished by the ads that run on your pages?
In the short term, direct marketers have the cash. Perhaps we are forced to take these ads in the short term as we figure out new ways to generate revenue. I hope that in this case, history repeats itself in that the industry will innovate yet again and more desirable advertiser dollars will flow into the ecosystem. But instead of getting rid of direct marketers, can’t we find a way to help them create more acceptable ads from a design perspective but are ALSO as effective?

An Evening with Jeff Jarvis and his new book, What Would Google Do?

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On Thursday night, I went over to the offices of Daylife to see Jeff Jarvis talk about his new book, What Would Google Do?.

His presentation was a bit rushed as his prepared powerpoint was a lot longer than his talk. But I had read some of his book by the time I got to the presentation.
I think his book is pretty good at gathering together a whole bunch of disparate strategies and thoughts from the state of the Web and its effects on a variety of businesses. To us in the biz, I think it’s stuff that we deal with every day, but it’s nice that somebody put it all in one place.
The one thing I think could be better is the title. It’s deceptive because there are things that are described in the book that are valid and true, but they are not what Google would do. In fact, Google itself would never do them ever because it doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint for them. And it’s funny that even if Google doesn’t do them, they enable those activities to be done by others.
I would probably call the book something like, “This is the Way the Internet Is Now and What to Do About It”.

Increasing Site and Social Engagement in Detail

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Over the last few years, social media has really become a popular buzzword. People talk about social networks and the importance of implementing them, as well as the drawbacks and potential dangers. Rather than talk about social media as a strategy, I wanted to point out some actual detail level things to try rather than stay at the 10,000 foot level of discussion. Based on working on social media projects over the last year, I have found the following techniques to be effective at creating and maintaining a vibrant social environment that produces results:
Voyeurism
Related to: Dating/Hooking Up, Expression (receiving end of)
People love to follow other people for a variety of reasons. From telescopes in apartments buildings to eavesdropping on a nearby conversation to hearing and passing on gossip, the lives of others around us seem infinitely more interesting than our own. We follow other people for many reasons: to keep up with what our friends are doing, to check out hot women, to see what trouble celebrities get into – we are always curious, sometimes to the point of obsession, about what other people do day to day. Successful social networks allow people to post and describe their daily lives so that others can take a look.
Communication
Related to: Dating/Hooking Up, Connecting with Context, Entertainment, Validation
It is human to want to contact someone else. We are social creatures and we want to talk to others. Providing a way for people to contact and maintain communication with others is crucial to the lifeblood of a good social network. Just as important is the ability to shut people out, and give people ways of *not* talking to everyone or only certain people (ie. annoying people, spam, ex-boyfriend).
Dating/Hooking Up
Related to: Voyeurism, Communication, Masquerade, Entertainment
Let’s face it. Lots of guys surf pictures just to check out hot women. But then sometimes you’ll want to make contact and see if you can get a date. Simply providing a means for surfing photos in profiles and a system for communication can enable this activity, but providing additional functionality to facilitate this activity can make the experience more enticing and fun. Think HotOrNot.com and the ability to rate people, and then pick out only the HOT rated people to contact, or show interest by sending someone a virtual flower. Or I’m In Like With You where auctions meets dating and you bid on the ability to meet someone.
Entertainment
Related to: Communication, Dating/Hooking Up, Competition, Fame
Having a good time on a site increases engagement. Providing ways of having fun keeps people coming back to have more fun. Games are the obvious one, and playing by yourself is good but playing against others is often better. Sometimes it’s the content posted by users, like funny videos of themselves posted on YouTube or pictures on Flickr to be watched on their Flickr streams. Or if a fun spin can be put on mundane activities, then the unique fun that activity brings will draw people in and keep them interested.
Fame
Related to: Competition, Expression, Entertainment, Showing Off/Vanity, Validation
It’s fun to do an activity and play a game, but enabling a way for people to get acknowledged and recognized for their skill rewards people by the notoriety they get for being good at something. Leaderboards on gaming sites allow users to show the world that they are #1 in a game, and they’ll screen shot that and put it on their blog. It also means that they’ll keep coming back to keep achieving or maintain their #1 position on the leaderboard for bragging rights.
Competition
Related to: Fame, Entertainment
There is something in the act of striving against other humans that people love. They want to test their ablities and measure themselves against others and be measured and will keep coming back to try. They like to see continual improvement and enjoy a rise in skill. There is also competition against themselves so it’s not always about other people. And, there is the ultimate prize of being number ONE. Perhaps we’ll never get there, but maybe we will. No matter what, we love the struggle and the journey to number ONE. In games and sports is where we most often see competition, but it can also be other things like getting the most views on posted content like a video. Great games and activities constantly provide the ability to raise the bar just a little more each time to keep people competing, but don’t raise the bar too high or else people will give up. Not raising the bar at all will cause people to achieve that level and then move on because it’s too easy. This bar can be set by other users, like when you’re competing against other players in a sports game, it can be set by a computer which auto-adjusts for your skill level.
Expression
Related to: Fame, Voyeurism (contributing to), Showing Off/Vanity, Validation
Constantly we are on stage. The world is a theater and we are its actors. From the clothes we wear to what we say or do, we are always showing the world who we are. Providing a means for people to express who they are means they will continually do it, especially if there is a mechanism for validation like commenting on photos in Facebook.
Showing Off/Vanity
Related to: Expression, Fame
The extreme form of expression is showing off and trying to show that we are special and unique. Showing our crazy stunt videos, or photos of us drinking a 3 foot tall beer, or next to a movie star all show the world that we are not boring people but that we have the biggest peacock feathers. Allowing people to show off and giving validation mechanisms like commenting on photos, or leaderboards, or graphical badges of honors on our profile pages reward us for posting and showing off, and encourages us to do more.
Validation
Related to: Communication, Fame, Expression
We always want to know that who we are is noticed and special by others. We like it when we get comments on our photos and videos from our friends. It makes us feel that others care and that we are not alone in the world. Implementing means of giving validation gives users that special feeling that others do notice them, and they’ll keep on posting to get more validation. The simplest form is commenting on photos and videos, but it can be focused by providing context like on Dailystrength.org where you can post an issue and get support from strangers and friends via the internet.
Masquerade
Related to: Communication, Community
Sometimes we’re boring. Our lives are so mundane that we get sick of it. Or maybe we’re not in the social mainstream. We feel shunned by the general masses and can’t seem to get in the flow of society. Or maybe we’re just tired of being ourselves and want to try being someone else. On the internet, the ability to be someone else is very easy. Simply creating a new screen name and building a personality underneath it has been done since the early days of the internet. People can pretend they are the opposite sex, older or younger, more fun, more engaging – whatever. It is something that is not easily achieved in the real world. Acting out the fantasy that they have either personality traits not in the real world or entirely someone else can be an activity that keeps people returning. The unfortunate thing is that people often masquerade for negative reasons like stalking children, and this needs to be guarded against.
Community
Related to: Masquerade, Connecting with Context, Communication
Humans want to belong. It’s often to easy to feel outcast in the real world. On the internet, communities can be more accepting of people than in the real world. If a site can create a means for people to be a part of something, they will want to come back and continue to participate to be part of that community. Think of the instant groups that Facebook has, based on tags created from your interests, or your hometown. These are ways for people to find commonalities on which to connect on, which foster communication and validation.
Connecting with Context
Related to: Community, Communication
In watching social networks over the years, I am a firm believer that social networking for social networking’s sake is a path to declining activity. It is much more engaging for users when you create a context for which socializing happens. MySpace’s usage came from the fact that they were always about promoting indie music. Yes, other things happened there, but you knew that you could always find indie music on MySpace. Facebook started out by being exclusive to colleges and there was no way to taint the population with random people who were not attending your university. Everyone you found there went to your college and you could relate easily. LinkedIn’s network is built on professional networking, another popular activity in business and its functionality is focused on making that activity easier. Contrast that with Friendster, who had a meteoric rise when it first came out and then usage tapered and dropped because people got bored there when applying this list of social techniques was not done well or not at all.
For all my projects, I try to think about applying some or all of these techniques in creative ways. I also think about the context since not all techniques are effective in every context. For example, dating could be a hard sell in a social stock picking application, but competition and fame would definitely work well. Some of it is experimental, as there could be unexpected results of applying something you thought wouldn’t work in a context. So let’s turn my example around. Suppose you did create a social stock picking site which had an underlying dating application underneath? Perhaps it could link up all the superficial, money hungry people by allowing you to find, meet, and date the richest, best stock pickers in the world…? Socially unacceptable? Perhaps. Successful? Who knows…

Facebook Messaging vs. Old School Email Part II

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Following on my last post about Facebook messaging…
Today I exchanged Facebook messages with someone. I connected this person via traditional email (via his last known email address that I had for him) with some folks. It was an urgent communication, so I immediately logged onto Facebook and sent him a Facebook message telling him that he had an email waiting for him, so that he could respond quickly.
Isn’t it funny that since I had not corresponded with this person for a while via traditional email but rather Facebook messaging, that I would tell him he had a traditional email waiting for him via Facebook?
As soon as I clicked on the Send button in Facebook, I paused and thought that I should check out where his notifications (that he got a Facebook message) were going. When I looked, they were going to same place that I had sent a traditional email to him!
Facebook…Email….Facebook…Email…?

Facebook Messaging vs. Old School Email

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One thing I heard about the young generation is that they never use email anymore. I began to wonder why that was, where corporate America and us old folks who grew up with nothing but email couldn’t live without email now.
Lately, I started trading messages with people on Facebook through their messaging system. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. Some people began sending me messages while I would initiate some just for kicks. It seemed like a novelty more than something that was useful.
But I started recognizing the advantages of messaging like this:
1. Email is filled with spam. Yet, Facebook messaging is not. I guess spammers haven’t figured out good ways of getting into the messaging system. Each time you create an identity on Facebook, there are verification steps to show that you are a real person. Once someone creates a fake identity for spam purposes, it’s pretty obvious, even if you get past the verification steps. They often have a big link posted to their website and I immediately report them as inappropriate to Facebook authorities. I once met Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, who tossed out the idea of using a social network as an email system, because it would effectively eliminate spam. I think he was right.
2. It sorts emails by the conversation. It presents each message thread, which is incredibly useful from a conversation standpoint. In Outlook and other email programs, somehow the sorting by sender or subject doesn’t solve the entire problem. It doesn’t do auto-grouping by conversation, which I am finding to be very useful in a Facebook GUI; subject sorting just doesn’t cut it. And last, threading never seems to work well, because sometimes attempting to derive threading via the RE: of a message subject can be daunting, especially if it has been editted.
3. Going further, the presentation of each conversation once you click into it is very nice. There is no antiquated ‘>>’ for presenting the previous body of the message into replied email, which can make for difficult reading. You can see the whole thread at once and see where people replied. I do wish I had the option of copying some of the previous message into my current message. Sometimes there are multiple points in a message and you want to reply to each one separately and clearly. I have cut-pasted message sections into a new message and then typed a reply to that, just so the recipient knew I was talking about that section of a message and not another part.
4. If you want to start a new topic, you can just start a new message thread. This helps keep conversations organized instead of devolving from the original message where you may forget to change the message subject or just too lazy to, and then the conversation starts going every which way.
4. You can only receive messages from friends. Thus, you have already designated a list of safe message senders, which along with item 1. above helps to eliminate spam.
5. Private messaging is available, but you can also do public messaging. This is not available to the email world. Via the wall, you can have a more public conversation which can be entertaining and/or useful, if you intend on others to see it.
6. There are many types of communication happening on Facebook. People can comment on your photos, write on your wall, have activity and you get notified of it, and send you personal messages. Having all that accessible in one place is very useful. Otherwise, I’d have to flip between Outlook and several other websites to check activity. Sometimes I can send activity to my email, but then it just gets mixed in with all the other spam and normal important conversations I’m having. It’s not very optimal. On Facebook, the newsfeed gives it to me all and a light notification on the front page gathers for me all the communications one can have with their friends and community in one convenient place. It’s no wonder that people today have switched to Facebook from email as a primary communications vehicle.
The moment of epiphany for me happened when I began my Facebook messaging to friends AND I left a browser window up with Facebook in it. I would find myself hitting reload on that page many times during the day as well as checking on Facebook through my iPhone. I began to understand why today’s youth almost never use email and just use Facebook messaging.
As my usage of Facebook messaging grew, I could also see parallels with another project I’ve been deeply interested in, which is email innovation. Facebook messaging solves so many things that I hate about current email. But could email innovation just be a dying concept as email gets supplanted by Facebook messaging?
Four wishlist items for Facebook messaging:
1. Offline messaging.
2. Save messages and conversation threads on my hard drive.
3. SMS messaging.
4. File sending.
Still, I do not see myself totally removing myself from email. The corporate world, and most of my generation, still use email as a primary communication vehicle. But for a significant and growing population of people I associate with, Facebook will become my primary communications method with them.

You Asked Me About Yahoo!…

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been asked what I think of the recent events at Yahoo!. As an once insider, people think I’ve got some inside knowledge and insight into whether the changes are good or not. To be honest, I do still have some connections with Yahoos, but they get more tenuous each passing day. Still, it’s been interesting polling both insiders and outsiders about Yahoo! and its future.
Since the announcement of Jerry Yang becoming CEO (and Sue Decker becoming President) and Terry Semel leaving, I have thought a lot about what this means for Yahoo!. I also went around and talked to ex-Yahoos and current Yahoos about what they think. It’s been an interesting experience hearing what they’ve had to say.
I have found an amazingly wide range of opinions but there seem to be some trends:
1. Those who just joined Yahoo seem more optimistic than those that have been there for a while. Some guesses as to why this is so:
a. They joined at the current state of affairs, so they must be bullish on the company or else why would they have joined up?
b. They must be bullish or else they would quit. This could be real or self-delusional. Who knows. But they must make themselves bullish or else they would lose all psych in their job, which they arrived at not too long ago.
2. Veterans seem to have mixed opinions. Why:
a. They have more experience in the company and know what works and what doesn’t. They’ve been through change before at Yahoo and can be both optimistic and pessimistic.
b. It seems that this is highly dependent on position and location in the company (see next item).
3. Higher level employees unanimously are bullish on the company. This is not strange; they have signed on to be an exec in the new regime and have to like it. Otherwise, they would leave. And politically they can’t express any fears; it would scare the troops. So it’s been hard to pin down what they REALLY think about the new Yahoo.
4. Pockets of bliss exist. In many small, local areas, people are doing really great work and getting lots done. The opposite is also true, that there are also many areas of despair as well. These folks cite all the typical stuff, like growing politics, impossible to get stuff done, no direction from leadership, etc. etc.
What do I think about Jerry being CEO?
I totally think he should have been CEO a long time ago.
I think that in order for someone to run a company effectively, you must have instinctual knowledge about the industry. We would not put a DOW chemical exec in charge of GM. Likewise, for someone to run an Internet company, you must have some great resonance with the Internet and are in tune with what people want and like.
Who out there could qualify for this? Larry and Sergei are two. Filo and Jerry are another two. I actually think Dan Rosensweig could have done it. He used to run ZDNet and thus had a lot of knowledge about the Internet as well as executive experience. Well, we’re not going to get Larry or Sergei, and Dave Filo is still working on engineering issues. So who is left. Jerry Yang.
Can he turn the ship around?
While I think Jerry is the right person, I also think he has an enormous task before him. Think of trying to turn the TItanic by pushing on it with your hands. In certain crazy and inventive situations, I bet you could actually turn the Titanic that way, ie. if you were Superman, you could do it – this is sort of like answering one of those famous interview questions in a Microsoft interview. So I believe that turning the Yahoo ship can be done, but it remains to be seen whether or not there is so much inertia and momentum that it resists turning fast enough.
One possible consequence of turning the Yahoo ship will be some down revenue quarters over the next year, potentially two years, as restructuring plans take hold, removal of waste, taking down sites that shouldn’t be worked on, etc. etc. However, it will be amazing if revenue can be kept growing in the midst of such change.
Only time will tell. My money is definitely on Jerry Yang to bring Yahoo into its next stage of evolution.

Avoiding Blur

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I was just talking to a startup about their website and we were strategizing what it could become. We noodled, talked, brainstormed, argued, and finally agreed for over 5 hours and developed a sense for what we want the future site would be like.
At the end of the session, I was still feeling uneasy about what we came up with. The main reason was that it was merely a combination of what other sites were doing in part. One site would have this feature, but not the main direction for the site. Another site had people doing the activity, but in a different way. Some of the bigger sites out there also had the ability to do what we were doing, but of course their missions were much more broader and not focused like ours. Could we do better by simply having a niche, focused mission but having many of the same tools as other sites, and also competing against the fact that users were already using our competitors for that same mission we wanted them to focus on with our site?
This was the source of my unease. If there are competitors or near competitors, or even non-competitors, who allow users to accomplish the same thing on their sites, whether it is their main mission or not, AND these competitors exist already, this is a danger point. I call it “blur”.
The blur occurs in users minds when they hear about what you want them to do, but can’t figure out where to do it. They may already be doing it on some other site, by either using some existing functionality, or jacking some other functionality to get the job done.
Blur is heavily related to product differentiation. You want something to cut through the blur. When they think of something they want or need to do, you want them to think of you. Whatever functions you have must be cool, creative, and original enough to attract them to you despite being in a similar place with other existing sites.
Here is an example. Suppose you want to build a site to allow users to connect with friends. Let’s say your main interface is email, as a possible differentiator. However, as a user who hears about your offering, “connect with friends via this new way, but with email”, they’ll think all sorts of things like:
Hmm I’m already on Facebook and that works for me.
I have my address book on Outlook and email people just fine.
All my friends are on MySpace. Why switch?
I don’t have time to try something new, let alone learning it and THEN getting all my friends on it.
The problem here is that when you express your mission to users, they get caught in the blur of other competitors being able to do pretty much the same thing and you don’t have something to justify the switching cost of going to your service to do something they can do already somewhere else.
You need to find that one (or more) things that people can do on your site that no one else offers, AND is cool enough to get them to come over and learn something new.
It’s always a danger point for me when I hear of entrepreneurs who design something supposedly really cool but then I point out that people are already doing these things on other sites. I ALWAYS get pushback because they think their creation is the best out there, and nobody has mashed up the functions in such a focused manner.
It might actually be great. I’m just talking about risk here and the realities of getting users attention in a crowded space. You might actually have something that is a ton better at doing something, than for them to do it on some existing site.
I’m into risk reduction. Why try to fight with through user blur with something that isn’t shouting “Come here and try me because I’m different” loud enough? You could run out of resources and funding trying to bulldoze your way into users’ attentions. If you had several million dollars in the bank, yeah potentially you could market your way to success in a certain category.
Or you could spend a little more creative time and figure out something to build that is actually cooler and hasn’t done before, and that users will want to spend time with. Enough to get past the switching cost and try your service.
WIth that previous startup I mentioned, after 5 hours of discussion, we spent another 20 minutes talking about something that wasn’t mentioned and was something very unique in their offering. I think that 20 minutes is going to turn out to be most valuable part of that day. Because I think we added back something that would cut through the blur and thus reduce our potential risk in attracting users to our site, to do something that they could do somewhere else in general, but being able to do that one thing that they CAN’T anywhere else.
We could have gone home after 5 hours. But spending that little bit of extra time and effort to find something to avoid the blur was worthwhile and I believe, critical for the success of the company.

Social Networking is the Web 2.0 “In” Thing to Do

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Yesterday I went through an exercise with one of my companies on the social networking feature set. We went through the basic list first:
1. Add, edit, manage, invite friends.
2. Sending and receiving messages privately.
3. Announcing to friends when some activity is accomplished on the site, with announcements going out via email. Management of such communication to your friends list (instead of knowing and typing in tons of email addresses).
4. Commenting on your friends. Approval of comments to appear.
Then we added some more on top of the basic list:
1. Tracking activity of your friends via RSS feeds or announcements.
2. Affecting your public and private activity setting, by being able to expose your activity only to your friends instead of totally public and totally private.
3. Rating your friends. Enabling reputation building through rating.
4. Enabling reputation building through activity on the site.
5. SPAM management.
After that we talked about something I wrote about a while back, which is about Fame and Competition on the Net. I think fame refers to:
1. Fame amongst your circle of friends so that you feel important and have notoriety and show expertise.
2. The creation of your personal fame, which is a great way to encourage activity on the site. Create a system by which people build up their rating and reputation to create fame.
3. Application of that fame in opening up new functionality to those with higher reputation, versus those with little or no, or negative reputation/fame.
4. The ability to see their fame expressed, in leaderboards, star ratings, in comments on users, in lists sorted by fame.
Competition refers to:
1. With respect to fame, competition encourages activity by making people compete to be more famous than other people.
2. When you make things visible like reputation and ratings to the world, you foster competition when users want to have higher reputation and ratings over their friends. Leaderboards, graphical elements like rating stars, reputation building comments like those found on Yelp, are all great ways to show how great you are, which in turn encourages more activity on the site to make you chase greatness over and above your friends.
3. Getting to the top of certain lists, or placement on a certain page like a home page fosters competition. For example, if there is a module on the home page which shows recent activity, a user might increase activity just to be able to say that he got his activity shown on the home page.
4. Competition amongst people you know is great as well as to the rest of the world. A user will want more notoriety within their circle of friends as well as to the world at large.
5. If orchestrated right, competition can bring an element of gaming into the equation which can make the activity fun and engaging. That’s not to say that gaming needs to be in the arcade sense of the word; it just means that a sense of play, of being able to strive and to win are elements that need to be present.
Social networking for meeting and activity management are the basic functions. But I would argue that they are not enough. There are enough social networks out there where you can perform these functions. A site who wants to employ social networking needs to rise above common functions, such as with elements which generate fame and competition. You want to make your site more than just a place for meeting and hooking up. Design activities which foster meeting AND fame and competition AND encourage activity on your site and you’ll win across multiple goals.

Drinking the Kool-Aid Ain’t So Good

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When I worked at frogdesign, I remember our team going to a PC client and getting reprimanded for not using their company’s PCs If we were going to work for them, then shouldn’t we be using their products and getting to know how “great” their products were by living with them day to day?
The same thing happened at Yahoo!. I remember a sales rep who had a major PC manufacturer as a client and he immediately went out and bought a laptop made by that company to show solidarity and support for the client. I don’t know if he used it when he got back to the office, but definitely he brought it with him to client meetings. He even switched his cellphone to that company’s brand (maybe you can figure out who this company was now heh). It was all to show that he was in full support of the manufacturer as client and supported them so much that he lived and breathed their products, as much as what he did with them at Yahoo!.
I drank the Kool-Aid too. When we worked on Yahoo! products, we were told to always use them. It kind of made sense at the time. If you lived and breathed the products, you could make them better. You could spot problems, make suggestions, and overall show the world that a company who uses its own products must obviously have the highest confidence in them to do so.
After observing and experiencing this behavior for many years, I’m going to take the contrarian view. I am going to suggest that using solely your company’s products is not so good as people claim.
I reached this conclusion just now, almost 3 years out of Yahoo! and have been out there using whatever it was that made my life easier, instead of just using Yahoo! products only. I found that there were a huge number of products out there that were really great, and often much better than what Yahoo! could offer. I even took Yahoo.com off my home page button, which had occupied that button since 1995. Drinking too much Kool-Aid too long made me miss out.
If you are constantly using your own products, I would put forth that it’s the best way to put blinders on. Sure, your company’s products may be the best there is when they come out, but they may not be at some time in the future. With Web development happening so fast, it could happen sooner than you think.
In today’s Web, things move so fast. People come up with stuff that you personally would not have dreamed of. The more you focus on your own products, the more the likelihood that you fall into that comfortable place where you don’t need to change, you don’t look for something better, and you just don’t feel like learning something new. You get complacent and feel that what you have is good enough, or you think it’s world class because you worked on it and people have told you so. How can it not be? You take pride in what you’ve done and nobody can knock you off the mountain. Everyone tells you to research and look at competitors’ products, but yet nobody finds the time to do so. It is a small number of people who actually have their own personal curiosity to go out and try somebody elses products. It’s too freakin’ busy to go and do this in your spare time!
I would put forth that the blindness that happens with being comfortable and focusing on yourself and your own company is precisely the way you get blindsided by some fast moving kids out of college developing something that is so cool and compelling and you see them gaining traction only after you’ve fallen behind.
What’s the best way to combat this?
USE THE BEST PRODUCT OUT THERE FOR WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO.
Force yourself to always try new things, even when your boss is telling you to use the company’s products. Fake using Gmail when you go to a client meeting, but return back to what you think is the best product for email when you’re out of that meeting. Use the best cellphone for you, but when you go back to work carry your Sony-Ericsson.
You can’t learn about a product by just trying it; you really need to live with it and become a real user of that product and internalize why it is great.
Always ask your friends what they use. Read magazines and blogs about what they recommend. Collect your insight and feed it back to your own development process for your own products.
Don’t get complacent about your own products by missing what’s happening in the greater world. This is more than just being “innovative”. It is experiencing and acknowledging the world is a bigger place than just you, your product and your company. Broaden your horizons and you’ll be a superior product person for it. Truly in today’s Web, the best product does win.
POSTSCRIPT:
When you realize that you are practically using none of your company’s products because your competitors’ products are so much better, and you can’t get your company to realize this, I think it’s time to leave.
POSTSCRIPT Part II:
If you’re a boss, don’t be an ass and make everyone on your team use your own products, if they aren’t as good as your competitors’. That should be motivation enough to make your own stuff better.

Changed My Home Page on Firefox, New Portals

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I never thought I’d see the day. Today I changed my home page from the venerable Yahoo.com to Netvibes.
If you’ve never tried Netvibes, it’s basically what My Yahoo! should have evolved to. Lots of cool Web 2.0 features like dragging modules around, in-page DHTML adding/removing of feeds. It just makes the personalized page experience that much better.
I used to open up Firefox to the familiar view of the Yahoo front page. But I find that it isn’t all that useful for me anymore. Occasionally, I enjoy the interesting headline that shows up, like today’s headline on how much Bush paid in taxes since it is the tax return deadline today. But usually, I don’t even try to read what is on the page. Previously, I also enjoyed seeing the cool ads that popped up. But none of those show up in Firefox and only in IE, which I almost never use.
So today, I resigned myself to switching out my home page to Netvibes, which is a page I look at multiple times a day and has great use for me. Now why not My Yahoo? I used to use My Yahoo, but never set my home page to it. Somehow it just didn’t fit the bill and was too Yahoo content focused. Sure, you can now add RSS feeds. But it wasn’t as nice to work with as Netvibes and I just abandoned it after using it for years as a second home page.
As I pulled up Preferences in Firefox and hit the “Use Current” button for setting the home page, I ruminated on the fact that all the old portals had barely changed: Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Google. All were just rehashes of the same old thing. Just a Web page, some flash, but lots of links, and not feeling very useful to the Web world beyond their own boundaries; I could only get at Yahoo! stuff on the Yahoo! front page.
It brought back some thoughts I had about a year ago regarding portals. None of them had taken into the account the changes in Web surfing behavior; they all basically stayed the same. I thought of all the issues they face, like legacy issues in technology, thinking, politics, fear of change, commitments to partners and advertisers, lack of innovative thinking, closed door protectionist attitudes towards driving traffic to their own services. These are real barriers to what a portal really could be in today’s world. But it also meant for me an opportunity.
If you were to remove all those barriers and start building a portal for today’s Web, what would it look like?