Save Me From B-School

A friend with a particular gift for web wisdom once told me “there are only two ways people will find your site: through Google, or because someone tells them about it.” I subscribe to this assertion (of course “someone” includes aggregation sites and other trusted link collectors) and also believe that if your site is worth talking about, Google will respond to that as well.

I saw a link to Ling’s Cars last week on Twitter and stared in shock and awe for a good 10 seconds at the website. Animated gifs, FOR SERIOUS. It took me an additional 30 seconds of pretty concentrated analysis to decide whether the site was a farce, a scam or maybe-just-maybe a site that actually leases cars? You can take a look at the image below, but that’s just a small taste.  Click the link. Go ahead, I dare you.

That was just the beginning. In the hours that followed, I realized that Ling’s Cars is actually totally effing brilliant. I find myself sometimes so sucked into the rounded-corners gospel that I forget no one really notices that stuff except for *other design snobs*. I think good design is extremely important but I’m starting to realize design and usability aren’t as tied together as I once thought.

So why is Ling’s Cars awesome? Thoughts:

Authenticity

Car salesman have a (often well-deserved) reputation for sleaziness. Every time I interact with a car salesman, I am trying to pinpoint how exactly I am getting screwed, and for how much. Ling’s whimsical site prompts the opposite response - all the “shiny objects” prevent the buyer from going on the offensive the minute he/she lands on the site.

Did everyone see Jesse Schell’s awesome talk from DICE last month about “Design Outside the Box”? I think it’s relevant here - start watching at about 12:00, where he talks about authenticity.  The most interesting quote:

“Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept, that the most valuable thing in products today is ‘are they real?’ ‘are they authentic?’…we live in a bubble of fake bullsh*t, and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.”

If nothing else, Ling’s Cars is authentic - you can tell it’s a real person behind the site and not just some SEO factory. Perhaps you missed this quote: “Note: I live inside this website Monday to Friday 9am-6pm, to give you the very best service and make your experience a happy one! - I am Ling, accept no substitutes.”

Entire video here:

Insane Understanding of Importance of Referral Traffic

After I found the site, I was curious to see what the smart folks at Hacker News thought of it. So I posted this thread and within 30 minutes, Ling had found the link, responded and emailed me. A personal email. From Ling.

I think many web business owners underestimate the importance of referral traffic, especially traffic that comes from sites that aren’t search engines.

Personal Attention

Given the quote about living in the website, the personal email I got from Ling and the piles and piles of customer letters on the site, it is clear to me that Ling really takes good care of her customers, in a genuine way. If I ever need a car in the UK, guess who I am going to call? Perhaps it’s not directly “conversion” but it’s that step before conversion -  “awareness”- that’s just as important.

Give The Customer What they Want

The reason why Ling’s Cars was getting so much attention on Twitter a few weeks ago was likely tied to this presentation from the 2010 Online Marketing Summit (start at slide 54). After doing some research I also found a blog post that speaks about the usability win of the site.

I think something the site excels at is giving people what they want. It’s surprisingly easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.

If you really love something, you should want to know everything about it, right?

I am currently in an ongoing love affair with the internets. This, mixed with the liberal dispensing of tech-related kool-aid that goes on at MIT, has provided enough of an impetus for me to begin learning how to actually write beautiful code. The hack-job e-commerce sites I had developed and run and SEO-ed like mad before school just will not do. No, this is a completely different undertaking.

And guess what? Writing respectable code is REALLY EFFING HARD.

Genius conclusion, I know. I wanted to write this post though, not to announce to the world that hey-guess-what-coding-is-hard, but rather to analyze why I believe business-y people like myself tend to abandon ship at this point in the learning process.

I do not plan to quit. In fact, I am only *more* determined and believe that over the next 2 years I can learn enough Python to be dangerous. That said, long-term-progress undertakings are really easy to quit.

The reason I’m not quitting is because I’ve been through this before, when I decided in 2005 that I just had to learn Chinese. So I did what any normal/sane person would do and packed my bags and moved to Beijing. I was not leaving until I could speak Chinese. Period.

I wanted to learn Chinese because my ultimate plan was to get a PhD in Chinese-American relations and become a badass diplomat (translation: spy). I really believe that in order to understand something at the most intimate level you need to learn the entire chain - ie, in order for me to understand the inner workings of the Chinese government, I had to be able to understand how the interactions take place in their most basic form.  Same thing with computers and the internet. In order to truly understand macro trends, it seems like one needs to be familiar with the most granular aspects of the trade.

I enrolled in a beginner (level 0) Chinese class here and off I went. What I did not realize is that any Chinese class worth a damn will spend at least the first month going over the fundamentals of the language. This means you don’t even learn how to say a single sentence until at least one month in - and keep in mind this is full-time studying. See the video below. Welcome to my entire life, September 2005.  I’ll call this the “bopomofo” period. Day after day it was “bo po mo fo”, again! repeat! You learn sounds and tones and initials and finals and radicals and you leave each day not one bit more prepared to go and order lunch than you were the day before.

I was frustrated, and wanted to quit. Why was I wasting my time learning how to shape my mouth and twist my tounge just right and listen for the difference between first tone and fourth tone? Hello! I had dumplings to order, and fake-North-face vendors to haggle with!

With Chinese, you can’t just take what you know from English or Spanish or German or whatever and apply it. You have to start from scratch and completely re-conceptualize how you think about language and structures and communication fundamentally.

After three months, it started to make sense. If I wanted to actually become good and not just some dummy with a phrase book, I had to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. I couldn’t go straight to learning phrases otherwise I would have to eventually unlearn all of my bad habits. So I sucked it up and went back and really really mastered all those mouth formations. And then I skipped two levels of class and ended my year having an all-in-Chinese throw-down with a military doctor in Tibet. Good times. (Though sadly now I’ve forgotten a good chunk of what I learned).

Seems to be the same in the world of developers. There are probably more than a few who have some knowledge here and there but don’t really have a clue how the entire system works together. These are the people with the phrase books who can say enough to sound impressive but in reality have a really shallow knowledge-base.

I am in the “bopomofo” period of learning to program, which is fine with me only because I know it’s going to be these micro-incremental teeny tiny baby steps for a while. But man, it sucks.

Now I understand why so many business students and other non-technical types who love technology make the attempt to learn how to code and then quit right around now. In non-technical professions there really is no equivalent to this particular type of learning. Spending an entire day to get the “name” field to work on a form for your website is easy to dismiss as a “non-optimal” use of time, especially when there’s someone you can hire who can do it in 5 minutes.

Though I think that is completely missing the point.

Knowing the “bopomofo” of the web world can be extremely helpful for non-technical people when interacting with a technical team. And once you make it through mastering the fundamentals, your ability to learn new concepts improves exponentially.

At least that’s what I’m hoping.

To all you crowdsourcing-lovers out there who see the web as a way to subvert impenetrable elite networks and democratize industries and systems, congratulations, you have a new convert. (This girl.)

I was totally fascinated by the DARPA red balloon challenge earlier this month, and obviously pumped to see an MIT team named the winner. It took less than 9 hours for the team to locate the 10 red weather balloons deployed in different cities around the U.S.

If that stat alone doesn’t for the zillionth time reiterate the astounding power of the internet, please return to your cave.  K thx.

What was most interesting, though, was not the shockingly short duration of the competition, but the very different strategies used by the MIT and Harvard teams and how each played out during the competition itself. To me, the strategies proved to me that effectively deployed crowdsourcing is an extremely powerful tool.

First, some disclaimers:

-I am currently a student at MIT, though I was not involved at all in the team’s efforts.  I didn’t even register on their site.  But I’m still biased.

-Everything I know about the Harvard team I got from these two great and thorough blog posts from Rafael Corrales and Caren Kelleher.

So, my thesis. The MIT team’s use of recursive incentives (ahem, cash money) to compel participation indicates to me that:

-Even on the web, greed and personal gain are powerful motivational forces

-Although the Harvard team was able to mobilize and engage their extremely powerful student and alumni network, the MIT team’s more tangible incentives were better suited to encourage widespread participation. Could this be an indicator of the potentially diminishing power of single networks (no matter how powerful)?  I think it is.

Here’s why:

Based on the articles I read about the Harvard team, although they ran a Google adwords campaign, had a website, a twitter account (@helpredballoon) and a pledge to donate the entire $40,000 to charity, by far the most useful tool they employed was leveraging the current student and alumni networks.  The Harvard network is arguably the most powerful network in the world - a common bond that ties together world leaders, politicians, billionaires, academics, etc. The sheer level of participation and engagement that the group received from this network is notable.

The MIT team, on the other hand, created an incentive structure that encouraged people to not only participate themselves, but get their friends to participate as well.

I think to me that was a key difference - converting participants versus converting them AND compelling them to get their friends involved too (the Facebook application Causes comes to mind here).

I don’t think the tools available on the web even five years ago would have had such success when pitted against a network as powerful as Harvard’s. But web tools are becoming downright easy to make, which I believe will enable this sort of mobilization to take many forms in the next few years and continue to chip away at the relative power of these very elite and deeply entrenched networks (examples: big media + youtube, finance industry + kaching, etc.)

The web/software as a tool of democratization is not a new idea; it has been very artfully articulated for years. Though few instances have provided such a clear case for why the process is so game-changing and how the web’s ability to mobilize disparate groups is changing the meaning of elitism.

Pluralists, take note.

I really love the website stackoverflow.com. When I discovered the site about a month ago, I had one of those “wow” moments that I was desperate to share with any willing soul, though it was difficult to find someone interested in freaking out with me over a fancy coding bulletin board. Alas.

Stackoverflow.com is a free question-and-answer site for developers, but yes, so much more. Poking around on this site has inspired me to think about how this model can be used for education on the web. I’m calling the model “lurk and learn” and will explore in this post how to replicate it.

But first, why the site is awesome:

1.  Concentration of Expertise - Whatever “secret sauce” they used to attract so many developers worked. Clicking around the site you can tell that this site has a higher concentration of top-developer-talent posting to it than probably any other site on the web. The ability to corral smart people is extremely difficult - just ask any conference organizer. Yet day after day, top minds congregate at stackoverflow.com to ask and answer highly technical questions.

Anyone who doesn’t see the opportunity here is nutso. If you want to see the pulse of the developer world, here it is.  Part of any job is learning the syntax of the industry - the way that people talk about what they’re doing, the terms that they use, the “language” of the trade. It’s all here, and nicely grouped into tags for easy browsing.

2.  Bite-Sized Bits of Knowledge - The problem with learning from experts is that many incredibly smart and accomplished people are terrible at communicating what they know in a way that’s easy for novices to grasp. StackOverflow combats this problem through the question-and-answer format. Instead of “tell me everything you know about Java”, users will ask very specific questions like “Is there a Java library that performs a message digest on a tree of objects?” This allows beginners to piece together bits of knowledge at their own pace instead of alienating/frustrating them at the beginning with a massive brain-dump of hard-to-grasp programming talk.

Additionally, every company I’ve ever worked at whines about “knowledge transfer”. What’s the best way for the smartest people in the company to teach the new kids? I’m starting to believe more and more that bite-sized little packets might be the answer.

So here I was, thinking about the coolness of StackOverflow when I stumbled on this video – a Google TechTalk from Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of the site:

And then the wheels started turning. Could this work as a model for other industries?

Defining the Educational Model: “Lurk and Learn”

I am a big fan of learning by osmosis. If you surround yourself with smart people and listen to how they talk, what they read, who they listen to, eventually it will penetrate your habits, thoughts and behavior. This is why I love Twitter – it has virtualized osmosis-learning for me. I can fill my stream with people who I think are interesting and accomplished and smart and then maybe a little bit will rub off.  Maybe.

What works about StackOverflow is that there is evidence of an entire spectrum of expertise on the site. It’s not just the whiz-kids, there are some dummies too. This is a good thing – it makes the site a lot less intimidating. The newest of wannabe coders can click around as much as they please (“lurk”) without ever having to answer a question, absorbing information like a giant sponge (“learn”).

This socialization process allows new users to develop a relationship with the community. There an article in ReadWriteWeb that discusses the “building blocks of social engineering” that Spolsky discusses in the video. Here’s the key diagram (read the article for an explanation of each block):

When you hear Spolsky talk about the site, it becomes clear that this model is not specific to the coding world.

So can it be replicated?  I think it’s a worthy experiment that I would love to work on. In addition to the social engineering road map above, I would suggest three rules:

1.  Create sites focused around a single subject/industry but with lots of breadth.  LOTS.

This requires lots of users, so there’s high potential for a chicken/egg fail. Providing value immediately is really important.

For a whole range of search terms, Google currently favors a range of well-SEOed but ultimately useless content sites that are filled with ads and just the right keywords. This is especially frustrating when you’re searching for a very specific, somewhat advanced topic.

Having a site focused on a single, highly specific vertical will hopefully attract your key user: the experts. This is the difference between StackOverflow and the other hoards of q+a sites (Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, etc.) - it’s specialized.  Attracting experts will be the key to success – if StackOverflow was a bunch of novices like me asking questions and not getting answers the site would be useless. Instead, lure in the experts and treat them well. Let them rule their own small sliver of the internets and fight hard to keep them around.

Additionally, the specific focus and emphasis on breadth will help with Google as well. StackOverflow’s SEO is so good that it now pretty much owns Google for a lot of very specific coding terms (long-tail score!!)

Other sites that follow this model and do it really well:

-  HackerNews – uses the reputation model and provides some of the most in-depth and interesting startup-related content on the web.

-  ChinesePod – I have been a fan of this site since 2006. I was living in China and trying to learn Chinese (Chinese and now coding. Can you tell I am a masochist?) They have nutured a huge Chinese-studying community using bite-sized podcasts on specific parts of the Chinese language (for example “Calling a Supplier for a Quote“). Their levels range from novice to advanced meaning that the community can also teach/learn from each other. And now they’re so popular that they charge a crapton for their content. (And good for them – $17/month – daaaaaaaaamn).

2. Support discussions (whether through a question + answer format or otherwise) as opposed to definitive and static content

Wikipedia is great, but there’s only a single Wikipedia entry for a given topic. Example – let’s say I’m trying to understand tort law. I can easily go and read the Wikipedia entry, but sometimes it take more than a single explanation to “get it”. This is the difference between going to law school for three years and reading a bunch of wikipedia entries. So what’s in the middle? The place where you go to get a working understanding of highly advanced subjects?

As far as I can tell, there isn’t one. The process of knowledge acquisition is different for different folk, and sometimes a single definitive explanation isn’t as good as multiple explanations of varying quality. Wikipedia is definitive; learning is not.

Another example – take this question: “What does Ruby have that Python doesn’t, and vice versa?” You could answer the question in a few sentences, or read through the twenty-four answers posted on StackOverflow and get a much more comprehensive explanation of the differences between Ruby and Python, sorted according to how useful the community deems each answer.

3. Create a hang-out spot, not just a content site. And make it just as compelling for experts as for beginners.

For me, the best part of learning is the struggle. It’s surveying some seemingly insurmountable subject matter and breaking it down into digestable pieces. But a lot of people are more likely to walk away/give up rather than go through the process of breaking down complicated subjects. Sites like StackOverflow take care of that process for you.

Additionally, the constantly changing content and the social engineerning that Spolsky and Jeff Atwood implemented when they created the site turns it from simply a content site to a hang-out spot. And one that’s interesting for people with varying ranges of expertise. They keep coming back because they keep finding useful stuff.

Where to begin?

Medicine would be a great place to start. Given the recent what-have-yous over healthcare, there is increased public attention on the topic and people are craving change.

Law would also be on my list, though I have a feeling lawyers hate the internets. Finance would be on there too, along with food/recipes/cooking, language learning (like Chinese!), auto repair, chemistry, accounting, real estate, and umm etc. Oh, and SAT and other standardized tests would be cool too. This list goes on.

You could also create a network of sites like these, roll them up and build a massive search engine on top of it.  Perhaps that is what Mahalo is trying to do, but because it’s not vertically-focused I have trouble tracking down information there.

The reason why “lurk and learn” is so hard to pull off in the real world is because when you walk into a classroom, you’re noticed. You require a seat and there are a limited number of seats. At the best schools, you have to pay for a seat, and you need to pass through rigorous tests just to be able to pay for a seat. On the internet, though, there are infinite seats. Now we just need to create the classrooms.

I thought “Town Holler” was organized by Foursquare.  Nope.

The event, the first of its kind as far as I know, was organized by a user and fan of Foursquare and managed to draw 50+ people to come out at 4pm on a Saturday in the middle of summer.

It started at One and One in the East Village, and everyone drank beer and wore name tags with his/her name and the name of the place where he/she was the “mayor”. The event went on into the evening with people coming in and out and the crowd moving to different venues around the East village.

I met some new people - not necessarily “strangers” but definitely new faces. They were friends of friends, in a similar field, had similar interests, etc. Not friends, not strangers. Fr-rangers. Or maybe just other “foursquares”.

It reminded me of Paul Graham’s quote that I love: “Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.” Foursquare is a great example of that quote in action. People care enough about the product to self-organize and show up.

Through events like Town Holler, Foursquare is helping to solve an issue that social networks, dating websites, and location-centered local sites have been trying to solve for a while: meeting new people and finding new places. And Foursquare, so far, does it best. Why?  Because it’s built for mobile devices. After all, when’s the best time to meet new people and find new places:

a. while at home surfing the internet
b. when you’re already out and about

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

And then - oh yeah - there are the HUGE potential benefits for local businesses.  The biggest challenge for a lot of local businesses is foot traffic. They want bodies in their establishment spending cash money. Foursquare drove a hoard of people to a group of local bars during the dreary afternoon lull - and the establishments were more than happy to provide drink/food specials as a result. Sounds like win/win to me.

There are also all the bomb “discovery” and gaming features as well. Yesterday’s post in Mashable highlights some of the gaming features, and Charlie O’Donnell does a great job explaining the discovery angle in a post called “Why Yelp (…and Every Single Retail Establishment) Should Support Foursquare.”

If anything, yesterday’s event was Charlie’s post brought to life. I knew it before, but saw it so clearly yesterday: Foursquare  will soon be the default engine for connecting people to local businesses and to new and exciting things around them.

15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley causes stir in media world by calling Twitter irrelevant to teenagers.  OH NO HE DIDN’T!

Check out the drama:  TechCrunch, FT, Christian Science Monitor, Forbes, Guardian, Mashable, Bloomberg, list goes on…

Here’s the full text.

How Teenagers Consume Media

The presentation from Exit Strategy NYC at tonight’s New York Tech Meetup made me think about alternative ways to raise seed capital. When you’re raising money for your paradigm-shifting, world-changing startup, it can take a long time to build your product and simultaneously convince people with money that your team+product+company is worth funding.  You want to meet the right investor, find the right “fit” etc etc etc etc.  Months go by, and chip away at the time you’d normally spend building your product and - right - changing the world.

Enter Jonathan and Ashley Wegener.  They took a real pain-point (have YOU ever gotten out at the wrong end of the platform in Union Square?  Vom.) spent two months riding subway cars and making sweet Adobe Illustrator files and built a very cool iphone app that I have already shelled out $1.99 to download.  Is Exit Strategy venture-backable?  Nope.  But I figure they’ll probably make around $100-$250K from selling this app to New Yorkers and tourists alike.  I bet the whole process was about 3-4 months start to finish.

Now, they could spend the cash on boats and dinners and houses, or double-down and use the cash to build their “big vision”.  They’ll probably make enough money from ExitStrategy to get through that painful product-development period without starving, they have already proven that they can execute, AND they have built a product that will make a lot of people’s lives just a little bit easier.

Sounds like win/win/win to me.

Now go buy the app.

I was oh-so-innocently trying to learn about businesses that curate Twitter content, so I watched all 45 minutes of the Howard Lindzon and Fred Wilson chat on howardlindzon.com, hoping to get just a little bit of the secret-sauce behind StockTwits.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was about 40 minutes in when Fred Wilson said: “This holiday season there will be Boxee boxes in the stores. So you can go to the store and get a Boxee box and you can take it home and connect it to your TV and you’re done.” (Though he did say later that Boxee will not be making the boxes).

This is amazingly awesome news for Boxee (and for me!).

Why?  I see at least 7 reasons (this list started out with 3 FYI):

1.  Differentiation from other online video platforms

Outside of YouTube and Hulu, there are a myriad of other ways to consume video online and a whole truckload more in development.  By making the link between the computer and the television, Boxee is taking a huge risk (would you really want to go up against Hulu, the MSOs and a whole host of other large corporations?), but the potential upside is significant. I think true differentiation in the video space is extremely difficult right now and this could be the key for Boxee.

2. The UI gap between television and the internet has become, well, HUGE

People who spend the majority of their time on the internet  get this look of disgust on their faces when talking about the state of television.  It’s not that the next best UI for TV isn’t out there - from what I can tell, TV Guide did such a great job locking in the cable providers and patenting everything related to guide technology (including a “claim for generating a simple EPG grid with channels on one axis and times on the other”) that the pace of innovation has slowed significantly.

This has created, in a way, a perfect storm for a product like Boxee: alienated users, a battle between giants that doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere, and an enormous market ripening itself for widespread change.

3.  Nothing says “Recession: Game Over” like a holiday rush on Best Buy for the hottest new electronic toy

What’s the competition this year?  Windows 7? Please. The economy is starting to bounce, and what better symbolizes a return to consumption than the long line outside electronics stores on Black Friday? (Circuit City R.I.P.).

4.  MSOs need a wake-up call

Henry Blodget’s article “Sorry, There’s No Way to Save the TV Business” in SAI last week summed up the situation quite well (so no need for me to say more here).

5.  The future of television is not in widgets

I am pretty anti-widget when it comes to the future of television. I have no interest in seeing a sun in the corner of my screen when I’m watching Law and Order: SVU. I like Boxee’s app-driven model much better.

I know a lot of people are really into the Yahoo! widgets and there has been a lot of praise for the new Samsung TVs, but I’m not a huge fan.

The recent Boxee app development challenge is a great example of what can be done with the Boxee platform - photos, education, and news are just the beginning.

6.  Boxee in its current state is too difficult to use with your TV and only sometimes compelling to use with your computer

Do I really use Boxee that much now?  Nope. I love it, but for videos I find myself most often at Hulu, YouTube and Vimeo.  The “pain point” is much sharper for television; online video is too slick and user-friendly, competition is vast and the video space in general is really crowded.

7.  I am sick of paying for cable

Comcast, are you reading this? We’re breaking up. It pains me to pay $60/month so that I can scroll through those silly ads between every four listings in the guide software. I can’t stand staring at my remote and wondering what to do with all those buttons that I never seem to use. Anecdotally, it seems like the early adopter crowd is fed up and starting to unplug en masse. Here’s my guess on how the rest of the demo groups will shake out:

NOW - Early Adopters - Currently hacking together solutions that for the most part involve Mac Minis

1-3 Years - College Students - What do all dorm rooms have? Internet Access.  Probably wireless. Cable TV is a pain in dorms, and colleges would love an IP solution that could just use the existing wireless

1-3 Years - Yuppies - The ones who always have to have the “latest and greatest”

4-6 Years - Moms - Once word gets out that you can look at baby photos through Flickr on your TV? Forget it.

5-7 Years - Everyone Else - Yeah, five years is a long time, but the MSOs are huge and the TV world moves slower than the internet.

Anyway, here’s hoping the Boxee set-top rumors will pan out this holiday season.

Back in April, I attended Tim Hwang’s XORCon and saw MIT undergrad Colin McSwiggen give a talk called “Is Memetic Engineering Real?“.  Last week at Ignite NYC I started thinking about it again (not to mention, the Xhibit story is pretty amazing).

So.  Is there money to be made from memes?

Rocketboom.com founder Andrew Baron apparently thinks so.  According to newteevee, Baron’s new video venture mag.ma aims to be THE viral video tracker on the web. I love analytics just as much as anyone, so I’m looking forward to all the sweet, sweet data that he claims mag.ma will deliver. I am already  obsessed with bit.ly, and I’d love a more thorough overview of a video’s stats beyond the view count.

I think there are two key ways to capitalize on internet memes:

1.  Leaders and followers. I hear a lot from advertising people about the identification of leaders and followers on the web.  Sure, you can identify leading websites by their traffic and price accordingly.  But the identification of leader and follower personalities in any sort of scalable way is much harder (ie, who’s the most popular girl in this high school that I can give a free pair of jeans to in the hopes of selling lots more?). That is part of the reason why advertising is so hard on social networking sites. Sure, you might have 1000 friends, but how highly do they regard your opinion? How much influence do you really have?

One could suggest that by tracking memes you can identify these “leaders”. Knowing true inflencers in a space as vast and complicated as the web is very valuable data for advertisers.

2.  Collectibles. What’s the difference between a meme and a fad?  I think of fads as physical.  If a concept has proven itself digitally - engineering a crossover to something physical could be pretty powerful.  We’re all waiting for the next slap bracelet.

Seriously though, if you know someone that’s currently working on an Xhibit face magnet for my car, please let me know.

In my Web 3.0 class last spring I heard the story of Six Degrees. Six Degrees was a social network that started in 1997 and shut down in 2001. It was one of the first online social networking sites and according to this screenshot (thanks Way Back Machine) they had over 2 million users in 1999:

We spent a lot of time in class analyzing why Six Degrees didn’t survive the dotcom bust. Social networks were going to be huge! The power of the network effect would crush new competitors!

…and yet they didn’t make it.

I think the demise of Six Degrees shows the importance of timing. How many pre-youtube youtubes tried and failed because most people didn’t have broadband and couldn’t support streaming video? There are tons of theories out there that speculate on which products are widely adopted, but more and more I am realizing that timing is one of the most compelling factors.