Is Facebook Taking Inspiration From Apple’s App Store?

January 31, 2010 in Essays, Technology & Science

In the coming weeks Facebook will be launching a new “Dashboard” screen for their Applications. At first glance it has many similarities to the iTunes app store, but looking a bit deeper there also seems to be quite a few lessons that Apple could learn from Facebook’s plans:

The Dashboard

As you can see from the screenshot (click for full size) the new dashboard will have a much better layout than the existing list format. Links to the dashboard will sit on the left side of your home page and when clicked will replace your news feed with the new dashboard – like switching between live feed and news feed.

Facebook hope to encourage “discovery and re-engagement with games and other applications” and this is definitely a step in the right direction.

With a little luck it might also help clear up the news feed which can often become clogged with torrents of game notifications.

Applications vs. Games

This is one area in which Facebook seem to be leapfrogging Apple. The iTunes App Store has Games as just another category of apps (the most heavily promoted category) but Facebook is going one step further and dividing it’s applications directory in half, with users now having an Applications Dashboard and a Games Dashboard.

This is a great move by Facebook. Although there’s no technical difference between the two (a Game is just another type of app) from the average user’s point of view the distinction is useful. It also allows the Games Dashboard to include more game-specific features such as high scores and leader boards.

Integrating Social

This is where Facebook’s new dashboards should move into a league of their own. For the initial launch the social integration isn’t anything we haven’t seen before but it’s still a great demonstration of how any simple service can be greatly enhanced by integrating a social web. Here’s Facebook’s list of features they expect in the new dashboards from day 1:

  • Recently used applications and games
  • News items: Examples given by Facebook include “It’s your turn in a game against Jared” or “The leader board was reset 6 hours ago, come play!”
  • Your Friends’ Recent Activity
  • Your Friends Play
  • Directory, Including an “Applications You May Like” section
  • Suggestions/Sponsored on the right hand side, based on a combination of paid placement and the applications they and their friends are using.
  • Counters and home page placement: Bookmarked applications will also have prominence on the home page, and can be accompanied by Counters that you can set to let users know there are actions for them to take within your applications.

It’s A Numbers Game

The motivations behind this move are pretty obvious once you understand the numbers behind app usage. Apple should have an advantage in this area because applications sit on the home screen of iPhones and are harder to ignore, yet some figures show that as little as 20% of all iPhone applications are ever used more than once. Data for Facebook apps appears to be quite similar, with the Top 100 apps having only 10%-20% of users being “active” in any given month.

Try Them Out

Before the official launch you can test them out to see what your dashboards will look like using these demo links:

What do you think? Will this help you get the most out of Facebook Applications or is just more intrusions into your home page? Will it make Facebook games an even more lucrative industry?

Video Killed The News Story

January 13, 2010 in Essays, Marketing, Technology & Science

Here’s some recent headlines from a few technology and marketing websites. Both are about different stories, but the headlines all effectively say the same thing.

Online video more popular than blogging and social networking

Video Marketing Tops Search Marketing as a #1 Priority for Brands and Agencies in 2010?

A lot of stories like this pop up around the web and although they can be quite interesting to read, the underlying trend is nothing new. An offline equivalent might have a headline like:

Watching a documentary is quicker and easier than reading a book



In this hyper-connected world we’re all starting to realise the power of interactivity (or it’s evilness), but let’s not underestimate the power of the lazy person inside all of us that just wants to sit back, relax and passively consume.

This Just in: Watching stuff is easier than reading stuff! A couch potato is lazier than a book worm!

Leave a comment…. if you could be bothered typing 😛

Some iPhone Stats

January 11, 2010 in Essays, Technology & Science

I just got this in info in an email from O2 (I’m a registered iPhone developer), some interesting numbers:

Edit/Update: It seems that they just sent me a summary of Mulley Communication’s iPhone survey results…. from 2008!

  • 72% of users would recommend an iPhone to friends/family
  • 86% of users said their next phone will be an iPhone
  • Social Networking apps are the most popular
  • Circa 25 apps is the average per user
  • €17 is the average spend on apps per user in the last 6 months
  • Of the 34% of users who purchase music on the iPhone, 72% say their impulse buying of music has increased
  • 43% of users check their email hourly or more
  • Circa 60% of users are between 25-44yrs
  • iPhone users uses over 10 times more data than a non-iPhone user

iTunes Beats Paypal for Registered Users

January 7, 2010 in Essays, Technology & Science

A few months back I was watching Apple’s Rock N’ Roll event (this post has been in my drafts half written since then!), and one thing mentioned that really struck me was the number of registered iTunes users who have registered credit cards – a whopping 100m.

I’ve seen the comparisons done between social networks (“omg, Facebook is bigger than Brazil!”), but hearing the iTunes figure made me realise that I have no clue how that stacks up against the other big hitters in the online world, so I did some research…

Registered Users

Ebay – 88.4 million

Paypal – 75.4 million

Skype – 480.5

Facebook – 300m

iTunes – 100m

Gmail – 146m

Yahoo Mail – 285

Windows Live Mail (msn/hotmail) – 343m

Wikipedia – 10.5m registered (only 148k ‘active’)

I’m still shocked that iTunes has more credit cards registered than Paypal, that’s a very impressive asset. I’m going to try dig up the equivalent for Amazon, but it’s tricky to find. The skype numbers should be taken with a pinch (or a truckload) of salt, as their definition of “Registered User” is basically any skype account ever created, including ones that were never used, have been inactive for years or multiple accounts for the one person.

Graphs

I thought some graphs might be nice so I did that too:

Registered Users

reg users pie

Definitions

Ebay – All users, excluding users of Half.com, StubHub, and our Korean subsidiaries (Gmarket and Internet Auction Co.), who bid on, bought, listed or sold an item within the previous 12-month period. Users may register more than once, and as a result, may have more than one account.

Paypal – All registered accounts that successfully sent or received at least one payment or payment reversal through the PayPal system or Bill Me Later accounts that are currently able to transact and that received a statement within the last 12 months.

Skype – Cumulative number of unique user accounts, which includes, among other things, users who may have registered via non-Skype based websites and users that have more than one account.

Wikipedia – Active: Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days.

Sources

Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Bing Mail, Ebay, Paypal, Skype, Facebook, Wikipedia,

Let me know if there’s any other companies you want me to add to the stats.

Growth, Reproduction, Generations and The Recession

February 12, 2009 in Economics, Essays, Evolution, Fuck The Recession

I was going to call this post “How Darwin could help us out of this recession” in honour of his 200th Birthday today. Apologies in advance for the length, but I hope it’s worth it.


The last book I finished reading was Richard DawkinsThe Extended Phenotype. It was fantastic. Although it has given my mind enough fodder for several blog posts, I’ll start with the very end of the very last chapter, which I finished the week that the big three car companies in the US went to congress looking for a bailout.

Reproduction vs Growth

What is the difference between reproduction and growth? It may seem obvious at first, but apparently it caused biologists a spot of bother back in the 70s.

When an organism grows, it mostly does this by replicating cells over and over. My hand, for example, grew in size from when I was a child. It did so when cells in my hand multiplied to form more skin, muscle etc. for a bigger hand. All of these cells contain the same DNA (my DNA) because they’re all me! In an evolutionary sense, all of the cells with my DNA – which are all the cells in my body – are working together to make hands and eyes and organs and tissues to get me through life and to reproduction, to pass my genes on.

Reproduction is obviously different. It involves two organisms coming together, to produce a third organism which is an exact copy of neither. Right? Wrong! But then what about a-sexual reproduction? When a bacteria cell divides in two, both are copies of the parent, is this really reproduction or is it just growth like the cells in my hand? And that was the stickler.

So What?

The discussion is fascinating and well worth a read, but not overly important for this post. The crux of the difference is that growth involves dead end replication – if there’s a strange mutation in the cells in my hand and the DNA suddenly begins to code for a new finger to grow, this will affect my hand only. If my hand gets chopped off, my future sons or daughters will not be born hand-less; If I get a tan they’re still be born a pasty Irish white! Reproduction is replication of DNA that will live on, forming a new organism which will potentially reproduce again.

A long time ago in a primordial soup far far away….

The importance lies not in understanding “what” is the difference, but “why?” If you cast your imagination back a few billion years to a primitive earth, where the first single celled organisms were appearing in the primordial sea. It’s obvious why some of them ganged together and found a competitive advantage as a multi-cellular organism. But what’s not obvious is why did reproduction evolve? Here are two examples from the book that best illustrate this point:

Imagine a primitive plant consisting of a flat, pad-like thallus, floating on the surface of the sea, absorbing nutrients through its lower surface and sunlight through its upper surface. Instead of “reproducing” (i.e. sending off single-celled propagules to grow elsewhere), it simply grows at its margins, spreading into an ever larger circular green carpet, like a monstrous lily pad several miles across and still growing. Maybe older parts of the thallus eventually die, so that it consists of an expanding ring rather than a filled circle like a true lily pad. Perhaps also, from time to time, chunks of the thallus split off, like icefloes shearing away from the pack ice, and separate chunks drift to different parts of the ocean.

Now consider a similar kind of plant which differs in one crucial respect. It stops growing when it attains a diameter of 1 foot, and reproduces instead. It manufactures single-celled propagules, either sexually or asexually, and sheds them into the air where they may be carried a long way on the wind. When one of these propagules lands on the water surface it becomes a new thallus, which grows until it is 1 foot wide, then reproduces again. I shall call the two species G (for growth) and R (for reproduction) respectively.

These two outcomes were possible, but the second one (R) is what we recognise as the modern plant. For this to evolve by natural selection it has to have had some advantage over pure growth (G). In what way is reproduction a more successful competitive strategy than pure growth? I’ll let Prof. Dawkins explain it better than I ever could:

…the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor. Of course it may not be an improvement, in which case its genetic basis will be eliminated by natural selection. But growth without reproduction does not even allow the possibility of radical change at the organ level, either in the direction of improvement or the reverse. It allows only superficial tinkering. You may divert a developing Bentley into a fully grown Rolls Royce, simply by tinkering with the assembly process at the late point where the radiator is added. But if you want to change a Ford into a Rolls Royce you must start at the drawing board, before the car starts “growing” on the assembly line at all. The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.

On Detroit

I read that for the first time last month, and I think I enjoy it even more every time I read it. Biology is such a powerful teacher. Evolution by natural selection is by far the most powerful scientific theory that I’ve had the fortune to learn. Natural selection has no intelligence behind it – the most successful organism (or gene or evolutionary strategy) will reproduce and live on, lesser alternatives will not. When nature has a way of doing something we should take note, as it’s more than likely the best possible way that it can be done.

So on the occasions that free market economics fails us (as it’s been accustomed to doing of late!) we should look to Biology for guidance. How can we apply the learnings that reproduction is better than growth, that the continuous life cycle beats never ending expansion, that rebirth trumps a resistance to ending?


Once more I’ll quote someone who can say it much better than me. This is an excerpt from a Seth Godin post titled What to do About Detroit:

Not only should Congress encourage/facilitate the organized bankruptcy of the Big Three [car manufacturers], but it should also make it easy for them to be replaced by 500 new car companies.

Or perhaps a thousand.

That’s how many car companies there were 90 years ago.

That’s right, when all the innovation hit the car industry, there were thousands of car companies, with hundreds running at any one time. From Wikipedia:

Throughout this era, development of automotive technology was rapid, due in part to a huge number (hundreds) of small manufacturers all competing to gain the world’s attention. Key developments included electric ignition (by Robert Bosch, 1903), independent suspension, and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909).[16] Leaf springs were widely used for suspension, though many other systems were still in use, with angle steel taking over from armored wood as the frame material of choice. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted, allowing a variety of cruising speeds, though vehicles generally still had discrete speed settings rather than the infinitely variable system familiar in cars of later eras.

Between 1907 and 1912, the high-wheel motor buggy (resembling the horse buggy of before 1900) was in its heyday, with over seventy-five makers including Holsman (Chicago), IHC (Chicago), and Sears (which sold via catalog); the high-wheeler would be killed by the Model T.

What we don’t need are giant companies with limited choice, confused priorities, private jets and a bully’s attitude.

I’d spend a billion dollars to make the creation of a car company turnkey. Make it easy to get all the safety and regulatory approvals… as easy to start a car company as it is to start a web company. Use the bankruptcy to wipe out the hated, legacy marketing portion of the industry: the dealers.

We’d end up with a rational number of “car stores” in every city that sold lots of brands. We’d have super cheap cars and super efficient cars and super weird cars. There’d be an orgy of innovation, and from that, a whole new energy and approach would evolve. Betcha.

I know this post has been mostly me patching together the thoughts of two men much smarter than me, but I think there’s value to be gained from linking the two.

I don’t think this is just a lesson to be applied to certain industries, but in fact could be applied to modern economics as a whole. Capitalism is still quite young and questions like “for how long should a company live?” need to be be considered. The demise of a company like Waterford Wedgewood is obviously not good for the company itself, but the existence of a company life cycle is beneficial for the economy as a whole. This life cycle, with the expectation that companies will some day reach the end of the line, is not something that should be fought by our governments with bailouts or protectionism. It should be expected, managed, normalised and encouraged so that a sector, an industry, an economy and a country can be reborn stronger than before.

Finger on the Pulse

January 19, 2009 in Marketing, Technology & Science

I just watched another one of Niall’s great videos in which he shares a great tip on how to increase sales on Twitter. I want to expand on his tip with a few handy pointers on how I use Twitter search to do business and find and interact with customers.

In his video, Niall uses the example of Pat Phelan searching for potential Max Roam customers talking about cheap roaming. This is simple enough to manage as there tends to be about one tweet per day. But what if Pat wants to have a look at all people complaining about their phones? That search has a new tweet every second (and has 5 new results in the time it took me to write that sentence!).

Here’s what I do to keep my ear to the twitter ground more effectively:

Location, Location, Location

A very handy thing you can do with twitter searches is append a location to the end of them. So for me, because all my customers are in Ireland I add “&geocode=53.344104,-6.2674937,100mi” to the end of a search it will show me only the results within 100 miles of that location (which is Dublin, but maybe I should change it to Athlone). Using the same example as above, that search for phones becomes much more managable with about 10 tweets per day.

For an easy way to do this for the coordinates and distance (e.g. within 2km of your shop/business) use the search bar at the top of monitter.com

monitterlocation

Feed Me

Now that you’ve narrowed down your location you can easily manage more keywords that are relevant to your business. This leads to the problem of remembering all these key words and constantly checking them all, which is where RSS steps in. On the right side of the search.twitter.com results you should see a link to the feed.

twitterrss

If you have a feed reader (I use Google reader) you can add this feed and the search results will pop straight into your reader. I have all mine organised in a Twitter folder and check on it a few times per day. There is a slight delay of an hour or two between when a tweet is posted and when it appears in my reader. I use it for work and personal – e.g. I have a “leaving cert” alert set up for zulunotes.com.

googlereader

twittertweetsfolder

Example

One evening a new entry appeared in the feed for the term Leaving Cert:

wdf

(bonus: I’m now even more “hip” with the youth of today after learning that WDF stands for What Da Fuck?)

From the Zulunotes twitter account I offered some help

zulunotestwitter

And I had one happy user in less than 5 mins effort.

omg

Other uses

Of course this isn’t only useful for businesses finding and engaging with customers or prospects; It can be used to find people tweeting about things you’re interested in, or for journalists keeping an ear out for discussion on certain topics or breaking stories.

Cheat Sheet

For a search for a word being mentioned in Ireland:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=searchterm&geocode=53.344104,-6.2674937,100mi

Or for a two word term (e.g. “Social Media” = social+media)

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=term1+term2&geocode=53.344104,-6.2674937,100mi

Or the link directly to the feed:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=searchter&geocode=53.344104,-6.2674937,100mi

Yahoo TV Widgets – A forgotten inspiration

January 9, 2009 in Technology & Science

Back in August I wrote a post on the announcement of Yahoo’s TV Widgets. I read today that Samsung and Yahoo have announced a partnership at CES 2009 to launch these internet widgets on the new Samsung HD TVs.

Source: ReadWriteWeb.comSource: ReadWriteWeb.com

It was only when I spotted this story that I realised that these widgets were the one first inspirations for the Micro-forums application.

Back in August I said

One interesting comment I read under the ReadWriteWeb article was a from somebody delighted at the thought of the twitter widget being at the bottom of his tv screen, so they could watch tv at the same time as their friends and have a kind of a group chat experience. E.g. “Peter says: ‘what a goal, that was amazing!” coming up at the bottom of your screen when you’re at home watching a football match! I think it’s really clever and could definitely create a new level of interactivity with what has always been a distinctly one-way medium.

I think that was the first seed planted in my mind which eventually lead to the idea of the live micro-forum. I signed up to the developer program back in August, Yahoo said they’d send out a mail when it was open to developers. No word yet, but if the Facebook application goes well that’s a definite potential avenue to grow it.

Wants, Needs and the Spectrum of Desire

December 4, 2008 in Economics, Essays, Evolution, Marketing

I enjoy reading Seth Godin’s blog. He often has really clever insights and ideas about marketing and business, and his books are very good too.

Recently he wrote a post entitled Hungry. An excerpt:

By any traditional definition of the word, she wasn’t actually hungry. She didn’t need more fuel to power her through an afternoon of sitting around. No, she was bored. Or yearning for a feeling of fullness. Or eager for the fun of making something or the break in the routine that comes from eating it. Most likely, she wanted the psychic satisfaction that she associates with eating well-marketed snacks.

It got me thinking about the distinction we draw between needs and wants. From a practical point of view I can see the difference. We all know the definition of the two: Food, shelter and water are items that we cannot live without, they are necessities, they are needs; wants are anything above and beyond this.

But from a biological point of view, I wonder do our bodies draw as clear a line in the sand? Evolution teaches us that organisms that felt the strongest compulsion to survive and replicate would be the fittest. Survival of the fittest ensures that after many generations the only organisms that are left will have strong compulsion to do/get/eat/drink/find that which helps them survive.

Plants don’t have brains. They can’t decide or know what they want or need. They have instead evolved tropisms which ensure that each plant “desires” or “wants” those things that make it survive, but in a very mechanical way. Geotropism involves anti-growth hormones in the stem, which are pulled to the bottom of the cell by gravity, ensuring the plant grows upwards. Phototropisms are chemical reactions to sunlight, spurring the plant to grow towards the sun. Were we to personify plants, could we describe these physiological reactions as needs or wants?

Evolution has resulted in similar mechanisms in us animals. To be a successful animal, our ancestors would have had to 1) survive to reproduction age and 2) reproduce!

For the part 2) we all understand sexual desire, and how important it is in the survival of a species and the passing on of genes. We also understand that there’s a spectrum of desire involved here. There are ranges of emotion we can feel: Having a crush, a fantasy, a sexual encounter or falling in love. Do we need a relationship but want sex? (Or vice versa!?)

And then when we look at part 1) – surviving – I don’t think our bodies have evolved to distinguish a clear cut distinction between a need or a want. Biologically speaking, our reactions are based on a spectrum of desire.

The reaction process (e.g. a plant growing, a dog eating, a human wanting) has been fine-tuned by evolution, so that the intensity of the desire is matched by it’s benefit. Think of it as an algorithm of sorts. This is why we feel thirst as a more intense desire than a hunger for chocolate, or sexual desire more intense than the desire for friendship. I think of it like a mental tropism – the stronger the sunlight the more a plant grows towards it – the greater the benefit to my survival, the more I subconsciously desire it.

The way we use language always gives us a good insight into the working of the mind. The fact that we use terms like “she had a thirst for knowledge” or “he had a hunger for results” are great examples of how our mind processes this spectrum of desire. Even though hunger and thirst are supposed to be for food and water, our mind can instinctively understand what is being said. This simple sentence construct is further support for the theory that our mind treats desire as a spectrum. There is no cognitive leap that the mind has to make between understanding hunger for a need (food) and hunger for a want (results).

Which brings me back to Seth’s post.

People don’t need Twitter or an SUV or a purse from Coach. We don’t need much of anything, actually, but we want a lot. Truly successful industries align their ‘wants’ with basic needs (like hunger) and consumers (that’s us) cooperate all day long.
….
yet most of them aren’t needs at all. That’s because the industries that market these items have done a brilliant job of persuading us that they are needs after all.

A lot of people make the claim that Seth is alluding to here, that marketers make needs out of wants. That they exploit basic needs such as hunger and thirst, and build new wants around them.

I wouldn’t give marketers that much credit! Something like that sounds difficult to do, and yet millions of products are successfully marketed, and not all these marketers can be way above average ability, right?

The reason this is so do-able, I suggest, and the reason that there are thousands of new products each week which attract customers’ desire, is because us consumers don’t mentally divide every purchase into a need or a want. We operate based on our spectrum of desire. And just as it’s possible for me to tell you that “Jane had a thirst for knowledge” without you having to make a cognitive leap to understand it, so too is it possible for a marketer to position a product so that you subconsciously desire it almost as much as something else you consciously define as a need.

As a marketer I don’t try to create new needs, or trick people into needing something that they barely even want. That sounds complicated, elaborate and quite frankly not something I have a desire to do. As a marketer I try understand what people desire and I try create products and services to satisfy those desires. Advertising shouldn’t be used as smokescreen or a ruse to con people into thinking my product will meet a desire that it won’t, or a need that they don’t have. Advertising should be a display, a way to demonstrate how it can satisfy their desires. Branding can be used to help my product meet multiple desires, and move it up along the spectrum. Sure, Nike fill their customer’s desire to be clothed, but also to feel cool, to feel athletic, to express something about themselves etc.

Are these needs? Or wants? Or wants in needs clothing? I don’t know, but they’re definitely desires and meeting them as best they can should be every marketers goal.

Happy Boardsies

November 28, 2008 in Technology & Science

I saw on John Breslin’s blog that the winners of the SIOC data competition have been announced.

The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie

There were some really cool entries, and I’d definitely recommend checking them out. My favourite use of all the boards.ie information came from “Visualizing the boards.ie community culture with charts“:

So it looks like on the whole we’re a happy nation! (well, those of us that use boards!)

A few other heartening graphs:

Check out the rest of the winners here