Category Archives: web 2.0

Tracking Twitter via Kwippy

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Twitter’s Track feature was one of the features which could easily classify as the “Holy Grail” of microblogging. Ever since it was released people loved it and couldn’t get enough of it. Tracking keywords that you care about and getting tweets containing them on your IM(and mobile) was simply terrific. But then like all the good things Track too came to an end. Folks at identi.ca tried doing track but that too ran into some issues and thus had to be taken down.
For those who’ve missed tracking twitter on their gtalk there’s a good news. We at kwippy have found a way around to track twitter via gtalk, just like before. So be it your field of interest, the film you like most or simply your name, now you can get notifications on your gtalk everytime somebody mentions them on twitter.

How it works ?:
Summize/Twitter search gives an atom feed for search results which can be integrated to kwippy, which has the ability to send updates/kwips via gtalk. Which means everytime the feed gets refreshed with new search results
the people who are following the user on gtalk will get the kwip.

Checkout: http://kwippy.com/obamabuzz , this user tracks all the tweets from twitter which contain the word obama.

If you want to track something from twitter on your gtalk, reply here with the keyword(s) and your kwippy username.

The YouTube Culture

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A great video presentation by Prof Wesch on YouTube from an anthropological point of view. I particularly liked the parts of talk about YouTube’s community and the website’s culture. As written previously, websites have cultures too , the fact that a good 5% of videos on YouTube are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community means something and common trends like remixing people’s videos and replying a video by another video demonstrate how cultures are built and grow. What do you think about the culture  and community on your favorite site ?

Of Virtual Gifts and Real Money

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If you are one of those who always thought gifts can(and should) always be tangible, think again.

Few facts:
1) People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling.
2) The virtual goods market is expected to exceed $7 Billion in less than 18 months.
3) Facebook’s digital goods business has appeared to double to between $30-40 million/year at the current rate.
4) Second life raises $80M annually from virtual goods.

While a lot has been said about the business aspect of Virtual Gifts, what makes virtual gifts a phenomenon remains a mystery for most. Virtual Gifts might sound a bit weird for some but there’s a lot more to virtual gifts than 1’s and 0’s. Here’s what I feel make Virtual Gifts tick.

1) The Gesture: This according to me one of the most important/human aspects of virtual gifts. One might not be able to eat a virtual cake or smell virtual flowers but the fact that someone took their time, effort and maybe money to gift something has an inherent feel good factor for both the sender and receiver.
2) The Trophy Effect: Flaunting gifts, is almost as common as gifts themselves. The act of giving a virtual gift and receiving one can be flaunted and ego’s(of people involved) massaged. Be it one’s profile page or activity news feed, if implemented well in a platform it can be another reason to share virtual gifts.
3) A virtual gift is better than no gift: You might have hundreds of real life friends and family members but not everyone will buy you a cake or send you flowers but if given an option(with low price) people might choose to share online gifts instead of not sending any gift at all.
4) Fun: You and I might not agree but there’s a fun angle involved with virtual gifts, in a sense that you can have unusual, exotic and virtually relevant( hours for an online game etc) gifts which might not be possible in real life.

Though the virtual gifts market is growing at a good pace what  needs to be seen is what all types of virtual gifts get added to the mix going forward, how can they be interlinked with points or real money and how business models evolve over them. A barter system could also be interesting and so would a resale and sale back of virtual goods for real money. What do you think ?

Startups and Spam

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These two “S” words are not often used in the same sentence but I had to use them. Everyone hates getting spam but not everyone hates sending spam. I too like most others get a daily quota of spam in my email account despite the spam filters. While most of those spam emails don’t generate any bad feelings because I simply choose to ignore them there’s this category of spam which I can’t help feeling bad about. This category of spam originates not from shady people selling enlargement creams or Viagra pills but from people who actually own and run less or more popular companies/sites. Most of the spam emails that I get from the category mentioned above are from various early stage startups based out of India(except wayn) so it seems like spamming people in such a way is a trend more popular in India only.

Sample these:

“Hi
Someone close to you had invited you to join www.xyz.com
Please visit www.xyz.com and register, you may win an illuminated t-shirt.”

and

“Your friends have been inviting you to join www.xyz.com”

As if the shady generic signup spam emails like the one’s mentioned above weren’t sufficient that we now also have spam vote for me emails like this

“A friend of yours provided us with your email address and suggested that you would be open to provide 2 minutes of your time to support a startup company engaged in a worthy mission.  We have been nominated in the TATA NEN Hottest Startups contest.  We are writing to request you to vote for us.”

“worthy mission” was it ? Not sure if anyone who gets this spam email would vote for them, I certainly won’t(despite the fact that I liked the site’s interface when I looked at it for the first time)

I fail to understand why these sites/companies have to resort to such stupid ways of spreading the word. Why why why ? Firstly, I am not a big supporter of mass emails, for I am not really sure if they do more good than bad and secondly if you have to (for whatever reasons) mass email people keep in mind the following things

1) Don’t address it to everyone.
Hi all, Dear all etc are a not a good way to start an email which is not addressed to a known/close group. They look spam from the word go. I’d rather read a mail which reads “Hi Mayank” or at least a “Hi”.
2) Don’t use vague referrers:
“A friend of yours”, “Someone close to you”, “Your good friend” or something weird like this is sure shot sign of a spam email. If you have a referer name use it else don’t pretend to act genuine because this just doesn’t work.
3) Make the text interesting:
I won’t mind reading a random email if its written properly and maybe a bit witty. It should be a run of the mill promotional email.

That said, I’d like to advice startups(and others) to not bombard random people like this as it might give you small returns but it most certainly will piss others off which might have been neutral towards you otherwise but now think of you as evil/lame.  No points for guessing what image I now have for the startups who sent me those spam emails.

Ready, Steady and Startonomics

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Just like startups the events focused around startups are growing by the day. Think Barcamp, Momo & Proto. Each of these events offers a different platform for startups and entrepreneurs. While events like Barcamp tend to server as a rendezvous for startups and their early adopters events like Proto intend to bridge the gap between startups and Venture Capitalists. While events like Barcamp and Proto serve important needs they don’t specifically help startups with their day-to-day problems of how to grow in various aspects and how to measure their growth. In many cases these things are way more important than others and that’s where events like “Startonomics” come in the picture.

Startonomics is a one-day workshop designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs on how to create simple, actionable metrics; and how to use them to make better product and marketing decisions for long-term growth and startup success. – startonomics.com

Sounds good ? It’s way too good.

On 2nd October  Startonomics was held in San Francisco with hundreds of startup enthusiasts coming in from different places to hear their favorite entrepreneurs speak on topics of their interests. Luckily those who couldn’t make it in person had the option of watching live stream of the event. I was one of them. The minute I got to know of the sessions,  I knew it would be great, especially for people involved with startups. “Metrics for startups are what classics are to literature. Everybody knows they are great but nobody does them”. Metrics are one of those things which need some time to get started  with and a bit more time and effort to understanding them and putting them into use. Someone who “gets” Metrics is a great asset for any startup. I vividly remember from my Slideshare days that it was Dave who helped us focus more on metrics. Its one of the things that has stuck with me. Kudos to Dave and his team for putting up this wonderful show and making all the content publicly available 🙂

Wanted to embed a Slideshare presentation pack for the event which had all the presentations but apparently there’s some issue with the embed code for wordpress. Anyways you can check them out here

Delhi bloggers meetup/tweetup

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Delhi’s second tweetup/bloggers meet happened on Saturday evening at Incube’s nehru place office and I was one of the speakers. Like last time’s meetup at C.P It was organized by the Delhi bloggers bloc with Priyanka aka Twilight Fairy co-ordinating the event. The last such event I attended was the social media camp/meet that happened a couple of months back in Gurgaon.

It was good to meet friends and people whom I had just known by their online identities. The event was nicely coordinated and managed to attract 30-35 attendees mostly bloggers/microbloggers. The audience was a mix of beginners and intermediary level social media enthusiasts. Gautam Ghosh started the event with a discussion on Twitter & its various uses. It was a free flowing discussion and he nicely touched various aspects of twitter and its tools amongst other things. After Gautam it was my turn to talk about kwippy.

The talk that I gave had two parts, the first being  “WTF is kwippy”. Taking forward some of the points that were discussed in the previous talk I discussed the following
what exactly is kwippy,  how it started as a status message aggregator, how we are handling conversations, people behind kwippy and kwippy’s community.
It took a while for people to get in sync with all that was being said but the demo of the app helped in putting things into context much better and easier. I picked up one of the ongoing conversations on kwippy started by thepete to show a sample conversation and how conversations on kwippy can stay active for days.

Second part of the talk was on how kwippy is different from twitter. On hindsight I should not have made this comparison and got the topic changed because when we talk about conversations there’s nothing common between the two as compared in a previous post here. No offense but I’ve always wondered how come people who’ve been using twitter for long don’t really get what @reply there means. Every time I tell people @ links to that person’s last reply and not the tweet you replied it for, they seem to simply refuse to admit it first and get perplexed. It was good to see people asking all sorts of questions ranging from the technology behind kwippy to the holy grail of social media sites aka monetization.

The next discussion was by Priyanka about copyright issues and her recent experience(not so nice) TOI believes flickr is for flicking and am sure It would have raised some awareness amongst the attendees and maybe left a few wishing for a similar experience to earn some extra buck 🙂

The last topic of the event was on bill of rights by Kumar Rahul. It was another interesting discussion which raised some important questions about user rights on web.

I enjoyed the event throughly and it was worth an hour n a half’s drive from my place.

Thanks Vimoh for the pics 🙂

Conversations, who’s doing what?

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“Social Media is people having conversations online” – Marta Z Kagan.

This in my opinion is the most simple yet apt definition of social media that can ever be. Once you start connecting the dots you’ll realize that’s indeed what social media is all about. Be it the latest craze aka microblogging sites, conversational tool/services, social-networking sites or any other media sharing site. While the social objects may differ from service to service the end goal for most is to get people talking/commenting around those objects. Since humans are by nature social and love talking/discussing/debating conversations are the ultimate hooks for a site and if done rightly can do wonders to a site’s engagement.

Wait for a second and think what was your last activity on your favorite site ? Mine was commenting on a comment someone made at a friend’s facebook status. Facebook does a great job in providing these hooks to let people have conversations. It started off with a simple wall, then it was user uploaded images/videos and now its status messages. Comment chains on people’s status messages is getting common by the day. According to me any site that needs to grow and be successful needs to handle conversations extremely well and give it all it takes.

Here’s a brief comparison of how some sites that I’ve used/still use handle conversations.

[TABLE=4]

Each of these features/attributes play an important part in the conversation game. People might not realize it consciously but these features/attributes help in forming hooks that keep people engaged to conversations and in effect increase site’s stickiness.

Threaded Conversations make it extremely easy to keep track of comments/replies around an object.

Parallel Conversations is a purely online experience. Unlike real life with the context switching issue you can online have parallel(almost) conversations with someone or a group on different topics. What it means is that its really difficult offline to have conversations with someone on two-three different topics simultaneously/parallely for long but its far easier online(in some services).

No Character Limit lets people express their views/thoughts without any restriction thus enabling proper discussions/debates.

Follow up Notifications lets people stay in touch with conversations they like which in effect means that people are always connected to a conversation and any activity even weeks/months of inactivity can infuse life again. Conversations are now immortal.

Invite People to a conversation lets people invite other people to begin/join a conversation. It helps in the free flow of conversations across the site and making them VIRAL.

Comment Feed lets you own not only the comments on your objects but also on other people’s objects. You can know take your comments and use them the way you want.

We at kwippy have added a new dimension to the equation by introducing the “Invite people to join/begin a conversation feature” to make the conversation mix more engaging.  How have your experiences been with on-site conversations ? What do you think can make conversations more sticky ?

Early Adopters vs early adopters

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An early adopter or lighthouse customer is an early customer of a given company, product, or technology. – Wikipedia

If you are a regular user of any social media site chances are that you might have come across this term fairly often. Think Early Adopters think Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and the likes. Interestingly a lot hasn’t been said about the fact that for each Early Adopter there are hundreds and thousands of “early adopters” who are more or less that important for a new service. An early adopter could be a defined as scaled down version of an Early Adopter in most metrics. Having hundreds of subscribers/followers instead of thousands,their blog readership would be in hundreds instead of thousands etc. While the frequency at which they use the new services would roughly be same as Early Adopters but when it comes to trying new services and giving regular feedback/suggestions they are often ahead(in numbers and frequency respectively) of Early Adopters.

Essentially these are the people who are the bridge between Early Adopters and the mainstream users and are just as interested in exploring new services as it can be and are just as passionate about what they do but with a smaller sphere of influence.

In the past year or so that I’ve been using social media services I’ve seen quite a few instances in which a new service picked momentum because some Early Adopter started using it regularly and started spreading the word. Does it mean that “Its mandatory for a new service to get blessings of an Early Adopter or two in order to succeed ?” . Sure it helps if someone whose articulate, has insight and has a big follower base starts to use a new service but I am not sure if this was the case always and with every successful service. By successful here I just mean in terms of active users & web traffic.

I am not too sure if popular sites like Orkut, Scribd etc caught eyeballs because of some Early Adopters.
If I think about it, I got to know about these sites and many more from people who would fall in the category of “early adopters” and not “Early Adopters”. While the early adopters might not have the same levels of expertise or insights but they make up with extra enthusiasm and optimism.

As aptly mentioned by Steven early adopters don’t equal success i.e If you have Early Adopters as raving fans it won’t necessarily mean that the mainstream audience will love your product just as much or the revenue would not be a problem.

In my opinion while new services should keep an eye on the Early Adopters and try to convert them to regular users of their service they shouldn’t be obsessed with just them and NOT overlook the small fish in the sea aka the early adopters because the early adopters because are easier to find(and please).  Also, since they are more close to the mainstream audience in terms of their usage & behavioral patterns their feedback would probably be more relevant/useful if you are targeting the mainstream audience. What also tends to happen at times with Early Adopters is the sense of entitlment (which at times comes in initial days itself) which could leave the team behind the service in a perplexed/worrisome state and they’ll end up expending their energies in the wrong direction.

I’d summarize it all by saying while Early Adopters are great to have one should get obsessed by them and shouldn’t ignore the early adopters in the process.

Lifestreaming is not Micro-blogging !!

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Disclaimer: The post that follows is a personal take and is by no means against anyone or anything.

Microblogging has been one of most oft used and abused term in recent times by internet junkies and bloggers alike.

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web. — wikipedia

Everything is fine till here but the trouble begins when people(including me till a while back) start using the term “microblogging” loosely and confuse it with life streaming, where people send updates about what they are doing and not doing etc to update their friends/followers/fans (referred to as friends going forward). This gets particularly messy when people start using a service to do both microblogging and lifestreaming leaving their friends to do the tedious job of finding relevant bits of information that’ll be useful/relevant for them. Also its difficult for the user and his/her friends to take note and keep track of important matter/content as the chances of it being lost in the huge flow of lifestreaming are pretty high.

The instinct to share details of one’s daily life is a basic/innate one and so is the instinct to be aware of what people that matter to you are upto. Couple this with the ability to easily broadcast/stream your life and you get a viral but not exactly useful combo. Most of the minute details of what one did today won’t be relevant to him/herself leave alone their friends. While I by no means am opposed to the idea of streaming one’s life I am saddened by the fact that there are very few people who understand this and microblog in this sense, and most stream their lives instead.

I would really love to see people start microblogging i.e writing micro posts (100-200) characters about their ideas/feelings/fantasies/stories/philosophy whatever and share it with their friends online with ease using IM’s, browser pluggins, SMS etc. You can do this with the service of your preference, the updates will be less no doubt because tiny updates of life stream like having lunch, watching tv, on phone etc are more frequent but for that moment and many to come these microposts will be more relevant and precious for you and for your friends.

Share a link to your microblog below if you are doing it already or starting now.