reDesign

April 22, 2012

Weekly Reader: Facebook virality, Twitter patents and Groupon’s Lefkofsky

Filed under: daily deals, facebook, groupon, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 8:46 am

This contains a summary of my work this week. I had two very important non-Groupon stories this week, on Facebook and Twitter.

My work

Secrets of Facebook’s success: Virality — Facebook’s photo tagging feature was an important driver of its growth. Traditional marketing approaches aren’t as effective as products that are designed to take advantage of the social nature of people. Google+ misses the basics. While Google spends millions running beautiful Oscar ads, they ignore very basics of product design necessary for social interaction.

Can Twitter and Yammer fix our broken patent system? – Twitter announced a new agreement with its employees that Twitter will only use patents for defensive purposes and will not become a patent troll. Employees who invent for Twitter will have a say in how Twitter can use the patents. As an inventor, this has a lot of appeal. Could this be a sign of more sanity in patent battles?

Chicago Tribune talks to Groupon chairman Lefkofsky; asks the wrong questions – A Chicago Tribune business columnist sat down for an extended interview with Groupon chairman Eric Lefkofsky and failed to ask the hard questions, such as: Why did you take so much money off the table pre-IPO? How is it that you made so much money on previous companies and investors were left holding the bag.

“It just works” rules – I’m launch a new feature on VentureBeat where I’ll be taking a look at brilliantly designed products. My goal is not to traditional product reviews, but to help product people learn from great design. Do you have a product that fits my criteria? Shoot me an email.

Staying connected with friends for frequent travelers – For someone who travels as much as I do, staying in touch with friends can be a challenge. Here’s a strategy I came up with.

Other interesting nuggets

The Perils of the Daily Deal Customer – A first person account from a merchant on her daily deal experience. The merchant’s experience is exactly the result I expect from the economic model of the daily deal. At their core, daily deals create unserviceable demand from untargeted customers at massive discounts.

I just finished the final hellish weeks of a Groupon deal I ran a year ago. I’ll probably never do one again. If enough merchants grow to feel the way I do — and many already do — Groupon and its countless imitators will wither and die because they will not be able to get enough businesses to participate in the deals you so enjoy.

Why aren’t we going back for more? Because daily deal customers are worse than normal customers in every way imaginable.

January 23, 2012

Twitter and Google are both responsible for you not being able to search tweets

Filed under: facebook, google, search, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 7:45 pm

Chris Dixon ignited a firestorm on his blog when he said it was Twitter’s fault that Google doesn’t index tweets. It’s the fault of both parties, really. Neither has the moral high ground.

Twitter does not block Google from crawling their site. Google does crawl Twitter and index tweets. You can see this by going to:

https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Atwitter.com%2Frakeshlobster

You will see some of my tweets in Google’s search index.

Right now, Google does this by crawling Twitter, just like it does for everything else. But crawling takes resources (bandwidth, compute cycles). For a site that is updated as much as Twitter, it would take a lot of resources to keep a reasonably fresh index.

This also has an impact on the crawled site. Twitter has enough stability problems without Google increasing its crawl rate. If Google cranked it up, it would make Twitter less stable.

Another alternative is for Twitter to provide a feed of new tweets to Google. This is what they do for bing and what they previously did for Google, before their agreement ended. This would take less computing power and bandwidth on both sides.

Twitter used to charge Google for this. It was a rare case where Google paid for content. According to Google, Twitter decided to stop licensing this feed to them.

So there are two ways to get more tweets into Google:

  • Twitter could provide a feed (either for free or a mutually agreed upon fee).
  • Google could increase it’s crawl frequency.

A third, more complicated way to solve this is for Twitter to provide Google a real-time query API. This would require that Twitter build a decent search engine first.

There’s a broader question here, that Yelp has raised a few times, including in the senate hearings: should Google be allowed to use its dominance in Web search to make its way into other spaces like local and social?

If  social search was not part of Google’s dominant Web search, no one would care whether it included Twitter or Facebook results because no one would use it. But because Search plus Your World is so prominent in Google search, Twitter and Facebook care.

See my series on Google and antitrust for a deeper exploration of this.

July 5, 2011

Google should just buy Twitter already. At any price.

Filed under: facebook, google, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 8:40 am

I’ve been thinking more about Google+ since my TechCrunch post on the Google circles colliding.

Even if you buy the argument that categorizing your friends into buckets offers user value (which I don’t), that is not a defensible feature for Google. Facebook could replicate that functionality in weeks, if not days.

And sitting on top of years of interaction data, Facebook could do it better. Based on your interrelationships, Facebook could suggest which friends to put in to the college bucket, friends bucket, best friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. That would create the value of Circles without the upfront pain of manually categorizing your relationships.

As it’s currently structured, Google+ is a bigger threat to Twitter than to Facebook. (Even then, just based on network effects, I don’t think it’s a big threat.) Twitter is a simple but extremely clunky platform. A lot of the constraints that were essential for its early growth just don’t apply any more.

Think of Twitter as a command-line interface for communications. You have obscure commands like @, ., d, #. It’s extremely unfriendly to users. DM fails happen regularly. We had to invent an inefficient layer of URL shortening services to deal with Twitter limitations. It relies on handles, which is a geeky thing.

For content publishers, tracking activity on Twitter is a challenge to say the least. When people reply to conversations, it’s much harder than it should be to track what they were responding to.

Google+ is a GUI for communications. But so is Facebook.

Despite its clunkinesss, Twitter has built an extremely loyal following of publishers. If you have 1 million, 100,000 or even 1,000 followers on Twitter, it’s going to be extremely hard to get all of them over on to Google+. Unless Google+ entirely replaces Twitter or Facebook, it’s just another place to check and to manage. If there were unique functionality, it might be worth incurring the overhead. But the new functionality is marginal at best.

With a Twitter acquisition, Google could transfer those relationships onto a more user-friendly platform. Google benefits from having a huge firehose of information and relationships.

Twitter also benefits in that it gets a partner with deep algorithmic and search experience. Twitter has also fallen asleep at the wheel when it comes to local — something I don’t understand at all, given its strong assets. Google is one of the leaders in local. Local could be Google’s backdoor into social, given that a lot of social interaction happens in places.

Someone asked me what price Google should pay. My answer: whatever it takes.

Google has had many failed attempts at social. Without Twitter, Google+ isn’t likely to work either. And Google can’t afford to keep failing at social.

See my answer to “Is Google overreacting to the the rise of Facebook?” on Quora for the reasons why.

August 20, 2010

Facebook Places is at the beginning of a long road

Filed under: facebook, foursquare, geotagging, lbs, maps, mobile, twitter, wireless — Tags: — Rakesh Agrawal @ 8:39 am
Facebook Places on the iPhone

Facebook Places on the iPhone

Facebook’s much awaited Places product finally launched this week. It’s the first step toward bringing friend finding to the masses.

People have been using Facebook to do this for years; posting their location in freeform status updates that their friends can read and comment on. (e.g. “heading to Cambridge for dinner.”) By turning that freeform text into structured location data, Facebook can make that data more useful.

From an iPhone or HTML5-capable mobile device, you can check in to a place, such as a restaurant, bar, movie theater, airport. You can also leave a message with the check in. The check in is posted to your wall and may appears in friends’ news feeds. On the mobile side, you can see a list of your friends and where they’ve checked in. Clicking on a place will show you details of the place, including a map and who has checked in.

The initial release is fairly simple. In fact, it’s not that much more useful than the freeform status updates.

Facebook is entering a very crowded space with competitors such as foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Whrrl and Twitter. Many of those products are much more robust. Facebook’s key advantage is the size of its social graph: within the past 24 hours, 18 of my friends have checked in.

There are many opportunities for improvement to Facebook Places:

  • Basic UI. Check ins are sorted by time, not distance. A friend checking in 2,000 miles away 2 minutes ago is less relevant than someone checking in 2 miles away 5 minutes ago. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the city isn’t shown. Considering that many people use Facebook to keep track of friends all around the world, this is a significant issue. Foursquare has a separate bucket of “Friends in other cities.” Update: Facebook now has a separate grouping of nearby friends.
  • Map view. Often, visualizing your friends on a map is much easier than scanning a list. Foursquare already offers this.
  • Visiting friends. Out of town friends who are in town aren’t indicated. One of the big potential values of social friend finding is discovering when friends are in town. If a friend from far away is visiting, I’m more inclined to want to get together than someone who lives in town.
  • Pictures. There is no way to associate a picture with a check in. Given the difficulty in typing on mobile devices, often a picture gives a lot more information. These pictures could also be used to build a much more robust Place page.
  • Pushing location. Sending people your location via SMS is tedious. You have to address the message, type out where you are. If they don’t know where it is, they have to pull up a map or text you back for directions. With Places, it would be easy to push a notification to friends with where you are, complete with map. This could be sent as a push notification on iPhones or as an SMS with a URL for other phones.

As with most Facebook product launches, questions of privacy come up. In general, I think Facebook has done a good job with the default privacy settings on Places. You must explicitly check in; there is no background tracking.

Only your friends can see where you’ve checked in. Unfortunately, my social graph on Facebook wasn’t designed with location in mind. When I decided whether or not to accept friend requests on foursquare, I used a tighter filter than on Facebook. Now, I’ll have to go back through Facebook friends and create a list of who should have access to location. (See Post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro’s piece on how he classifies his friends.) Yes, old high school friends have been known to burgle homes based on Facebook updates. If that worries you, watch Rob’s video on how to adjust your privacy settings for Places.

The one big complaint I have with the privacy defaults is that your friends can check you into a location without your permission.

See also:

June 24, 2010

Checking in with foursquare at SFO

Filed under: audio, foursquare, geotagging, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter — Tags: — Rakesh Agrawal @ 12:57 pm
SFO is a hotbed of foursquare activity

SFO is a hotbed of foursquare activity. Creative Commons image by Håkan Dahlström.

With the increasing use of mobile applications such as Yelp and foursquare, it’s becoming possible to pull ideas from thin air. Users of these apps can leave tips for others to find that are linked to a specific location.

In most places there aren’t enough tips yet to make filtering an issue. San Francisco International Airport, with more than 57,000 checkins on foursquare, is an exception. It offers a glimpse of what we can expect as these services become more popular. The airport is the perfect petri dish for tips: it serves a technically savvy audience and people often find themselves there with plenty of time on their hands.

The SFO tips page contains dozens of notes including places to eat, complaints, ground transportation, wifi and power availability. Mixed in to all of this are ads, other spam and random observations. Some examples:

have a corned beef sandwich at max’s if you’re flying southwest. the best! well, really good

When you enter short term parking do it as far to the right as you can (lvl 2) & then immediately head to lvl 1. There is always parking next to gate and that is the lvl that connects to the terminal

Free wifi at the Continental lounge in Terminal 1- be warned, it’s located outside Security

Smoking hot brunette woman at gate 20. Stop by and smile at her. She is so lovely!

Bart to Millbrae gets you within 1 block of an in n out burger. Great for 3+ hour layover!

Heading to wine country? Take a moment to stop by St. Supery in the heart of Napa on Hwy 29. Mention this to get a 2 for 1 tasting.

Sorting through the volume of tips can be overwhelming. As the volume increases, we’ll need ways to filter them. Among the ways to filter:

  • Timeliness. Some of the tips, such as wifi at the Continental lounge, are evergreen. Others, like the smoking hot brunette are very timely. Tipsters should be able to flag their tips to self destruct. As I wrote earlier, being able to identify tips by timeliness would allow for new applications, such as sharing rides. (“Anyone want to split a cab to Moscone?”)
  • Social network. Among the tips were tips from people I follow on Twitter, including Danny Sullivan and Adam Lasnik. Being able to surface these would increase relevance.
  • Ads vs. not ads. Sometimes people want ads, especially if it can save them money.
  • Keyword search.

Places like airports are especially complex because they’re really collections of places, sometimes with other groupings and physical restrictions. Being able to filter tips by terminal would also be useful. But then maybe that’s best left to GateGuru.

June 16, 2010

Now we’re going Places

Filed under: geotagging, gps, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter — Tags: — Rakesh Agrawal @ 1:59 pm

I’ve been writing about Twitter and location since my first post about Twitter in 2007. This week, Twitter launched Places, which allows users to add their location to a tweet.

Here’s a screenshot from 2007:

Twitter location 2007

Embedding location in a tweet the hard way in 2007

and today:

Embedding location in a tweet in 2010

In 2007, I used a third-party application from Where to include my location. Clicking on that link would take you to a map on Where’s site showing the address. (The link in the original post no longer works.)

With the launch of Twitter Places, the search is done within the Web browser (and soon in Twitter’s mobile applications). You can select where you are from a list of nearby places. Clicking on the place name brings up the map above and the option to view tweets about that place.

Although the difference between the two may seem subtle, they are significant:

  • Because the place is metadata, it doesn’t count toward the 140 character limit.
  • Place names are human readable, unlike addresses and latitude/longitude. Knowing the name of a place makes it much easier to find than just a street address, especially in dense metropolitan areas.
  • Places are unique to a specific venue. Doing a pure location-based search would return tweets from surrounding businesses or businesses that have since disappeared.
  • Integration in to the main Twitter experience means broad exposure and eventual standardization of place identifiers. That has been a longstanding challenge in the local space.

Twitter’s geo APIs have been available for several months and third parties like bing have created interesting applications like Twitter Maps. With the availability of places across the Twitter platform, we can expect to see more interesting applications including both real-time applications (ride sharing and ticket exchanges) and historical (restaurant reviews, past events).

Once Twitter allows owners to claim their Place and associate it with a Twitter account, we could see official tweets of announcements and offers incorporated into a Place’s search results.

When pictures are tagged to a Place (instead of a lat/long), we’ll have the ability to visually browse a venue in Twitter.

May 11, 2010

Geo-enabled Twitter comes alive on Twitter Maps

Filed under: bing, geotagging, lbs, local search, maps, mobile, social networking, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 8:56 am
Bing's Twitter Maps show you what's going on

Bing's Twitter Maps show you what's going on

I’ve been playing with Bing’s Twitter Maps lately and it’s one of the better implementations of Twitter’s geo APIs that were introduced last fall. It shows tweets within the last 7 days plotted on the map. Google Maps recently introduced a similar feature, but it seems to only show items that are fed through Google Buzz (including tweets that people have configured to send to Buzz).

Some future applications of geo-enabled Tweets:

  • Events. For last-minute party goers, a real time view of what’s going on around town, complete with pictures and real-time reactions.
  • Ticket scalping. Rather than walk around for blocks talking to scalpers about what they have, glance at a list of tickets posted. The information transparency would result in a higher price to sellers and a lower price to buyers than what scalpers typically offer. (In my experience at baseball games, scalpers usually ask at least 3x what they paid.)
  • Finding a place to go. When in new cities, it’s often hard to figure out where to go — what are the lively neighborhoods at night. By looking at a map of recent tweets, you could quickly discover where people are still awake.
  • Read reviews from friends. Geo-enabled tweets filtered by those you follow would provide socially relevant recommendations.
  • Offers from local businesses. These could be persistent or distressed inventory. Slow night? Tweet an offer to draw in customers.
  • News. Twitter has long been used for user-generated breaking news. With geo-enabled tweets, breaking news could be aggregated by location in addition to hashtags. The biggest stories could be identified by an increase of tweets from a location (versus normal) and retweet frequency. News from media outlets could also be plotted.
  • Construction and accident information. Avoid bottlenecks by seeing tweets from fellow drivers, DOTs and news sites.
  • Trip sharing. Find others at the airport headed your way, cutting costs and reducing pollution.

And, of course, there’s friend finding, which is the most talked about use of geo-enabled tweets.

So far, the percentage of tweets I see with geo information is tiny (>1% of those I follow). But as more and more geotagged data is put into Twitter, the key will be applications providing the right tools to filter all of that data. At a minimum, we’ll need the ability to filter by time of tweet, people we’re following, hashtag and application (e.g. foursquare).

Unfortunately, bing’s Twitter Maps doesn’t seem to be available where real-time information would be most useful — on mobile devices.

More on: geotagging, social networking, Twitter

February 3, 2010

Plowing through the middleman

Filed under: facebook, journalism, media, newspapers, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 7:53 am
Snow plow in Arlington County

Snow plow in Arlington County. Creative Commons image by Ron Barber.

The snow day. Growing up in Michigan, it was always a treat. Whenever a significant amount of snow was in the forecast, I’d wake up early to see if I got the day off. I’d listen to the radio as the DJ went through the school closings or watch the crawl on the local morning news. It took some patience as they went through the list, but once in a while that patience was rewarded with a day off.

Kids today don’t have that level of suspense. As a fan of Arlington County on Facebook, my newsfeed showed that school is closed today. A quick check of the Arlington Public Schools Web site also provides that information. No more listening through “Angelus Academy, Anne Arundel Community College, Anne Arundel County Schools, Apple Montessori School, Aquinas and Old Town Montessori School…” (In a large metro area, this is killer.)

It’s yet another example of how media consumers can cut out the middle man and go directly to the source.

In much of the discussion about aggregators such as Google News and digg, what’s left out is that much of the media are themselves aggregators — compiling data from school districts, local businesses, funeral homes, police and fire agencies, etc.

Newspapers didn’t really get to play in the school closing game, but compilations of local events, lunch menus, high school sports scores, police blotters and obituaries have been a key part of the newspaper content mix. Such content is an even greater proportion of What People Care About. Many of these needs are now being better served online as easy-to-use tools such as Facebook, Twitter and flickr get adopted by these news sources.

Instead of reading about promotions and awards in the newspaper, I can get that information delivered to me through LinkedIn or Facebook status updates. Sadly, I’ve found out about the death of a high school classmate through Facebook.

And it’s a much better experience than what fits in a newspaper:

  • The filter is personal. It doesn’t matter whether that person was important enough in the eyes of a newspaper’s editor. I also don’t have to read through long lists of people I’m not interested in.
  • The content is richer. Clay Reid’s Facebook page is filled with photos and remembrances from friends.
  • It’s interactive. With promotions and job changes, I can quickly reach out to friends and congratulate them.

In the case of a snow day, you can make plans with your other friends who suddenly have the day free right on Facebook. And then upload the video of you snow blading down the hill.

More on: newspapers, facebook

August 27, 2009

Twitter and foursquare: the tipping point to getting local business online

Filed under: foursquare, lbs, social networking, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 2:48 pm
Crepe cart in Seattle

Crepe cart in Seattle

Getting small local businesses to go online has been the holy grail of the Internet. I’ve written before about some of the reasons local business don’t go online and suggested several ways that they could use emerging technologies to get online with minimal effort.

That finally seems to be happening. Whether it’s a crepe cart in Seattle, ice cream store in San Francisco or a restaurant in Sedona, businesses are using the simplicity of Twitter for their virtual presence.

Most local businesses are too busy running their business to exert a lot of effort maintaining an online presence. If it’s not easy, it won’t get done. My favorite example of a small business reusing their existing work is the Webcam pointed at the wall of Beachwood BBQ where they list the pints on tap.

The challenge is that these businesses are only announcing their presence to existing customers or passersby. While this can help drive repeat visits through specials, notices of new arrivals, etc. it does little to bring in new customers.

That’s where foursquare comes in. This location-based social game allows users to “check in” to places they visit. Check in often enough and you become the “mayor” of that place. Savvy businesses have latched on to this and begun offering discounts to their mayors.

It has also been incorporated into the foursquare check in process. When I checked in at a restaurant in Seattle, I was presented with an offer at a nearby bar: happy hour all day for the mayor or $1 off well drinks for anyone else who checked in. (Checking in updates your social network status, providing further exposure for the business.) It’s one of the first examples of location-based mobile advertising that works. The process is a bit cumbersome now, but it provides a glimpse into where the technology is headed.

In addition to providing exposure to businesses, it solves a user problem that local search has long failed at: discovery. People often don’t know what they’re looking for when they’re out. Suggestions, even if they’re sponsored, help fill the discovery gap.

Foursquare offer

foursquare mayor offer

August 3, 2009

Missing out on the big stuff on Twitter and Facebook

Filed under: facebook, social networking, twitter — Rakesh Agrawal @ 3:44 pm

One of my friends recently got engaged and posted that fact on Facebook. I missed it.

It’s one of the frustrations of the constantly flowing river of news in social networks — births, deaths, weddings and job changes get lost amid the links to pictures of kittens, “what state should I live in quizzes?”, stories about Internet celebrities and the other trivia of life.

There’s no way to get a summary of the important stuff. On many news sites, we have a variety of clues: the size of a headline and the relative placement of stories serve as indicators a story’s importance. We need similar clues for social media.

One place to start is the publisher: the author knows how important it is relative to other entries they write. I post content to social networks on average 5-6 times a day. About once or twice a month I post something that I’d want to call extra attention to. But short of posting it repeatedly (further polluting the stream) there’s no way to call attention to it.

Something like this wouldn’t work in an open Web environment where spammers would designate everything they create as spam; but in a social context, the network serves as a check against excessive spamming.

Another way to identify important content is to look at how many people act on it. If a lot of people like a post or comment on it, that post is likely more significant than others. This should be normalized so that someone with a lot of followers or a more active network doesn’t drown out others with smaller networks.

Identifying important content also helps when looking at a longer period of time than the last hour or last day. It would be useful to be able to look back through my Facebook or Twitter history and see what were the most important things this year.

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