About
RAKESH AGRAWAL
I am Senior Director of Product at Audible.
I have been designing and marketing Internet services since 1993. I have worked at Tellme, AOL Search, uReach Technologies, washingtonpost.com and startribune.com.
On Twitter
Tweets by rakeshlobsterContact
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Recent Posts
- Rakesh’s travel secrets for the holidays, 2024 edition
- Airbnb’s changes don’t go far enough
- Rakesh’s travel secrets for the holidays, 2023 edition
- Thoughts on living and dying
- A finance guide for millionaires and billionaires
- Rakesh’s travel secrets for your holiday travel
- Lobsterclass – free classes on product management
- Getting down to numbers: quantitative research
- Pricing the COVID-19 vaccine
- Favorite things, day 1: podcasts
Top Posts
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Author Archives: Rakesh Agrawal
A wow experience from United Airlines. Wow.
It’s rare these days that a company impresses with customer service. It’s even rarer when that company is an airline, especially an American airline. That’s the experience I had last week when I was flying home from New Orleans on … Continue reading
Posted in airlines, customer service, travel
15 Comments
How the AP blew it
In the most recent round of AP getting in a huff about search engines and aggregators stealing traffic that they feel rightly belongs to them, there’s a fundamental problem they’re ignoring: AP chose not be in the online news business. … Continue reading
Posted in google, iphone, journalism, media, newspapers, yahoo
9 Comments
9 ways to improve the Facebook news feed
As any designer knows, making a big change to a site with as many users as Facebook has is going to cause a lot of complaining. With that in mind, I’ve tried to get used to the new feed over … Continue reading
Posted in facebook, search, social networking
3 Comments
Anyone can be a journalist
In conversations with people in the news business, I regularly hear about the need for “professional journalists.” Ask them what makes a professional journalist and the answers get wishy-washy. Is it someone who is on staff at a newspaper? What … Continue reading
Posted in facebook, flickr, journalism, media, mobile, newspapers, publishing, social networking, twitter
7 Comments
Newspaper companies can’t unring the bell
American newspapers are in trouble. So far this year, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have shuttered their presses. Tribune is in bankruptcy. My first employer, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, is also there. Publishers have threatened to … Continue reading
Posted in journalism, media, newspapers, publishing, twitter, web 2, web 2.0
3 Comments
15 people I’d want to have dinner with
Sir Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Group – He’s my kind of billionaire: irreverent, playful and working for the public good. Steve Case, co-founder of AOL – No one person did more to bring Americans online than Steve. I was … Continue reading
Posted in random
Comments Off on 15 people I’d want to have dinner with
Facebook drives 6MM people to Friendster!
That headline is kinda, sorta true. If you buy shoddy analysis from misinterpreted data. Like a recent piece from Henry Blodget, mass inflator of the Web 1.0 bubble. He is at it again with a piece on Facebook being a … Continue reading
Posted in facebook, google, search, social networking, statistics
1 Comment
More bad news for newspapers: hotels going green
This picture should send shivers down the spines of executives at USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. For at least as long as I’ve been traveling for business (13 years and counting), a USA Today in front of the hotel … Continue reading
Posted in hotels, journalism, media, newspapers, travel
3 Comments
Who needs newspapers?
I read two thought-provoking pieces this week on the decline of newspapers from voices outside the newspaper business and one Really Dumb Idea from a voice on the inside. Author Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: When someone demands … Continue reading
Posted in journalism, media, newspapers, web 2, web 2.0
5 Comments
Realtime Twitter search is not a Google killer, part 2
In the first part, I wrote about the fallacy of using people with thousands of followers to illustrate how you can get great results if you ask questions on Twitter. In this part, I’ll focus on why the conversational nature … Continue reading
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