Social Internet Growth and Adoption

I like to take generic polls or ask random people about new technologies to gauge where adoption is in the real-world since those of us that work in the industry can create real big niches and echo chambers.

A few recent observations include the following

• Last week I had the chance to speak to the first year MBA students at the Purdue Krannert School of Management. I had the opportunity to speak about careers in marketing and focused on my experiences in business to business marketing and product management. I also asked questions to the students in order to better focus the discussion and my examples. The total sample size was about a couple hundred people and it was interesting to note the social internet tools being used by this educated and connected group.
  • About 50% are Facebook users
  • About 20% are using Flickr or other photo service
  • About 10% are using LinkedIn, Plaxo or similar service for networking
  • No one admitted to using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service
• A few weeks ago I spent a couple days at the Defrag Conference where just from watching the audience one would guess 99% are using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service. In fact a big hit at the conference was the group Twitter stream (http://www.twitter.com/defrag08) that was set up by EventVue, the community software provider used by the conference, using the Gnip Platform. At times there were dozens of people live commenting on the sessions they were attending and the conversations among participants rivaled the actual presenter.
• While I was home for Thanksgiving I ended up trying to explain to my Mom what it is that Gnip does. Given I started a few months ago this is the first time I had seen in person and we eventually had the “so what does the new company do that you work at”. I really like these conversations with my Mom as it reminds me that the rest of the world knows very little about the software and technology industries — other then somehow Microsoft is bad and Apple is good, but why is not clear. Anyway, she got the idea that Gnip makes it easy to integrate data from sources across the Internet and several of my examples. Twitter really through her for a loop — she said “why would I want to post random thoughts and why would anyone want to read those?” and my favorite “how do you learn to get a meaningful thought in 140 characters?.

What does all this mean. I read a lot of reports from all kind of analysts on the adoption growth rates for social media as I am sure some of the people who bother reading my blog do as well. To me it seems that we probably have farther to go for more general adoption of the new social internet tools then we like to admit in the industry, which I usually attribute to the Echo Chamber issue. That said I remain very confident that many of the capabilities and tools that are available today will reach mainstream adoption like earlier communication and collaboration tools have over the years — think email, sms and instant messaging. These all several years or even a good decade or two in order to become mature and reach the mainstream. Being just a couple years into the evolution of the social internet we are very much only on the front to middle edge of early adopters.

GNIP – “data services bus” for Consumer Web Content

GNIP is an early stage start-up that is providing an interesting solution to solve the problem of fresh content and data for content centric consumers and producers on the Internet. I happened to recently meet the CTO since they are here in my backyard (Boulder), but I’m writing about it today because of the new Twitter integration they just launched.

Today, GNIP is offering a single feature in GNIP Notifications, which turns any traditional publisher API into a “push” API. Why is this cool? Well it means that anyone looking to keep up with fresh content, events and activity streams from “foo service” now can just set that up with GNIP and not have to write code to “poll” the “foo service”. This also is a real benefit for content publishers since it removes a lot of traffic from other complimentary consumers who are polling for fresh data. Obviously the producers are not able to easily separate polling traffic from real traffic unless they do things like issue account keys and throttle certain consumers, but that also is not a real great thing for anyone. The answer is creating a more loose coupling via push notifications that can be filtered based on the producer and consumer requirements. Not hugely complicated, but GNIP is the first I have seen tackle the problem in this way.

Why is this good for Twitter? The scaling issues at Twitter have been documented a lot and GNIP could really help them better manage traffic while they are working to fix things by simply cutting down on polling traffic and pushing appropriate data out to consumers in the form on the Twitter XMPP feed that can be segmented by GNIP or by anyone. Or as TechCrunch put it:

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers

It will be very interesting to see the future features promised on GNIP’s website: Polling, Transformation and Identification. All of these are areas where a set of common infrastructure services could be very useful to the Internet ecosystem and also to enterprise IT as they look at leveraging external services.

Startup Observations I

I have been plugging away officially on the startup thing for one month this week and decided to do a monthly post on how things are going. Over the past months I have talked about doing a startup, but I am only counting the time working on it full time as real, so that means this little thing really started May 19th. Here are a few observations from the first month.

• There are a lot of people out there who are interested in helping you get off the ground. If you have a network then it is pretty easy to find people to talk to about your business and products plans. More important is that your network is the best way to get introduced to all the other people that you may need along the way including other local entrepreneurs, VC and angels, and possible partners or employees.
• Getting off the ground means having focus and knowing your critical paths. There are important things to do and less important things to do. Branding and naming will be needed, but these are not the places to spend too much time in the beginning. If you can grab a nice name and domain name well great, but since you may end up changing the whole focus of the business in three to six months these are less important. I think the following are among the most important elements of getting off the ground (a) Finding a partner or two to balance your skill sets (b) Having the right mix of people that cover the essential skills required to launch the business and product (c) The team needs to have the right temperament to fail and iterate quickly as they better understand the customer and the market (d) You need to be able to clearly explain the business and product to investors and customers
• There are no bad ideas, just bad execution. This may seem pie in the sky, but while working on my on concepts I spend time looking at the deal flow from some of the VC firms I have contacts and what is available in the public. Just like watching the real estate sales in the paper this is a very easy way to see the macro picture of the market and the market segment you are focused. This can also be a nice pick me up when you are having a bad day since you are almost guaranteed to see something funded for millions and say “why would anyone put money into something that lame?” or “WTF? that is so simple!”
• You need to know your stop points before you start. I set some specific criteria that will tell me this is not going to work. Mine are based on both personal and family preferences for quality of life as well as risk/reward.

I feel like I have made some good progress in the following areas over the last month.

• Better feel for the product and business concept. Over the last six months I have covered a lot of ground and at least six different very different directions, but looking at things full time the last month has really helped me a lot.
• Built out some decent prototypes. Ok, when I say prototypes it is important to remember my background is product management so by definition I am not a real coder. But, I can do design and am doing some functional web pages to build out use cases and steal threads. I also can download just about anything and work out basic proof of concepts at the API and web application level to help me build out use cases and functional specifications. I have a lot to do and at this point I think it is possible for me to build out a fully functional and spec’d product in the coming few weeks
• Learned a lot about how hard it is for people to pull the trigger on doing a startup. A lot of people are interested in entertaining the idea of doing a startup, but when it comes time to actually make the leap there are a lot less people. This seems especially the case when you are talking about doing a startup from scratch. I am still a one person show right now, and really trying to find a good technical person to be person number two.
• Met some really quality people. I have been able to leverage my network to meet another tier of people in the local Boulder community and also in the Bay area. Mostly this is helping me find people that are interested in the market segment I am focused, which could be helpful if this gets to the point of needing to do some fund raising. This also has been helpful in forcing me to more clearly communicate the what, why and how of the new thing.
• I did my first practice pitch with three serial entrepreneurs that I know. That was a great forcing function to get everything on paper, to cut down the message to as short as possible, and to get feedback on what investor’s need and want to hear. The good news was that they like the business concept and then gave me all the things I need to work on to improve how to pitch and consider ways to streamline phase one of the product delivery.

That’s month one. We will see how the next month goes and keep plugging away for now. And, if you are looking to do your own this is a great read posted recently at OnStartups, that made my day: Taking The Leap: Don’t Just Be A Wannabepreneur

Learning from failure

Many start-ups go under and one thing I have been doing as I work on my own is watch how and why people fail. Failing is the one of the best ways to learn and if you are lucky the “failing” only hurts some instead of being fatal. Larger companies have a lot more capacity to fail then small companies, but failing hurts all the same.

Today I came across the BricaBox postmortem post by the former founder, Nate Westheimer.

BricaBox was trying to provide a social content platform and up until recently received some decent press and buzz. It seems there was more buzz then product at this point.

Anyway, Nate provided a nice summary of an upcoming full post he plans on the company postmortem. In his planned table of contents of what went wrong I think he nailed a few of the common correct themes that anyone starting a company or product must think about and along with those themes here are my added thoughts on why they matter.

1) Companies should tackle Market Problems, not Technical Problems.

I have seen this many times and it always frustrates me when people just want to focus on making some increment updates. In consumer products that strategy with a lot of marketing dollars can work (new Tide cleans even better now as it has woopsy doo in every box!) However, in technology people are pretty smart about choosing products that actually solve their real problem. Also, once people are using products they tend to have some stickiness. So, depending on how you go to market and your solution being focused only on incremental things can be a dead end. And of course, if you can not articulate what problem you are solving or who the customer is that buys the product then you need to sit down and think some more.

2) Start with a real team.

I think a startup needs to cover the core business and technical aspects with the core team. This could be anywhere from 2 to 6 people depending on the scope of the initial work and go to market requirements. If there are too many people then that is just as bad as too few. Probably more important is having focus on incremental phases that the team can execute so you can get customers . If you can deliver a useful product in a six month phase one then do that instead of taking twelve months to deliver a perceived more useful product. I also think this is true for a new product concept in a larger company. Just get the right small team together in a group and let them focus.

3) When in doubt, build off Open Source.

Amen. If there is an Open Source solution that fits the bill then use it instead of wasting time building something that already exists and is “good enough”. If over time customer requirements make Open Source a poor fit because of real demand for capabilities not in your OS solution then you can make a change. If this problem comes up then congratulations as you have real customers helping you drive your product and company.

Why Internet and web software is currently anti-social

Humans are social – which depending on your view the answer is a) duh or b) really, we are. However, human society is always evolving as we are impacted by many environmental factors as we putter along from one generation to another. As the big news today in the social networking world includes the new Linkedin funding which now values this company at roughly $1 billion this seems like a good topic to ponder.

The Information Age which began some fifty or sixty years ago has transformed the daily experience and expectations of most people on the planet when it comes to work and daily life. Think about what office life was like before most knowledge workers used computers, calculators and the Internet which in just the last 20 years have become ubiquitous. If that is hard to picture then I would suggest watching an episode of the series Mad Men which I have been told by a few people is a mostly accurate depiction of office life in the 60s. The characters might be a little over the top, but look at how people do work, and work together to see the difference with the cubical villages of many offices today. Ask yourself a question – what would happen in your office if the power went out? a) people would just work with pad and paper b) most people would just go home. Having seen this happen myself I think the answer for most people who work in a technology laden office would see (b) happen as people flee to work at home to find connectivity to the Internet, email, etc.

Is the Internet and web software social?

I would say, no. In fact, in many ways these technologies are anti-social. Why is this the case? It has to do with the design and the medium of communications that the Internet and most web software is centered around, which is content and documents. Increasingly more near real-time or even real-time communication tools like instant messaging and various activity stream implementations provide more duck tape to provide a perception that we have a real social fabric. This is just a thin veil that improves on the issue but does not really fix the root problem.

Why do content and document centric approaches reinforce anti-social behavior?

People approach and use information in different ways depending on their natural tendencies. Several good books on these subjects include, The Social Life of Information, The Tipping Point, and Bowling Alone are a few I recommend. Because the Internet and most web applications are very content centric this appeals to people looking to “hoard” information, find the right/first answer to their current need or question and in some cases just complete their work or task at hand.

In addition, it is not easy or in some cases possible to directly and seamlessly share or discuss content in web based applications with other people. So, this means people who are trying to focus on completing a task are forced to take unrelated steps in the process if they choose to collaborate socially. For example, let’s say a person needs some information for a task at hand. They very well may find that information after doing some research on various sources, but then to verify the information they decide to find help. Next it gets interesting since in the Information based office we work today they most likely will need to change context to another medium to communicate to people, and if they are lucky then the person(s) they communicated to will work across varies points of information and the disconnected communication medium to have an out-of-band discussion via email, IM, or some other messaging platform.

How to make web software social

The answer to improving the social aspects of the Internet and web applications is to focus on the users and the very nature of human beings. The focus should be on the interactions between people and different sources of information, such as, applications, content, and other people. Many tasks are mundane, but for tasks that are more complex people will tend to reach naturally reach out to their known sources and then to unknown sources. By centering technology design in this way people could more naturally observe, interact, inquire and even be proactive in choosing to share, discuss and communicate. So, no offense to LinkedIn and other social networking sites but providing an electronic Rolodex while useful is hardly “social”.

What would this look like? Well it is a lot more then just putting the aggregate feed view on every application and content source, but having event driven feeds is one aspect. In addition, there will need to be advances that allow for people to work with event-based information and content more seamlessly with different communication medium. If people are left to figure out the what, how and who then they more naturally revert to their own devices or their limited known network of people. The true social network effect that can be harnessed requires far more explicit and implicit interaction to be built in to the design of what should promise to be a far more social Internet and web applications in the coming years.