Month: August 2006

Eric Schmidt joins Apple’s Board roundup

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 31, 2006

(image from Valleywag)

Oh boy. I do love the interweb some days. Being a long time Apple nerd, I’ve been through a number of rumors of x acquiring Apple, Apple acquiring x, what does x mean? Frankly folks, we’ve been here before.

Here’s the round up of “news” surrounding Eric Schmidt joining Apple’s board.

Is Schmidt the set-up pitcher for an Apple-Sun merger?
So I know this is Dvorak just being Dvorak, but man, this horse is glue already, please stop beating it. A Sun Apple merger would be horrible as other than being Microsoft haters, they’ve got nothing in common and culturally, it would be a really bad fit. Their histories in Silicon Valley are too long and both companies are heavily rooted in their own identities.

Common Enemies
Common enemies seemed to be a theme with almost all the news stories and this one does make sense. Google and Apple together pretty much cover the gamut of competing against Microsoft.

Current Board Members
Looking back in history, I remember when Mickey Drexler (then CEO of Gap), Al Gore and Bill Campbell joined Apple’s Board. Other than the iPod being fashionable, I don’t really know what “synergy” that Mr. Drexler brought to the board, other than being CEO of a huge consumer brand. Al Gore being on the Board, well, it can’t hurt to have the former VP of the USA a phone call away. And last, Bill Campbell. The only thing to say here is that Quicken for the Mac is one of the reasons I installed Parallels to run XP.

And finally, Valleywag chimes in:

Six effects of Eric Schmidt joining Apple’s board
Cloud of smug says it all.

So what will Eric Schmidt bring to Apple? Hopefully, a better .Mac, more support for OS X with Google Apps and services, and maybe iTunes will get distribution in Google Video.

My guess is that we’ll see a whole lot of nothing.

Wednesday Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 30, 2006

Page views are obsolete
Some good analysis as to why page views aren’t the best measurement anymore due to Ajax, RSS and Widgets. Interesting read, but no real suggestions for alternatives.

YouTube directors ready for post production
These kids today and their “unedited” and “uncut” videos. They grow up so fast, treasure every moment.

Guba thinks money grows on trees
Last week they offered $.99 rentals and yesterday they announced an affiliate program. At $.25 for a new member, this program can’t last long.

Downloads Xbox

Tuesday Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 29, 2006

Behind the scenes at Technorati
How Technorati works.

Battlestar Galactica available on Xbox Live
The first full length episode available on Xbox Live. A hint of things to come?

WordPress.com’s Beginner info
Want to learn WordPress? Here’s a good resource including some videos for starting up a WordPress blog.

AOL Music DownloadsYet another Plays for Sure clone, but this one includes some XM Radio channels in the mix.

Downloads Video

AOL Video: Want to buy a video? Watch an ad first

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 24, 2006

You gotta be kidding me…. If you watch a preview of a movie that you would like to buy, AOL makes you sit through an ad. Great user experience.

Wow.

What are we selling here? A movie download or Citibank Visa?

This is one of the reasons going to the movies sucks. It’s the only place I see video ads.

I’m not even gonna link to them.

(Not to mention, when I view this on my Mac, they totally get me to the video popup and then finally tell me that the DRM isn’t “available” on my Mac.)

Apple Downloads iPod Links

Thursday Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 24, 2006

Apple’s having a bad week…

Apple settles with Creative for $100mm
I’ve got no real opinion on this other than, it sucks for Apple to lose a UI/Look and Feel case twice, once for each side. Oy. Of course, I’d take Apple’s market share minus $100 million in cash any day.

Apple recalls 1.8 million laptop batteries
2nd largest battery recall in history. Sometimes lesser market share isn’t such a bad thing. God, I hope Sony is paying for all this. Apple Recall Page

AOL to offer pay video downloads
No big shocks here, but this space is getting crowded. Movie downloads will be priced between the now standard $10 and $20 marks. I think I need to do a roundup of these services real soon now.

Don’t Download This Song
Weird Al encourages file sharing with sarcasm. Ok, I know he’s done, but sometimes, you gotta love Weird Al.

Building Community Epinions Features Social Media

Reputation Systems and Gaming Epinions

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 23, 2006

I want to look a little more at the Yahoo! Answers story and add what I’ve learned about gaming a system. When you look back at the history of Epinions, the site made a big bang when it debuted because it offered to pay writers for their product reviews. The idea was the company would make money off of ads (this is when banners were big) and they would share that money with the community of writers.

At the time, your “Income Share,” as it is known, was based on the number of people that looked at your review. At the time, I believe that the going rate was something in the $.30 per-page-view range. You can just imagine how this got gamed.

How it works
Now, given that the site’s raison d’être was product reviews, there is a relatively finite amount of products to review and ideally, from a shopper’s perspective, you would want the “best” review at the top. So to accomplish this, Epinions built a reputation system called the Web of Trust. In theory, Epinions’ “Web of Trust,” or WoT what an early social network where your “friends” were people whose reviews you trusted and respected.

The second component of review ranking was how helpful someone found your review. At the bottom of every review, users are asked to rate the review on a 4 point scale from “Not Helpful” to “Very Helpful.” Review order is determined by a combination of the two criteria, WoT and review ranking. The basic idea is that if you are trusted more than another member and your review received a higher rating, that review would appear higher up in the list.

The story goes that writers on the site formed rating and trust circles to boost their own reviews over others. The stakes for this were high. If you were the top review on a popular product, most shoppers would see your review first. If you collected all the page views, you received considerably more money than anyone else who wrote the review. And while points are nice, money is a lot better.

So, what did Epinions do to thwart gaming?

Tags Epinions, gaming, reputation, reputation system, Social Media

Building Community Social Media Yahoo

Is Yahoo Answers being gamed?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 23, 2006
6 Comments on Is Yahoo Answers being gamed?

The WSJ is reporting this morning that people are asking and answering inane questions on the Yahoo! Answers service to boost their point scores.

Here is the WSJ’s explanation of the system:

“A points economy is like a regular economy, except the currency is points, not currency. Even though you can’t exchange these points for real-world goods and services, people will still spend enormous amounts of time accumulating them just to beat others in a list of top point-getters, or simply to compete with themselves.

Web sites are taking advantage of this aspect of human psychology and setting up point systems to draw in users to help create “content” for them.

If you’re a member of Answers — total users are in the millions — you can gain points asking questions, answering questions, and rating the questions and answers of others. The points are good for nothing, save allowing you to move up through the seven levels in the Answerers hierarchy. With each new level, you gain more powers on the site, such as the ability to ask and answer more questions, and thus get more points.”

Some background info on Yahoo! Answers

It’s interesting to see this particular system gamed as the incentive is somewhat low. Notoriety is one thing, but it seems that perhaps there are more lucrative sites out there to game. One thing that I learned at my time at Epinions is that the higher the incentive, the more likely it will be gamed.

Congrats to Yahoo! Answers for figuring out a way to make users care enough to game the system.

Read – [WSJ free link]

Tags gaming mechanics, points

Features Microsoft

Some good Microsoft experiences

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 21, 2006

And they weren’t even Xbox 360 or Live related.

Maybe my move to Seattle has mellowed me. Maybe I’ve grown up a little and realized that “hating” takes too much energy. I dunno, maybe it’s just the little things that impress me.

This weekend I had two Microsoft experiences that were really nice. Every good story starts with something bad happening and that bad thing for me was trying to load Windows XP Media Center Edition onto my MacBook. I’d bought Parallels so that I could effectively have two laptops in one. The Windows laptop would function as a test bed for new software and website rendering and the Mac laptop would do everything else.

On top of that, I’ve really wanted to play with MCE because I love 10 ft interfaces (ok, it’s a laptop, but work with me here) and the HCI aspects of working with computers in different ways. Unfortunately, Parallels mentions nowhere in its docs that it supports MCE, but I figure, what the heck, it’s really just a 10ft interface tacked onto XP, right?

Downloads Portable Entertainment Video

Amazon Unbox Video launched?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 18, 2006

Methinks someone pushed the wrong button at Amazon.

Gizmodo
Kokogiak.com

Here are some pix, click for bigger images.

Epinions Lesson #1: Let them talk to each other

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 17, 2006

One of the things that stunned me when I joined Epinions was that they had no formal message boards. Before I joined, (in my mind) the very definition of a Web community was message boards. I had spent countless hours either lurking or actively participating in many message board, Usenet, and BBS communities even before the Web existed. It was weird that Epinions didn’t have message boards. This was community, right? How did they talk to each other?

I discovered, however, that members did talk to one another. Quite a bit actually. First, there were off-site message boards (we’ll save those for another post), but second, while I hadn’t noticed it, every review on Epinions has a comments section. The comments section is where all the community interaction happened on Epinions prior to the launch of Epinions’ message boards.

So what could you expect in the comments section? This is what Epinions wanted to happen in comments:

And here is what happened as well:

In many cases, comments were just a way for friends on the site to let each other know that they read the review and what they thought of it. This is where the flame wars happen. This is where people let you know that they like you. And just like the blogosphere, that’s where community happens on Epinions.

Lesson learned – give people a place to talk, or they will do it wherever they can.

[By the way, we launched message boards on Epinions while I was there. A hell of a lot of community happens there as well :-) ]

Links Video

Thursday Links

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 17, 2006

Del.icio.us slightly less ugly
Hey, I didn’t say that I didn’t use it, but come on, it ain’t pretty.

YouTube talking to record labels on music videos
YouTube owns the long tail of internet video and they seem to be going after the head. Interesting… now, if only it worked on my iPod.

CBS to Webcast Evening News
But until I get it on my iPod, it doesn’t matterOk, is it me or does ‘real-time’ streaming video still suck? I’m not talking about Flash here (which for some reason does not suck), but WMV, Real, Quicktime streaming. Is there any reason these are still used?

Epinions General Social Media

Change of focus

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 17, 2006

Today I’m going to do something a little unusual and it may signify some changes to the blog and the sorts of things I write. I’m going to talk about me and my past work experience and what I’m planning for the future. No, the plan wasn’t to pontificate the finer points of gadgets, online media and general nerdery forever but figuring out what to talk about took some time and focus.

It’s been a really great month or so for me. I’ve taken some time away from being a full time dad (which is not so great for the family) and I’ve spent a lot of time immersing myself back in the world of social media and community generated content. Before my hiatus, I worked on a little site called Epinions which is one of the first and one of the largest, most active community generated content sites on the net.

With a trifecta of social media conferences, Gnomedex, WebVisions and WordCamp, my head is spinning a bit, but it made me realize that I really need to share some of the great stories from my time at Epinions and the lessons that I learned there. I had lunch with some old colleagues there and gave them a head’s up that I was going to do this.

What’s really great about Epinions is that in many ways, it is a microcosm of the world of social media. Many of the issues that companies are facing working with consumer generated media have already happened at Epinions. Some of the stuff that I’m going to talk about really hasn’t been discussed in any sort of public way, but I think that what I learned there is valuable to anyone who is trying to develop and grow online communities.

My intention isn’t to rock the boat, so I’m keeping my old pals at Epinions abreast of what I’m doing. I didn’t ask permission, but I’m not going to talk about things like revenue or internal stats in any specific way. I hope that anyone who wants to learn about working with and cultivating web communities joins in the discussion. I’d also be glad to answer any questions about Epinions that you might have.

One final word, I want to give a shout out to Garrett and Christal some ex co-workers of mine who taught me everything I know about Epinions and are two of the reasons that the Epinions community still prospers today.

General

Touch screen demo

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 16, 2006

Ok, that might be the worst headline ever, but sometimes you just gotta post. I mentioned the TEDTalks video feed a few weeks back, and I’ve seen quite a few really great presentations. If nothing else, most of these talks are worth taking notes on how they gave their presentation as much as the content of their presentations.

But last night while washing dishes, I stopped everything I was doing to watch this presentation and it absolutely blew my mind.

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It seems we’re getting much closer to getting rid of the WIMP interface.