Stewtopia

My Jellyfish addiction

So, I’ve thought a lot about how gaming mechanisms can make sites more fun to use and my friends at Jellyfish.com have made a very addictive experience.

Jellyfish is yet another comparison shopping site, like Shopping.com, Epinions, NexTag, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, yadda, yadda, but they have a few twists up their sleeve. First, they incorporate cash back on most, if not all purchases made through the site. While most of the time, these are small percentages, they do add up.

The far more interesting feature, however, is Smack Shopping. Essentially, Smack Shopping is Woot! meets reverse eBay. Every day at 11 am EST, Smack Shopping offers up a limited quantity of a product, like an iPod or Zune. As time progresses, the price of the product decreases until they sell out.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Naturally, some products sell more quickly than others, but so far many products have sold for almost 1/2 off their retail price. So, why don’t people wait longer for the value to go to zero? Theoretically, users could wait it out and get products for free. Fortunately for Jellyfish, most products have a value to people that is a lot higher than zero.

This is classic prisoner’s dilemma, which Wikipedia defines as “a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players can “cooperate” with or “defect” (i.e. betray) the other player.” This is frequently used by policeman to get one criminal to rat out their partner. If no one says anything, both prisoners could walk free. If they both talk, they both go to prison. In Jellyfish’s case, there are more players than products, so it certainly takes advantage of people’s inherent self interest.

The first hit is free

Ultimately, as a bargain shopper, I’m completely addicted. In theory, the more people that go to the site, the less likely products will be heavily discounted. So get out there folks and do your holiday shopping Smack-style :-).

Make my addiction go away.

Join

Conferences

MindCamp 3.0

Image by chadum

I’ve got a crazy week this week, but I wanted to say a few things about MindCamp 3.0 this weekend.

First off, Andru, Stuart and the rest of the gang – Thanks for putting on such a fine unconference. This was my first unconference and to quickly organize chaos so well was really impressive. The high level of interactivity of the conference and the quality and caliber of the folks that I met made the conference stand out from any I’ve been to in the past.

A few specific mentions

Coffee hacks by Jack Bell (pictured) was spectacular. I can’t wait to roast my own beans. Now, to figure out what the heck that single serve coffee device was… anyone, anyone?

The guys from Menuism are looking for ways to build their community and lots of good suggestions came their way.

My session on using gaming mechanics to make sites fun brought a bigger crowd than I expected. Got lots of great feedback on what folks considered fun. Thanks everyone for making my first time talking about this to a group enjoyable.

I met some fun, young Microsofties, whose business cards I didn’t get. If you’re reading this, gimme a shout some time. Sorry to slag Vista so much…

Elizabeth Grigg has a nice summary of various sessions.
Karen Anderson has a great post about general impressions of MindCamp.

More later

General

Farecast price prediction guarantees

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 13, 2006
2 Comments on Farecast price prediction guarantees

I was talking this weekend at MindCamp about products needing to be remarkable to make headway in a crowded market. Remarkable in the literal sense of the word, like Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.

Farecast, the flight price prediction engine, announced today that they are testing a new insurance product called Fare Guard. The idea is that you lock in a price for a flight for one week (for a fee) and if the price goes up, Farecast pays you the difference.

Farecast is an interesting product. I love data and trends like the next guy. A lot of what Farecast is modeling is stuff that I’d read in Peter Greenburg’s Travel Detective book, although most of his advice was anecdotal. Farecast took that advice and backed it up with tons of data.

With Fare Guard, Farecast becomes a remarkable product. For Farecast to put their money where their mouth is adds a lot of validity behind their claim of prediction accuracy. Additionally, they are creating a new revenue streams by adding this insurance option.

Even if few people take them up on the offer of insurance, Farecast seems more reliable than ever. Now, if we could just talk Yahoo! Maps and Zillow into doing this, that would be truly remarkable.

Read

[via TechCrunch]

Geek Fun Gossip

Nick Douglas leaving Valleywag

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 13, 2006

valleywag logo.jpg

Oh, man, say it isn’t so….

Ever since I left San Francisco a year ago, Valleywag has kept me up to date with all of the Silicon Valley gossip in the bitchiest way possible.

Nick… you will be missed.

Read

[via Techmeme]

Features Social Media

Boxbe – make spammers pay

Spam. This is the cost of doing business on the internet, right? Free and easy communication with friends, co-workers, partners, etc, but the cost of this ease is that it is easy (and close to free) for anyone to send you email.

I dunno about you, but I got better stuff to do than spend my time cleaning out my inbox. Yahoo! and Google seem to do a decent job of removing spam before I get it (I’m not sure that .Mac has any filtering at all). Apple Mail does a good job of removing what Google and Yahoo! don’t. But on occasion, a friend asks me why I didn’t respond to them and I discover that my spam filtering has been a bit over zealous.

Enter Boxbe, a new warrior in the battle on spam. Boxbe’s premise is that your time is worth money and you can set how much that time is worth. Boxbe gives you a free forwarding email address that you can post anywhere on the net. It stops spam dead because if the sender isn’t in your address book, they don’t get to email you.

That is, unless they pay.

And there is the beauty, my friends. How much is worth to you to be spammed? Personally, my inbox is worth about $2.00. If you want to spam me, I’ll take your $2.00. If you send me relevant stuff, like a sale on hard drives, maybe I won’t take your money.

In any case, the service went public yesterday. No beta, no Web 2.0 tom-foolery, just up and running. I signed up for the service today and will let you know how well it works later this week.

Oh yeah, spammers, come and get it:

randy@boxbe.com

Links
Liz Gannes on GigaOm is reporting on Boxbe
Boxbe.com

[In the interest of full disclosure, one of the founders, Thede Loder, is an old friend of mine from a million years ago. We’ve talked about this service a lot and I hope it is everything he has spent so much time working on. He hasn’t paid me to talk about the service, I just really believe in what he is doing.]

General

Sneaking inside Apple

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 9, 2006

Photo by by OmegaStation.

Or at least their repair facility. Some clever person decided to write an Automator script to take pictures when the lid was opened next, which was deep into Apple’s repair facility.

I love the internet some days.

[via TUAW]

Geek Fun

Flash Earth… Beautiful, just beautiful

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 8, 2006

I might be the last guy looking at this site, but man, Flash Earth is great. Admittedly, I’m a map nerd, but this great mashup rolls all the big services into one.

With one click of a button you can go to the same view on all the different services.

Don’t like the Google Maps’ view?
flash earth4.jpg

Try the Microsoft VE view.
flash earth3.jpg

I had never looked at the NASA maps before… They are updated daily, which is why you can’t see most of the Pacific Northwest today.

Flash Earth

[via Google Operating System]

Links Microsoft

Zune! Zune! Zune!

Ok, I’m not that excited, but it does seem to be shaping up to be a decent player.

Zune Interface Walkthrough Video
Our pals over at Engadget have been getting down with their new video software. Gotta say the interface looks pretty nice. They’ve definitely taken a page out of some of the best 10 ft interface world.

First Full Zune Review
Gizmodo’s got their take on the Zune.

Zune Insider Blog
Want a behind the scenes look at the Zune from the development team? Zune Insider give some insight into their process.

Technorati

Yahoo

Yahoo! launches a magazine? Yahoo! Food launched today

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 2, 2006

Yahoo! Food launched today and it looks like a magazine. Or at least, an online magazine. I’m not really sure where the content stops and the advertising begins.

yahoo food.jpg

What is truly weird about the food home page is the complete lack of Yahoo! branding. If there is one thing that was beaten into me at Yahoo! is that the brand (and all of the network effects that come with it) is everything. Of course, with a picture of the brand queen, Martha Stewart on the home page, maybe they figured
they couldn’t compete.

[Note:Â Looks like the site may have been broken yesterday when it launched yesterday.Â The page has Y! branding at the top today]

Where are the people?

The other strange thing here is that there doesn’t seem to be any community aspects of the site. While you can rate recipes that are on the site, there is no way to add recipes of your own or to even collect and share favorites on the site. While the food crowd and the del.icio.us crowd may not mix well, keeping and sharing recipes is a natural application here.

Taking it out a bit further, I think they missed another opportunity for user created content by not incorporating other forms of social media. While they incorporated video from Martha Stewart, they didn’t look within their own stable of sites. Yahoo! Video lists 48,000 videos when you do a search on the word “food.” Even if 99% of those videos are noise, 480 of those videos are good.

Finally

My first reaction was “Wow… this is huge departure for Yahoo!” Back in my day at the company, the product people designed the websites… that’s why they looked so bad. But they worked… and we liked it, and so did the public. I know that since then, they’ve hired some fancy designers and have spent a lot of time improving usability and design, but this is a major change even for Yahoo!

Nice design Yahoo!, now let’s hope you iterate this into something more fun and useful.

John Battelle and Economy of Intention

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 1, 2006

I had a great time at last week’s Blog Business Summit. I met a lot of people whose work I respect a great deal and people that I found that I had a lot in common with. John Battelle is someone that I hold in very high regard because he inspired me very early on.

I got an opportunity to hear Battelle speak Friday and he’s as well spoken in person as he is on his blog. The content of his speech inspired me yet again. I’ve read his book, The Search but I don’t think I truly realized how powerful an idea “The Database of Intention” truly was. Adsense and Adwords best illustrate the power of the intention economy and it is those products that have put Google where they are today.

Why FM Publishing?

Given all of that, I still have a lingering question. If Battelle truly believes intent will triumph over content, why did he start a “content” based publishing business, rather than one based on intent? I asked John that very question.

Essentially John replied that in the near term there are tons of advertising opportunities for content. To me that future seems limited. This limitation and distinction is currently being well demonstrated when comparing Yahoo’s quarterly earnings versus Google’s.

I relearned a valuable lesson that day; sometimes your idols let you down. Battelle isn’t a visionary, but he has spent his career being able to recognize them and to report on them, and in a limited way, to capitalize on them. I hope he will be able to learn the lessons he is teaching to capitalize on his Database of Intentions in the future.

Photo by Niall Kennedy.

Geek Fun

Textmate Halloween Icon

textmate halloween.jpg

Totally off-topic, but I got a nice little surprise after I updated TextMate today.

Instead of my normal TextMate icon, I got the image you see here. God, I love this program!

[Update from the comments]

Simon Dorfman Says:

“And if you open two or more files and once so you get the document side drawer, the page area has a spiderweb image instead of the textmate icon.”

Very cool! Thanks, Simon.

Google Video

Diet Coke and Mentos, Part Duh

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date October 30, 2006

Feeling much like most sequels do, the EepyBird boys are back. Bigger and better than their first video, but lacking the wonder and awe. This time, they’re getting paid by Google, not Revver.

TechCrunch reports on the deal between Google, Eepybird and their new sponsors, Diet Coke and Mentos (You’d think that Diet Pepsi would beating down their door). According to the report, this will be the first of many sponsored videos from Google Video, but this doesn’t appear to be for just anyone. Google is focusing on the top producers, rather than their typical long tail.

Unfortunately, the biggest loser in this deal is Revver, but this certainly proves their business model.