branding me 2.0

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We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we’re arrogant it’s because we didn’t hire them, or they’re unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They’re inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better. But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness.

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NO BE CHICKEN CHICKEN LIVE IN CAGE. NO CAN HAVE PERSONALITY INSIDE CAGE. LAST STEP IS SMASH CAGE, LIGHT BARN ON FIRE. DO THAT, YOU WIN.

A VC: Minimum Viable Personality

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I don’t think this is really an iPad competitor. This isn’t an iPad-killer. The Kindle Fire can be very successful without killing anything.

-Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg

Amazon creates first viable non-iPad tablet by not copying the iPad

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This service leaves open one critical question: Will Google’s flat document-oriented search approach maintain its value going forward?

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[P]eople turn to hits as a metric when they have no idea what they are talking about

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Q: What does the future hold for you?
A: Five years ago there was no such thing as an iPhone – if back then you tried to guess the future, you would have been totally wrong. I think there’s some productive value in not looking too far ahead because if you look too far ahead, you’re going to miss what’s right in front of you.

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“It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about Facebook, and fans, and followers, and engagement, and influence, and…”

Will you please shut up before you make me vomit on your shoes?

IT’S ABOUT GENERATING REVENUE THROUGH SOLID MARKETING AND STELLAR CUSTOMER SERVICE, JUST LIKE IT’S BEEN SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.

Thoughts On The New Google Analytics Interface

When I saw the magical New Version link in my Google Analytics account, I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I was wrapping up my work and about to head out the door, but ended up staying at work an extra hour and a half just to play with this new, shiny gadget.

Let me preface everything below by saying that overall I absolutely love the new interface. It’s an exciting change! However, after using it for a while, I feel I’ve spotted a few bugs, or, some things that I would like changed (please note that all screenshots below were taken for the same time period, with no advanced segments, etc).

First on the list is the dashboard. There is a keyword report we had on our old dashboard that is useful, and so I built a widget (I have options now, so cool!) and added that to the new dashboard interface. The great thing is the new dashboard lets me see more than five rows of keywords at a time, and also shows an additional metric.

For comparison, here is our old dashboard widget:

And here is the new dashboard report:

WHOA! Visits and Total Goal Completions on one table! Super-awesome!! Except…well, what’s with the giant (not set) bucket? On the old report it was only 304 visits, whereas on the new report it’s 8,607 visits. That is a big difference. Especially considering that when I go to Traffic Source > Incoming Sources > Search > Overview, my total search traffic for this time period is 4,699 visits.

There are similar issues with the other visit numbers. In the old dashboard report, let’s call the first row Keyword #1. Well, Keyword #1 in the new dashboard report, seen on the second row of the new dashboard widget, has 620 visits. That’s only a 14 visit difference, but still does not make me confident and I feel like something weird is going on.

Second on my list is the All Traffic report. We advertise a niche product so there is not a ton of traffic to our websites. There is a particular media placement we found that gets a lot of fairly qualified traffic for a decent price. This runs for one week, but the problem is that it skews the graphs a lot and hides any regular patterns by flattening out the day to day traffic. Here’s an example:

You can see the two weeks this placement ran. In the old Analytics interface, we could use the filter at the end of the All Traffic Sources table to exclude this placement. It appears to not work the same way in the new interface.

So, I drop down the Search menu, I select “Exclude” and try to filter out this placement:

I hit Apply, and get this:

All it did was filter the table; the number one traffic source, with its 6,445 visits skewing my line graph, has been filtered out of the table, but it is still seen in the line graph.

This is a small issue, but something I really don’t like because it was easy to filter the line graph on the fly in the old Google Analytics interface. For instance, sometimes the marketers that send out eblasts to potential customers don’t tag the email campaigns (grrrr!!!!). So there are times where I look at the reports and see what appears to be a significant spike in direct traffic. I check the media schedule and don’t see a print ad running on that day, so I wonder if it’s an email campaign that wasn’t properly tagged. To do this in the old interface, I would test by just typing “mail” in the filter and hitting “Go.” This way, I can see the referral traffic of everyone who may have opened the eblast in GMail or Yahoo mail and clicked through to the website; if this referral traffic spiked on the same day as direct traffic, it’s easy to put the puzzle pieces together and know what happened. However, if I try the same thing in the new interface, I can’t see the patterns. And I really don’t want to create an Advanced Segment every time I want to test something. Doing that multiple times can be a pain, and the time spent doing that can really add up. [UPDATED] I tried filtering this line graph with advanced segments and it still doesn’t happen…only the table gets filtered…very frustrating :-(

Of course, any corrections two the issues I listed here are welcome; maybe I’m missing something or haven’t heard that a feature is on its way.

I must say though, the Google Analytics team has done some great work with this new interface; I appreciate all their hard work! Especially since it makes my job easier :-)

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LAMP architectures are dead because few web applications want to ship full payloads of markup to the client in response to a small event; they want to update just a fragment of the DOM, using Javascript. […] [T]his means shifting our view of the server from a document courier (HTML Age), or a template renderer (LAMP Age), to a function and data shipper. The principal role of the server is to ship an application to the client (Javascript), along with data (JSON), and let the client weave those into a DOM. The secondary role of the server is to listen in on a stream for events (a new edit, a message, or ticker change) and efficiently push responses back to clients.

Metamarkets Blog » Blog Archive » Node.js and the Javascript Age

I can’t stand when someone proclaims that “[fill in the blank] is dead”…but this one just makes so much sense to me.

An Ode To Apture

To paraphrase the illustrious Ron Burgundy: “I love Apture. Apture-y, Apture, Apture. Here it goes, into my browser…”

I first ran into Apture during the Iran election protests in 2009. The New York Times used it in their blog posts about the protests; I thought it was incredible that I didn’t have to leave the page to watch a YouTube video or read a particular Tweet. And I liked the user experience much more than Cooliris or Snap because Apture wasn’t just loading an entire new webpage into a frame…rather, Apture allowed me to immediately access the information I wanted in a very smooth, seamless process, all without loading a new page into a teensy-tiny frame.

Apture has been through some changes since then (the search bar, for instance). Their latest iteration grabbed my attention because they have a Firefox addon, meaning, even if a publisher doesn’t have the Apture code installed on their website, I can still use Apture as normal. Besides the fact that Apture is fun, easy to use, and enormously helpful, the possibility of making everything Apture-able creates enormous potential…this is especially why I am so excited about Apture.

[Warning: college-aged hyperbolic idealism ahead.]

Consider: a living copy of the very first webpage. The break-through idea by Tim Berners-Lee was this type of “hypertext”, a network or web of pages linking to each other, all accessible with the click of the mouse. Genius.

Lately, I have found myself wanting everything to be hypertext-able…I cannot emphasize this enough. When I come to a webpage, I would like the majority of words on it to be linked somehow. For instance, take a recent story on the Financial Times website about Google’s bid for Nortel’s patents.

I’ve been out of the loop for a while (lot’s o’ work to do), and I wondered to myself: “Nortel…now why does that company sound familiar???” So I highlight the word and look for the “Learn More” pop-up:

And then I get a nice window that sums up Nortel:

And after that I have all I need to keep reading the story.

Here’s the key thing for me: the Apture process definitely beats out the highlight-the-text, right-click, scroll-down-the-menu, click-the-Search-Google-for-“Nortel”-option, wait-for-the-page-to-load, click-on-the-Wikipedia-article-and-wait-for-that-page-to-load process. I am an impatient person, as well as an easily distracted person, and so I find the latter method to be rather inefficient. I think even Google is aware of this problem: they launched Instant Search, and one of the important data points they repeated over and over again is how much faster the process is from the beginning of the search until the someone clicks away from the search results page.

So I dug a little deeper in the data asset that Apture could potentially amass. As Union Square Ventures notes, creating a defensible position with a data asset is key.

You may read the next two points and think to yourself “duh”, but I had to see these things for myself. First, it appears Apture has the referring URL of the website on which something was Apture-d:

Next, it appears they have the phrase that was Apture-d, noted simply as “Query”:

Boom-shakalaka!

And there it is…Apture, in many ways, is a query-engine. Know any other popluar query-engines around? (Hint: I’ve already mentioned the 800 pound guerilla of all query engines in this post).

Add all of this up, and that’s why I think Apture has such great potential:

1. It keeps users on the page; no need for them to exit by opening another tab or window. Publishers should love that. Users too.
2. The search process is quicker (cf. the MetaMarkets post that declares that LAMP is dead).
3. It has the potential to make the entire web hypertext-able.
4. Not only does it have the query from the user, it has the context surrounding that query.

That last point should be able to provide a wealth of data to Apture. For instance, if I Apture a tech company on FT.com, probably one of the first things I want to see is their current stock and other other financial indices. If I Apture the same tech company on, say, Engadget, I probably want something else (perhaps the latest news headlines about that company instead). Context is the one-up Apture has when compared to pure search engines. As Fred Wilson noted many years ago, there is a new “lode to mine”: relevance. And having context around what the user is querying, rather than just the query itself, I believe gives Apture a huge advantage. That’s exciting.

The biggest downside is that, to my knowledge, the Apture plugin is limited to Firefox at this time. According to StatCounter, that’s only a potential of ~29% of the market worldwide as of March 2011. Even more, if the stats on the Firefox page for Apture Highlights is correct, there have only been 310,719 downloads as of the writing of this post with approximately 25,000 more every week…that’s a tiny installed base. The only point of reference I have to compare this to is one of the top Firefox add-ons, Ad-Block Plus, which has over 117 million downloads and over 1 million weekly downloads. That’s quite a difference.

Here’s to hoping that Apture grows; I really like it and can’t wait to see this team realize its full potential :-)

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I’ve been Facebook “liking” junk across the intertubes for months now and Facebook has added almost no value to my experience (the *only* exception is where I liked the band Blonde Redhead and Interpol and saw they had a new concert at NYC’s Terminal 5 in May…bought tickets asap). Otherwise, what has “liking” stuff added to my Internet wanderings and content sifting? It’s like they have this great treasure trove and don’t know what to do with it…except sell it to advertisers.

Leave it to Google to make a similar product immediately useful.

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