YakShaving

It’s the little things. I love this: when you forget your Apple password, you go to “iforgot.apple.com”

I just saw this on Grooveshark today. Interesting. I wonder if more platforms are going to be a places where an experience is delivered (like music), and the original content creator will get direct authentic feedback from the content consumer.

I’m sure this is just a clever platform feature, but I like what they did with the copy — make it seem like Derrich John literally asked me what I thought of this song. It has a small textbox and two buttons, one for “I like this” and one for “Not for me” It’s in the bottom right hand portion of the screen, and so is evocative of a “chat” message directly from the user.

Lately I’ve been trying to understand strategically the creation of 2 sided networks/marketplaces and turning them into {web} businesses. I’ve come across some interesting articles and thought I’d brain dump them and share them here with other people who are trying to pursue similar end goals.

Two sided networks are interesting: They’re characterized by extremely high entry costs, which means, they’re HARD to start, but once you’ve built them, they’re really hard to disrupt. That sounds like a fun challenge, doesn’t it?

Various awesome links

Six strategies for solving the Chicken or the Egg Problem
The Ladies Night strategy, by Chris Dixon.
2 Sided Markets on Wikipedia. academic/informative, it’s wikipedia, whaddya want? The best advice here is: “..subsidized the more price sensitive side, and charged the side whose demand increased more strongly in response to growth on the other side.”
Strategies for 2 sided Markets
Competition in 2 sided markets This one has pricing model implications, but still very academic.
Quora answer on 2 sided marketplaces and conflict resolution

Chicken and egg problem on HN
Strategy Letter on Chicken & Egg Problems
Inventing Demand. “It’s a bit like asking two people who don’t know each other to fall in love. To solve this problem I decided to ‘Invent Demand’. This is how I did it.”
Market building dilemma. Focus or Buy your way in. Incentivize one side of the market to kick things off.
OnStartups answer to Chicken/Egg problem Low Risk Buyin for Sell side, Partnering with existing business, Scaffold. Great advice: ACTIVELY PICK A SIDE, don’t waffle. Actively “Simulate” one side of the transaction.

At some level, any 2 sided marketplace is competing with that ultimate – garage sale of the internet site — Craigslist. there was a hilarious hackernews thread that discussed businesses that geeks try to start. a Craigslist disruptor with an awesome user experience “on top of the Craigslist” data was on the top 5 list. My general hypothesis going in is that 2 sided marketplace businesses need to provide lots of “thick” value. In these cases, thick value could be defined as customer service, amazingly simple interface (where interface literally means the interface between the sell side and the buy side) — which has to be facilitative, simple, and a magnitude better than plain old “email” — or even what CL offers.

My other informed guess (ok, it’s kinda obvious) is that you have to start with the supply side first and then move to the buyer side.

I’m curious to learn more from other people who have gone about doing the same thing. In particular, I’m interested in: marketing strategy, pricing (lumpsum vs recurring vs transactional), and “order” of operations.

startup, strategy, design, marketplace, business

Tim Brown raised interesting questions on the ideo blog:

“Firstly, why is the design of tangible things so reliable and secondly are there lessons from attempts to design in the abstract world of economics that may be useful to all design thinkers?”

I had to stop and think about it for a while to ask if the premise behind the argument made sense: The design process, as applied to products, buildings and other tangible things is quite reliable, while the design process applied to systems and abstract products (like new financial products fashioned by wily wall street professionals) or even software can be unreliable — and often fail.

Examples	a stapler (product), is used to attach pieces of paper together. a building (architecture) provides a space for people to reside	a mutual fund or collateralized debt obligation (financial “products”) are used to obfuscate the consumer with unnecessary jargon and convey “informational superiority”. (What we’re doing picking stocks is high science and you wouldn’t get it, so you might as well pay us to do it)
	a building (architecture) provides a space for people to reside
Role of Design	The design of tangible products is straightforward in how “apparent” it is. Human beings have a wealth of experience with tangible goods — both heuristically from a very early age, and historically, from the very beginning of “made” tools. As an end user, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)	The design of complex financial instruments is intended to convey complexity and inaccessibility by the consumer. In fact, most parts of finance are intended to exploit or highlight information asymmetries, and there is very little that is “apparent” about the process.
Repercussions	The stapler will end up in a landfill after its durable use. Any perverse effects that result from a stapler might be environmental degradation, but no large scale injury can be created.	Software can be used in a variety of different ways, have non-apparent bugs, and generally “live” past the originally intended use cases. Vague financial products that people don’t understand easily cause confusion and may have perverse effects including a financial meltdown.

Despite our best efforts, on first blush, Design in the abstract (vs the tangible) seems to have many more consequences that are unforeseeable. Abstract design — mostly the kind needed today to mend large scale systems, software that has to serve a variety of purposes and needs while staying simple is much harder to get right. The coming years of Design and abstract product definition will continue to add a scientific diligence to the process that most nonpractitioners consider vague and driven by intuition. As Brown says, software — and particularly software startups (characterized by “Leanness”, fast prototyping, iterations, and transparency) is a good indicator of work processes that might overflow into other abstract systems.

Nice! I posted just a few weeks ago about the ridiculousness of the “Like Button“. Yesterday, an Unlike button showed up in the News Feed.

Hmm, Weird coincidence.

When fbook earlier this year decided to put these buttons everywhere like little pollen seeds that spread across the web, publishers and sites knew that putting incorporating it was a necessary sell-out in the world of social. They’d have to play in this tireseome little attention economy game and be well “Liked” by everyone on facebook.

I thought I was the only person who was annoyed at the visual detritus that is the ubiquitously sprayed like-button, but it turns out Ze Frank also shares in my animosity.

Ze Frank says, mockingly: “I think of the people that build all of this technology and the network.. a lot of them are not very good at connecting with other people. This is something I used to do in the 3rd grade” (and shows the picture you see below)

Is the future really about us all sharing what we “like” with our friends? Is that what connecting with others is really about? Actually, why even bother having conversations? Why not just walk around and geotag people’s foreheads with “Like” buttons?

… And why stop with Like Buttons?

There’s a Firefox extension now that allows people to “dislike” things as well. Good start, but still assumes we’re all androids that are programmed to sense the world in binary opposites.


And if we were being honest about what we really thought/felt about things on the great world of the internet, I think a “wtf?” button makes more sense.


Sorry, that last one was a multifaceted and provocative dig that probably merits its own post.

While it may be true that the social companies of today will be the dialtones that allow us to connect meaningfully to others, this first phase still feels so premature and ripe for innovation to me. I just hope that the people doing the innovating keep real people and real problems in mind.

Everyone knows that our country suffers from an obesity epidemic. We’re becoming increasingly aware, as Marco Ament of Instapaper fame points out, that we’re also suffering from information obesity.

The money quote by Arment:

People love information. Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.

This trend is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better. The proliferation of digital media means that more people are generating and sharing content than ever before, and with more mobile devices, “snack food” content in snippet form just gets easier to produce.

I wonder how many diseases are actually being caused by the waves of data (sometimes information) crashing around us — With BettrAt, we want to help people who suffer from reflection deficit disorder, but it’s clear to us that a tool alone won’t completely suffice. It relies on user commitment, institutional support, and a culture of lucidity.

{Sorry it’s been a while — I just moved to the Best Coast and have been getting settled and heads down in UX work}

I’m a big believer in business models for content based on augmentation, contextualization, and personalization. I was chatting with an old friend from Michigan EECS, Elias, and we came up with an example that’s been around for just a little while… — the Talmud. Now, I don’t know any Hebrew, but from what was explained to me — when you open the book there’s a large block of justified type, and around it, augmented layers of content by people. Over time, the border of content — the interpretations have grown while the original text has not changed.

Of course, it works really well in a religious text that is open to interpretation, but I believe that most interests and subjects work in a similar way.

In parallel with content consumption changing, the nature of content creation has dramatically morphed as well. Publishers and producers are much more willing to put out rough copies of content, see it augmented, and change on the fly. Eventually, they’ll press a giant “Publish” button that takes all that content and whams it together into a clean copy worthy of general consumption. Similar to the shift in power from producers to consumers in manufacturing and services, the lines are blurring a lot more between content producers and consumers. That “Publish” button grows a lot more figurative by the day.

One byproduct of this change is that it’s become a lot more common to push out content in rough form and get feedback on it, being responsive and adapting when necessary to fit the consumer.

Below are just a few examples of interesting constructs and blogs/sources in the brave new world of publishing that I’ve been tracking.

• if:book The defacto place to go for a continuously updated source of what’s happening with the future of the book. Love the name!
• The Knight News Challenge Gotta love “Xprize” type contests to solve problems.
• BookSquare – Used to be updated more often, but has some good stuff on it
• The New Everyday — Check out what they call “Middle State Publishing”
• Page 99 Test: Test one page of your book, and if people like it, they’ll buy it
• TenPages — Similar to Page 99, except it includes crowdfunding
• Leanpub – People in the Startup World are no strangers to LeanPub, as the venturehacks bible is a collection of blog entries (a darn good one at that)
• Corante Many to Many — Not updated anymore, but great essays by luminaries like Shirky.
• Lou Rosenfeld media — “Book Prototypes” — Being a Business Designer, I naturally love the idea.
• O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System. I *heart* O’Reilly and everything about it, so I am keen in seeing how this works out. Right now, it seems too “techy” for the masses, but it works GREAT for new programming languages – e.g. Rails3 in a nutshell
• DailyLit – Snack portions of best sellers
• Authonomy Crowds as Editors.. Hmm, good idea, but all about execution. I keep thinking of the Netflix prize — Experts are better than friends!
• Flipboard– If you haven’t used Flipboard yet, you’re missin’ out kids. It’s more about consumption, but peer production (or at least sharing) is a dominant theme
• BettrAt, my company. More on this coming soon {wink}
• KaPost, tangentially related (more news than long-form content) is a Techstars company changing how the newsroom works

I personally think we’ll find that “interleaving” (and the benefits it confers, like personalization) as an experience *and* a business model will become a larger trend that’s here to stay. Al Ries and Jack Trout tell us that selecting brands are shortcuts to decision making; In the same vein, people make choices about which publications and content to consume based on other people who are reading the same publication. Models which interleave peer feedback with your own are ripe candidates for disrupting incumbents with static models of content production/consumption.

I believe there’s huge potential for user experiences to adapt to the “current” stage in people’s lives, whatever term “current” can be applied to. Context-aware recommendations for content, services, experiences and more is a field that’s bound to explode. Companies, societies, and individuals are cropping up to serve this use-case of curating/filtering and making people aware of things when apt/necessary.

While technically it seems complicated and difficult (because it’s hard to know someone’s current state of being), I believe there’s scope for lots of the existing user experiences to take advantage of “currency” in someone’s life.

Dan Hill, noted author of City of Sound wrote about this Breville Toaster and applauded the design of the “a bit more” button. The post was commented on hacker news quite a bit and I’ve thought about its design in general a bit more.