misotv:

“Movin’ on up to the eastside.”  We didn’t exactly move to a deluxe apartment in the sky, but it’s close enough.  Here are some pics from our move and some people hard at work at Miso.

misotv:

We’re excited to announce another new feature in Miso for iPhone: Shout!

I have worked for platform companies and I have worked for companies that have built major parts of their business on platforms.  At the end of the day, if you’re not the platform OR you’re just a feature, you will get screwed in the end.  

It’s as simple as that. Don’t act like you didn’t know.

Platforms control the roadmap. If you build a feature, you will die or get eaten(maybe).

“With power comes great responsibility.”

The right thing for Twitter to do at @chirp today is to provide, what I refer to, as a heat map, which is a 12-month platform roadmap broken down into red, yellow, green feature areas as defined below:

• Red: Don’t touch feature areas Twitter will definitely build internally (ie it’s already in place) or buy (we have intentions of acquiring). Signal to developers: Don’t compete with us, but if you want to build do it, but there may be only one winner.
• Yellow: Features that Twitter is not sure whether they will build but it’s in the realm of possibility.  Signal to developers: Enter at your own risk.
• Green: Features that Twitter don’t have any plans to build in the next 12-months or in the 36-month horizon.  These are suggested business opportunities.  Fred Wilson tells this to Twitter developers, these are the real business opportunities.

We’ve seen most Twitter developers developing products/features in the Red and Yellow zone.  Here’s the Red zone:

• Location = Feature (a big one, but Twitter is just getting started. Maybe SimpleGeo or Geodelic get acquired, but I doubt it, since their feature sets are super robust and have wider application)
• URL shorterner = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy bit.ly because of Betaworks but won’t be surprised if they create their own since bit.ly is used everywhere)
• Post video = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy vidly)
• Post photo = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy TwitPic)
• Client developed exclusively for Twitter = feature (put one developer on it, or in Twitter’s case buy the developer) 
• …

I agree with Mark Suster.  Twitter needs to sit down with Twitter developers (maybe that’s what they are going to do at Chirp) and provide clear direction.  I think the heatmap is the way to go.  It’s clean & simple. Curious to see what’s going to come out of it. 

Take the platform at it’s face value.  

As a developer, Facebook is a social graph and a feed.   Use it just for those things.  Gaming works well because you use Facebook to play with your friends and you use the feed as a way to communicate what’s happening within your game.  That’s why Zynga is building a great business on the Facebook platform.

At Socialmedia.com, I saw us build a business on top of Facebook that grew to be very profitable only to find it was killed by Facebook because they controlled the way developers could use the API.  Now Socialmedia.com is the platform that enables publishers to sell ads.

I also worked at Right90 (quanity-unit forecasting), where our product was comprehensive and we integrated with Salesforce.com.  Salesforce started building it’s own forecasting products, and we were always unsure if they were a good partner or a competing partner.  It created lots of friction in our channel sales efforts.  As one of the early sales guys, I can tell you, it wasn’t easy. Now, Right90 sells it’s product stand alone by building a very core business with enterprise value (don’t miss your forecast), and integrating with Salesforce.com is now a second thought.

Twitter is a communication protocol. 

It’s a stream of information.  Developers should use Twitter in that way - push or pull- and if there is any business to build on top of it, it’s figuring out what to do with that stream of information and build unique technology that adds value to people’s understanding of the stream.

Foursquare will pull a Twitter.

So the question is there room for open innovation on a platform? @seth asked:

“now that twitter is “guiding” its ecosystem, like fb before it, who will emerge as the next wide open platform for startup innovation?”

Tristan’s response.

Unless your business is open source software, there is no such thing as 100% open innovation.  There isn’t and I don’t care what people say.  When it comes down to it, as a platform grows its’ business, it will “do whatever it takes to grow its’ business”.  If that means building features to compete with its’ developers, then they’ll do it. If it means kill the ecosystem for the short-term, they will do it. If it means change developers API policies, it will do it.  Why? Because they have to make money.

I love how Flixup! is considered something that won’t be “gobbled up”(read Fred Wilson’s post), but the reality is that if Twitter wants to get in the “eye-ball” business, which it is (ie launch Twitter ad platform), Flixup! is in the yellow zone.

We are not working on Flixup! right now because we think there is a bigger opportunity behind Miso, but if there is anybody out there that wants to buy it, please let me know.

Contact: somrat@bazaarlabs.com

If you haven’t checked out Miso, you should. (Miso is a Foursquare-like app for TV for the iPhone.  Download it here).  One feature that we have been requested from some of the people we have talked to is the ability to talk to other friends about a TV show in real-time.   I’m not sure this will work for MOST TV shows.  

The idea of real-time is getting so much buzz right now, but would people actually give play-by-plays of what they are watching?  Would you do it? 

People just want to watch the TV show.  Who wants to start engaging in real-time chatter with their friends through an app while their favorite show is on TV.  People just want to watch the content and move on.  This is not necessarily true of ALL TV shows - live events like Oscars, MTV Music Awards, sports games, where there are performances and people are not 100% tuned-in to every single aspect of the show, well, in that case, sure real-time chatter could be fun and useful.   

It seems that even in the broader scale, this just doesn’t work which is why YouTube just killed their real-time toolbar.

Google Buzz just launched today and one of the most interesting product decisions the Google team made was that on sign-up, you automatically follow people who you email and chat with the most.   This is very different than how most social apps operate.  On foursquare, you search for a friend-> manual follow your friend  -> your  friend then approves.  Gowalla works in a similar way and so does 100s of other social apps, including the largest one of them all, Facebook.

I find it personally frustrating that every single time I use a new app, I have to find friends, ask them to join the app, then they have to approve, and so forth.  If Facebook is my defacto social graph, why can’t the auto-follow model work?

But maybe there is something more to this.

While it might be more convenient to have an auto-follow feature, there are two inherent flaws:

• Just because you email/chat with people in your address book doesn’t mean you want to follow everything they say. This holds true for Plancast, Foursquare, Gowalla, and who knows what else.  Just because you email someone a lot doesn’t mean you care what they are planning to do (ie Plancast).  I think in MOST cases (which Google is betting on), you probably do care what they have to say, but maybe it’s the edge cases for why the model won’t work.
• Search ->Manual Follow->Approve is necessary for a service to take off. The fact that I get an email when someone wants to be my friend on Foursquare reminds me that the service exists.  It bring me back to the app.  Or the fact that someone subscribes to the things I have planned to do, makes me feel that someone cares about what I have planned. These social nuances make me want to use the service more and more.

Maybe auto-follow with the ability to “unfollow” is the way to go OR maybe Google is just using it to seed the service with the intent that the ability to manually follow people will be the method of the future, it’s still too early to tell, but other social service apps have taken off for a reason.  Maybe…just maybe Google should learn something from that or are they just smarter than us?

I have found analogies are the easiest way start-up companies communicate who they are.

Analogies are even a great way to communicate industry trends too (Ryan Spoon from Polaris Ventures uses analogies to discuss the difference between SEO and SGO here). Also, in this video, Bob Metclafe uses the “history of the internet” as a rubric to explain what advances need to occur in the clean-tech space.

Here’s the thing, it sounds easy to create an analogy, doesn’t it? It’s not, but if you find one that works, it’s a great way to communicate who you are in less than 15s.

Let me first go through the different analogies I hear in start-up corporate marketing messages:

1. We are X of/for Y. (e.g Flixup is the Rotten Tomatoes for Twitter, SocialMedia.com is creating the DoubleClick of the Social Web).  I’m a big fan of this, it’s simple, if you attach yourself to something mainstream enough.
2. We are X #.0. (e.g Mint is Quicken 2.0).  This is not as helpful because the term 2.0 is overly inflated but also doesn’t answer the question “how are you better”
3. We are X meets Y meets Z (e.g Foursquare is Social Network meets GPS meets Game).  **Foursqure doesn’t position themselves this way, they call themselves a location-based social network** The x+y+z only works, in my mind, if you’re communicating a fairly abstract idea that’s really new.  The challenge is that people will still be royally confused about who are you, since you’re a bit of everything. (I generally find people who speak x+y+z don’t know who they are quite yet)

When I worked at Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff used analogies to communicate a new product message all the time.  One of the most common methods was to use consumer product concepts and bring them to the enterprise.  That was his whole thing.  Here are some of them (not exactly in his words, but some derivative)

• SaaS/On-Demand Software - “In the same way you can access your email online, you should be able to access your CRM from anywhere.  It needs to be that simple.  Access it anywhere at anytime.” Marc uses the ease of accessing email as an analogy to communicate how it should be easy to access your accounts & contacts.
• AppExchange - “The AppExchange is the iTunes of the Enterprise.  We made it that simple.  Go to appexchange.com, browse all these great enterprise solutions, and like iTunes, download it to your org.  No software, no installations.”.  To make the message really simple, use something everyone is familiar with, Here is an article.
• Salesforce Chatter - “In the same way that you have your Twitter feed and your Facebook feed, Salesforce Chatter is your enterprise real-time feed.”  Salesforce Chatter is a real-time social network for the enterprise.

This worked for Salesforce and for 100s of companies, but here are some caveats about using analogies in the “who-you-are” conversation:

• Your analogy must contain a fairly mainstream company.  For instance, suppose you used Blippy in your company analogy.  Not enough people know who Blippy actually is - why even use it?   It might be helpful to communicate to people who understand the service but as part of a larger marketing story, it won’t be effective.
• The analogy needs to be 100% obvious.  I advised a company focused on field service management.  The simplest way to communicate who they were was to say “We’re the Salesforce.com of Field Service Management”.  People got it.  It was 100% obvious.  (They never used that positioning for other reasons, but I still vouch for it).
• Keep the analogy simple.  I’m not a fan of the we’re X+Y+Z.  That’s basically saying, you don’t know who you are and then the listening party is confused who are you more like, X, Y, or Z?
• Know your audience.  When we created flixup!, we wanted to be the “Lifestream for movies.  We surface the movie conversations from all your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc) “.  10% of the people that I spoke to knew what I was talking about.  Lifestrea, though it was part of AOL, was not mainstream enough, and wasn’t resonating well.  We had to make it more attached to “how people decide what movies watch” - we started using Rotten Tomatoes in our analogy.

When your company name is part of the analogy, you must be doing something right.   That means you’re mainstream and simple to understand.

NOTE: We don’t have all the answers and we are still trying to figure out who we are and identifying the analogies that best define us.  Hopefully one day, we’ll be part of the analogy!

The Douchebag badge on Foursquare is getting a lot of attention these days.  I’m not sure if it’s because of the controversial word, or because it’s so damn funny (well at least I think it is), one thing is for sure, there is something to learn from the “Douchebag” badge when creating an iPhone app.

1) Get people talking by creating something equivalent to the “Douchebag” badge.  This was really smart from a marketing perspective - create a badge that gets people talking.  I came into the office and some friends, some who weren’t on Foursquare, immediately interrogated me: “How did you get that badge?” or better yet “What is it?”  This got me talking about Foursquare, what it is, how I got the badge - amazing.  No viral optimization made this happen except someone noticing the Douchebag badge on Facebook. I’m not sure if this got the ones who weren’t on Foursquare to use the app, but I’m sure the users who were already using the app, were intrigued.

Why does this matter? My theory for why Foursquare is taking off is because of all the offline conversations that are generated from the app and it’s broadcasted social experiences on Facebook.  If your app is not “Featured” on the App Store or if you’re not spending $10K to get to the top 20 within an app category, it’s REALLY hard to get noticed.  Generate some conversation and your app might organically grow.

2) The marketing of social capital - in this case, the badge, matters.  This is an extension to #1.  The fact that a badge appears on Facebook and friends can see what badges you’re getting, adds a lot of value to the solo-user experience. If the name of the badge was anything other that Douchebag, it wouldn’t have generated as much conversation.  The guys who got it (me, included) are thinking “Whoa, cool!”.  The women, well, I can’t speak on behalf of them, but I can only imagine they are feeling some sense of emotion around the existence of the app badge.  They created something that pushed the boundaries - and in some cases, pissing people off.  The fact that the acquiring a badge with “Douchebag” in the name is attached to your profile (indirectly your social capital) and stirs some emotion is a good thing for creating loyalty to your app(or no loyalty if you don’t like it, for that matter).  Whether foursquare can do this in the long run as they become more mainstream is yet to be determined, but carefully picking the name so it stirs some sense of emotion is a good thing.

Oh, and those wondering how to get the Douchebag - just go to to Tipsy Pig.

Facebook has some amazing features, but recently I found the “Suggestions” corner on the top-right a little too much.  Forcing “reconnecting” with people is my favorite.

The question is….. who is this guy and why is Facebook suggesting we become friends when we have no friends in common.

I love technology.

Every start-up company that is creating a consumer-focused business is using Facebook and Twitter as channels to acquire users.  This should be no surprise given the access to massive amount of users, but the ultimate fallacy behind building the “push to X social network feature” is just because you add a “Share to X” button on your app/site doesn’t necessarily mean: (1) users on your site will click on the button and share the content and (2) friends of those users on X will click on the link that you’re passing along with the content .

In the case of #1, the real questions consumer product managers need to answer are:

• Do people want to share what you WANT them to share?
• Is the content you want them to share interesting enough?
• How easy are you making it to share that content?
• Ultimately, do people really want to share what you want them to share?

In the case of #2, regarding driving traffic back to your app/site:

• What pieces of information did you post back to X social network?  Was it text-only? Do images help? What was the exact text? Did you update the status or update the news feed?
• If it was a news feed post, did you contain a picture with the post?  Was the post interesting enough?
• What was the Call-to-Action for the friend and was it compelling enough?

Most startups build their products based on the premise that they will acquire users based on leveraging these viral channels.  It seems so obvious, yet many of them fail, not because they haven’t optimized all techniques of the channel, but because fundamentally people don’t want to share what you WANT them to share.

I am not claiming that I have the answer to these questions, but I am claiming that as product managers, we’re focused on the wrong thing.  Rather than focusing on optimizing viral channels, using Facebook Connect, or what should the post look-like, we should first ask “Do people want to share my content?”  Just because you give the opportunity to share content back to Facebook, doesn’t mean they will.

So, as a product manager, in order to increase #1 and #2, we should ask the question, “What do people want to share and WHY do people want to share it?”

There has been a flurry of interesting consumer products that have made a name for themselves in 2009: Foursquare, Gowalla, Plancast, Dropbox, to name a few.  What I have found particularly interesting about these products, is they are (1) changing user behavior and (2) generating offline conversations.

Changing User Behavior

When you walk into a restaurant now, it’s natural to ‘check-in’ on Foursquare OR Gowalla.  If you have used Dropbox, they are changing the way people collaborate and share documents.  Prior to Dropbox, you might have emailed yourself the docs that you have created.

In my opinion, most consumer media sites built by startup companies fail because they can’t figure out how to change behavior.  It is a difficult problem that I, as a founder, am trying to solve for.

So here’s how we’re looking at it (advice given by one of our advisors).  Ask yourself:

• What problem are you solving for?
• What behavior change are you trying to make?
• If you’re a consumer app/site, what single action do you want people to take?

Foursquare is check-in.  Gowalla is check-in. Plancast is sharing what you’re planning to do. Twitter is sharing “What’s happening”?  Get people to do that one action.  Be maniacally focused on getting it right.  If you can’t get people to do that one action you want them to do, that you came up with, try something else.

Generating offline conversation

Once you figure out how to change user behavior, you need to get people talking about your app, not online, but offline (ie in the real world).

It’s always amazing to see which apps on the iPhone emerge and create attention.  I’m not talking about the IMDB app, or Facebook app, where there is an iconic brand who has created the app, I’m talking about the “Joe-Shmo” app that you’ve never heard of that is killing it in the app store.  Obviously getting featured on the app store helps, but the apps that are really delivering value are the ones where you find yourself talking about the app offline.

Scenario #1: No one is using the app except you

Guy: [walking into the restaurant with friends. Opens up Foursquare]

Friend of Guy: What are you doing?

Guy: I’m checking in to Foursquare.

Friend of Guy: What’s Foursquare? (and so forth)

Scenario #2: Your friends are using the app already

Jack: Sweet, I just a new badge.

Jill: What badge did you just get?

Jack: Super User.  How many badges do you have?

Jill: Just 2.

In scenario #1, because of word-of-mouth, the app will most likely get another install.  In scenario #2, you’ll get more usage from friends because the product they created has generated a little bit of competition.  As a result, for both Jack and Jill, usage will increase.

So the question is - what user behavior change and offline conversation are you trying to create?