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Social websites and their vision statements

So what do you think the goal of these websites are: Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, YouTube, etc?   Wouldn’t you love to read the original business plan vision, mission and strategy statments?   I bet it is full of B.S. and what they stated in there business plans was very specific and they became something else.    Facebook prolly had something like, “To recreate the high school/college yearbook online”.    Total crap, they became a lot more then that.

Why are some of these sites so successful and others not so successful?   Look at Twitter ridiculous growth curve.   Do you think they had some vision of becoming a tool for other companies/applications backbone?

I have been reading one my favorite authors, Seth Godin’s latest book.   And it hit me that all these websites basically should have the same vision and mission statement.   Why some are successfull and others are not is really a case of how close their statements are to the following or just dumb luck.

Vision - Create online community

Mission - To enable users to tell there story, connect with others, and promote discussion

Now you look at that and say, how do you get from that to Facebook?   Well, that is a long story but you can look at your Facebook account and the applications you use and look at the ones you passed on.   My bet is the ones you passed on add no value to your interaction with others or are just stupid marketing applications.

Speaking of marketing, look how bad companies are implementing it on social networks.   I get at least an invite a day to some twitter user that is following 55,000 users.   Like anyone is going to follow them and listen to their marketing BS.   Definately old school and pretty much completely worthless today.   I’m afaid Seth Godin is correct, old school marketing is dead.   Move on and use the social web as it is intended.   To tell a story, interact with others and garner discussion.

Posted 02 August 2008 † Geoff § Business § Marketing § social web ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Death of the social community. Long live the social community!

Many of my peer call me an old fart.   Yeah, I’m the oldest at the office.   I remember in my youth the community that existed on Signal Mountain, TN.   It was great to be a kid, plenty of woods and caves to explore.  But the community was there.  People knew there neighbors and small business owners.   They new everything that was going on in town.   If something bad happened, or there as an escaped convict from the chain gang that worked the roads, the word went out and went out quickly.    Now remember, this is a time before internet, before cell phones, before cable and there was only 3 channels on TV: CBS,  NBC, and ABC.   Everyone took a sense of pride in there town and community.

Since then I have seen many town have a complete breakdown of community.  No body cares about small business, where is the Walmart?   Neighborhoods are full of people that do not talk to each other.   My wife and I moved out of town to the county.   No yard nazi’s telling people they didn’t edge there yard and did you get approval for that bush?   Yet in our neighborhood people talk to each other and watch out for each other.   Maybe we are the last few folks that hold on to geographical community, but for the most part, geographical community is dead.

Long live the social community!  Community is a group of people with shared beliefs.   This still exists in churches in these small towns but instead of the one or two churches in the community, there seems to be one on every block.   Online communities are far and wide, banding together every conceivalbe interest imagine.   But again, these online communities are very fragmented.   This is a coffee community, this is a gaming community, this is a cycling community.   All these disjointed communities are not connected directly.

Facebook, Myspace created their groups to have members associate communal ideas.   The exchange of information on these communities seems to be light and more a “I vote this is cool” then actually participate in the community.   FriendFeed came out as an aggragator of “lifestream”.    A person can setup a FriendFeed account and pull in al the activity he is doing elsewhere on the internet.    So if I want to see what Geoff Corey is doing, I go to his lifestream feed at FriendFeed.com/geoffcorey.   FriendFeed has gone further and created Rooms.   Rooms are kind of like a topic centric.   So if I do a post about coffee, I may repost the link in the “Coffee Lovers” room.   The beauty of these rooms is the article is a  cross-link to my lifestream.   So if someone posts a commet or simply likes the article that shows up in my lifestream.   I can even have the comments linked into my own blog (see below the article!).

FriendFeed also allows you to subscribe to other people.    Here is beginnings of friendship.   So I join a topic of interest room on Social Media and see some posts of a like minded individual.   By subscribing to the individual, I see other things they are doing on the net.   This may or may not be something I’m interested in, but  I have now been exposed to new things to do, read or try.   In effect, I have made my own personalized community that I interact with on a broad set of topics without any geographical connection.

Posted 02 August 2008 † Geoff § social web ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Coffeeshops in the suburbs

Despite great demographics in the Cary/Apex NC area, many independent coffee shops are failing.   In the last year in a 4 mile radius, Leaping Lizards, Pheasant Creek Coffee, Daily Perk, and Blue Rain Cafe have all closed.  Certainly the higher gas prices are taking a toll on Americans pocketbooks.   Specialty coffee is usually one of the first things people cut back on to save a few dollars.

As a previous owner of Pheasant Creek Coffee, now defunct, and seeing numerous other shops in the same area to fail, I believe there is more then just gas prices at play here causing the decline of excellent coffee in the suburbs.   For gas prices rising and people cutting back to close a shop it clearly the last straw.   That means many of these shops were already struggling with times were good.   Let me hit on several factors that make it hard to survive in the suburbs.

Location, location, location.  Yeah, it is always #1.   Location has to have high traffic volume and visibility.  At Pheasant Creek Coffee we were on the path for one of the busiest roads in Apex.   On the right side of the road for commuters.   Same for Blue Rain Cafe!   They were located just before you get on the highway to city.   Daily Perk was also on a busy commuter route and Leaping Lizards was right across the street from us.   So what happened?   Well, Daily Perk was high inaccessable shopping center on the wrong side of the road for commuters.   Leaping Lizards shared a space with Bruggers Bagels and they sell their own coffee.   Pheasant Creek Coffee and Leaping Lizards both had visibility problems.   The town of Apex does not allow index signs for shopping centers, so the 24,000 commuters passing through town from Fuquay Varina and Holly Springs never new we existed.   Apex also requires the shopping centers to be landscaped.  By the 3rd year the trees in the parking lot completely hide all signage on the buildings for passing moterists.   Blue Rain?  Not entirely sure what happened there.   It all looked good on paper.  They were visible to road, had a drive thru window.   Possibly motorists passing through thought it was a lunch place based on the name.

Apex has another problem, 70% residential.   That means all the office workers are somewhere else and the town is essentially depopulated during the day.   So if you don’t get the commuter crowd you have a hard time making it up during the day.   The demographics also point to a lot of young families.   As the father of twins + 1, I can remember the days when they were young and I seriously thought twice about going anywhere.   Too much effort.   So many of the stay at home moms rarely ventured.   Plus these moms are trying to save money as well.   Raising youngings is expensive.

What about the nightlife?  Out in the suburbs, people have built their own entertainment in the house.   From pools, home theater, pool tables, video games.   Heck, do you know that in 2007 video game industry revenues exceeeded Hollywood films?   Plus, being young families with children, many would eat out early and be home by 8pm.   Not exactly the happening town for singles, so if your single you hit the city where the action is all night.

If I ever did it again, I would do it only in the city.   In the city there is population density and that lasts all day long.   Many live in apartments and I know when I was single in an apartment I’d go stir crazy.   A coffeeshop is a great getaway to read a book or work on a laptop.   Location and visibility is still key as well as quality but if the population isn’t there you won’t have a chance in hell to make it.   Right now the only two suburban shops that are surviving are doing so off of wholesale accounts.   If they are not selling out the backdoor, I doubt they will survive more then 2 - 3 years.

Posted 19 July 2008 † Geoff § Business § Coffee § Economy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Online Social Communication: Good or Bad?

With ways of communicating increasing does this help or hurt us?   We can communicate with our computers, mobile phones in more ways then we have ever been able to before.   With social sites such as MySpace, Facebook and personal blogs we have opened up rapid communication with friends and the world.   With the advent of Twitter, micro-blogging we have seen secondary tools created to monitor the noise level of keywords.   A boon for marketing and advertisers.   With QIK, folks can capture video and audio in real time and broadcast it live on the net or save it for later viewing.  Just a matter of time before we see a QIK user scoop CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.   Now with Seesmic, random people are having video conversations.

Clearly, teens and tweens using MySpace we have seen the good, bad and ugly.  Often mirroring the clicks of adolescents school behavior.  You see some kids get carried away with popularity, crushes with everyone asking who everyone likes, plotting and scheming.   Some of the good things is it allows kids to talk about problems without tying up the family phone all night.   That constant communication can also be bad with drama generation and online bullying.   Often heads do not get a chance to cool off before someone says something they cannot take back.

For adults what does this rapid communication do for you or society?   In general, people want to be social including introverts.   This growth of communication vehicles have allowed old friends to hook up and continue their friendships regardless of geographical location.   More voices can lend more experience to problems being solved.   Easier methods of communication allow the quick alerts of breaking news.  Twitter was able to broadcast the news of the China earthquake minutes before the USGS broke the news.

Seesmic offers another level of face to face communication.   Good or bad?  Know body really knows, but it is an interesting level of detached communication.   Users can record their thoughts and people can post their video replies.  I’m sure some topics will become flame fests, while others will be interesting conversations of thoughts and ideas.   It would be interesting to monitor if this site grows to the level where people solve real world problems.

At this point there are now multiple levels of communication and vehicles to deliver:

Quick thoughts/events to the world:  Twitter, QIK, Plurk

Quick thoughts to a friend: Instant Messenger, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

Quick blurbs: FriendFeed, Pownce, Seesmic

Long talks:  Blogs, Webzines

Each of these sites target certain audiences or overlap each other in many areas.   For those that like a lot of action should checkout FriendFeed and their rooms.   Pretty good site to monitor your friends feeds from all sorts of social networks but they also support “Rooms” to talk about specific topics.   They do a nice job of making the user feel welcome to jump in the conversation or simply give a nod of approval or disapproval without comment.

The barrage of communication now available is like drinking from a fire hose.  Sifting through the information to get or add value too can be overwhelming for some and fun for others.   I myself now monitor 35 blogs with Google Reader and discover new blogs that interest me from my friends in the social network.  If a particular article is interesting and I want to take note of it, I will put a star on it in Google Reader so I can go back to it.  Many times I will bookmark it using Del.ico.us.   If I think others should take a gander at the article I can share the article on Google Reader and it will show up on my Blog and FriendFeed accounts.  And the cycle continues!

I can say that I have enjoyed hooking up with like-minded peers on these social networks and reading what they have to say.   I feel my knowledge of certain areas and trends has grown as a result.  What are your experiences?

Posted 13 June 2008 † Geoff § Cool Tech § Enjoying Life § Uncategorized § social web ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Business and technology planning - do it now before it is too late!

I was having a discussion over the Friend Feed Social-Media room if people thought there were any parallels to the Dot-Com (Bomb) days with Social Web companies.   Some great points were made that there is a much larger audience now versus then and one comment that software platforms are more accommodating and the barrier to market is a lot less.   Both excellent points and the last one dovetailed into one of my other questions stuck in my head, “Why would anyone develop on the Google Application Engine knowing that they could change pricing within 90 days?”  Why?  Low cost entry and instant scalability.

Now developing on GAE does not mean success for a business.  Let us suppose the favorite application architecture discussion going these days: Twitter.   Twitter has had quite a few outages in the last month.  Clearly as a result of hockey-stick growth they are enjoying.   So the argument and test applications on GAE have been developed, why don’t they just use GAE?   Well there is one problem: Money.  Twitter is a great application with no revenue stream.   So if they developed on GAE and they hit the hockey stick, how are they going to pay for all the bandwidth, CPU and disk?   The infrastructure is no longer a fixed cost but a variable one if you want to scale that number of users.   I assume Google will place some sort of limitations on billing and application usage.   But the problem all comes down to money.   Let’s assume  Google does limit resources your application can consume.  If you app is Twitter, then do you turn off the application when those limits are reached for the month?  Surely that will not work for the business, however you can not spend more then your cash reserves allow you to spend!

Once again money becomes the single problem to crack.  More importantly, cash flow.   If the business model does not a have a revenue model built into the business plan, your dead already.   If the business model is spend money and be popular and sell, you best go play poker in Vegas.   The business has to have a revenue model that works.   If you develop on GAE, the barrier to entry is small but you have to have a scalable revenue model such that you know the cost of each user addition.   So when your business does hit the hockey curve, you can increase the resources available without worries of running out of cash.

Writing a business plan is key to the success of the business, the underlying idea for the business does not ensure success.   In that regard, there are a lot of social web companies that look very similar to the dot-com days with VC money pouring in and very little revenue coming out.  Revenue must be around the corner according to this article on Information Week

Posted 07 June 2008 † Geoff § Business § Software Development § social web ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Designing for the social web

Just got this book and already I am impressed with the author, Joshua Porter. He is very clear and concise on designing social websites. There are design pitfalls and differentiation issues that need to addressed. Focus on what you are designing and building needs to be clear and concise, much like a mission statement for a business. Defining what you are and more importantly, what you are not is very important.

The power of the social web is undeniable but few understand how to leverage the power of the people. The future of the web is building social networks. The goal of companies is to leverage social networks. IMHO, the big stoic companies that are always behind the curve do this the cheap way with advertising. Smart innovative companies will be leveraging social networks by being a participant and having the consumers recommend their products.

I have seen first hand the power of social networking where I work at GameVee.com and I am a firm believer that social marketing through referral is a lot more powerful then advertising. It really has always been this way outside of the web as people ask their friends for recommendations rather then say, “I found an advertisement on page 10D of the local newspaper and I want to buy that!” A perfect example of business leveraging the social web is Amazon.com

Even with the big boys of Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr and new comers Pownce and host of others, the social web is still in its infancy.

Posted 13 May 2008 † Geoff § Software Development § social web ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The screen saver does not work when you use a Microsoft wireless pointing device on a Windows Vista-based computer

A friend of mine at work told me about this bug on his Grandma’s computer.   I didn’t believe it until I saw the Microsoft Knowledge Base article.   What the hell does a wireless mouse have to do with a screen saver?   What kind of spaghetti code is this OS? A perfect example of why you should never go to Microsoft Vista!

Posted 06 May 2008 † Geoff § Funny ‡ Comments (0) °

How a live podcast showcased cool internet communication technologies

I got to see the most amazing flurry of communication using internet technologies. I work for GameVee.com, a user community geared to gamers to share their video game play. The company sponsored the live Diggnation podcast in San Francisco for Episode 148 (see below). Diggnation is a podcast by the founders of Digg.com: Alex Albright and Kevin Rose. A log of folks thought the show would stream live Wednesday and a bunch of hit the live feed stream at Revision3. However, as we joined we found they were not setup at the venue Mighty to stream. Quick hits to Kevin Rose’s Twitter account and we found that he was streaming live his drive to Mighty via his cell phone and QIK.com. Amazing technology. His stream inside Mighty was not that good but folks watching the live stream noted that Veronica of Techzilla podcast was streaming live at Mighty. Using her phone she was streaming live audio and video over wifi (cell connections were choppy) and there were 10,000 people watching and chatting along with the video.

The show was great and Kevin and Alex went head to head on Call of Duty 4! You can see the video at GameVee.com

Posted 03 May 2008 † Geoff § Cool Tech § Enjoying Life § Games § Podcast ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Apple MacBook Pro burning up

Trying to cool off the MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro on top of match boxes

So my co-worker Mark was converting videos on his MacBook Pro with duel-core intel chips and the think shut itself down from the heat it generated. The laptop was sitting on glass top desk. So we figure if we raised it of the desk it would cool it off enough from the air flowing underneath. We picked the laptop up and the bottom was untouchable it was so hot. We fixed it by putting it on top of two uberboxes of strike anywhere matches.

Posted 01 May 2008 † Geoff § Funny ‡ Comments (0) °

How Starbucks lost its way and where their customers are going . . .

Anyone in the coffee industry knew Starbucks was not on a good path. Starbucks is a slave to Wall Street and long ago, started to undercut it’s brand by installing Super-Automatic Espresso machines in lew of training it’s baristas. Recently, Starbucks hit major stumbles. The founder that was horrified by the the board pushing to start selling sandwiches in the stores leaked his famous memo about Starbucks losing it’s way. The board responded by bringing Schultz back as CEO.

The biggest mistake was Starbucks naming McDonald’s as a competitor. McDonald’s was testing McCafe 2.0 after the first attempt failed. McD’s knew that Starbucks brand was weakening and went for the juggler. McD’s realized they can make the same coffee with the same consistency by using Starbuck’s operational model: install super-automatics and you can deal with high turnover labor that they do not have to invest a lot of training.

So basically, Starbucks announced they have lost there way, McD’s is their competitor, and they have overcharged for a sub-par product. It is no surprise Starbucks customers are leaving them. With the economy down, many folks seeing the pinch of $4 gas and inflation in the grocery store, have cut out espresso drinks or are going to McD’s. The high end customers have been leaving for years to local independent coffee shops that focus on quality.

Many of the independents are buying organic and fair trade or direct trade coffee beans. They grind right before they brew. They train their barista’s to pull proper espresso machines like a fine chef. Many of these baristas compete in regional and national competitions.

If you are looking for a better quality of life, then try your local shop or see the Espresso Map for the top coffee shops in the nation. Nothing beats coffee less then 2 weeks off the roast and espresso made from beans 4-5 days off the roast. Starbucks will never be able to compete against the local shops because the supply chain for distributing roasted coffee takes 2 weeks before it leaves the warehouse. Even if they did, both McD’s and Starbucks are unable to adjust the grind for the temperature and humidity to pour a proper espresso shot. Espresso shot should run for 23 to 27 seconds and have a reddish creamy color. Temperature and humidity will make the shot run fast or slow. Fast shots are almost completely blond and taste horrid where as slow shots will make your hair stand on end. Stay with the local shops that know what they are doing and your life will enjoy a nice upgrade in satisfaction.

Posted 01 May 2008 † Geoff § Coffee ‡ Comments (0) °