March 2010 Archives

This is more something I wish celebrities (at least within my community) installed in their Gmail.

I wish there was a Gmail Labs plug-in that showed whether the sender has emailed you before and whether you've responded before. Maybe a little indicator (hollow green circle for when they've emailed you before, and a full green circle if you've replied back). Mousing over the circle maybe shows the number of times its happened.

The reason is that I have a habit of emailing notable people, and every so often I get a response. I've received replies from Jason Kottke, Seth Godin, and Noam Chomsky for example. However, the time between each email conversation is like six months to a year or so, and so they forget that I was worthy enough to respond to at least once before! I feel like it would make me way more relevant in their inbox, and it would help potentially build up a relationship.

Aside: I'm aware that this could be an idea for YahooMail, Outlook, or any other email service, but they won't even try to consider trying this.

It just doesn't work for the mobile web, and that constitutes half the time I look up restaurant websites. Enough said.

Apple just broke into the top five biggest publicly traded U.S. Companies. What's interesting about stock prices is how quickly our brain comes up with rationalizations. What could possibly justify this price? If you believe in market efficiency theory, Apple's price predicts the value of the company 5-10 years into the future. Why is it nearly the price of Microsoft?

1. What if the Mac has reached its tipping point?

What if the Mac is at the tipping point needed to get out of the single-digit market share and defeat the network effects of Windows? You could cite the fact that Valve announced that Steam and the Source Engine will be ported to the Mac as evidence of that tipping point, as gamers have been rejoicing in the past couple days, "Yes, I can finally leave the PC. Between Blizzard and Valve's catalog, I have all my gaming needs." Hardcore gamers and professional creatives are at forefront of workstation computing power. The professional creatives are already all Mac, but the hardcore gamers have nearly been all PC. This could change.

2. What if the iPhone takes it all?

What if this fake study I've been touting is true, that college students on average spend more time computing on their iPhones than they do on their laptops. I'm nearly certain this is true. College provides an adverse environment to personal computers due to all the beer cups everywhere, and I don't need a study to show that students obsessively check facebook in-between (and during) classes on their iPhones. The computing habits of college students are some indicator of adults' future computing habits. Also, what if the numbers for Android growth are short-lived, and users realize the only reason they have one is because they hate AT&T. Once Apple goes multi-platform I'm going back to the iPhone.

3. What if the one-good-PC computing environment breaks completely?

What if the PC breaks completely. I just read a study about how sitting down all day nullifies whatever gains you make exercising. For a moment, I thought about getting a stand-up desk for my workstation, which led to a re-imagining of my entire digital existence: I'm stretched out on my couch reading with my iPad; I'm streaming videos through my Apple TV; I'm doing random computing tasks on my laptop on my table; And then maybe, every now and then, I'm using my stand-up workstation for actual work or gaming, which could actually very well be Mac (all I need is fast Photoshop and a good Valve/Blizzard game). And then when I'm outside of the home, it's all iPhone/iPad. One of the principles of good ergonomics is variety, and if Apple's got great user experiences on laptops, workstations, eBooks, phones, and media hubs, then they're the king of the new multi-platform reality.

If only one-and-a-half of these things is true, then extrapolated 5-10 years into the future, Apple is at least as big as Microsoft.

From Wikipedia:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. ... No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

I wonder if there is a similar cognitive limit for social networks. Call it Dhingra's number and say it's three. If I adopt a new social network, another one tends to fall out of favor. For example, I phased in Twitter right around the same time I phased out Myspace.

Whatever the number is, if you assume it exists, it has interesting implications. For example, my comment in the previous post about one-off friend feeding:

Everybody is now active on multiple social networks, but their friends aren't active on the exact same ones, and so there is an untapped potential for sharing across networks. I think I would be five times more active on facebook if I could just cross-post 10% of my tweets there.

I really like the idea of cross-posting my tweets onto Google Buzz or Facebook, but I don't want those processes to be automatic. I feel that nine times out of ten, social network interface designers set up automatic feeding between services, when really, I believe users want one-off feeding.

Here's an example where it's done right. I use Gowalla (which is like Foursquare but popular in Austin), and every time you check in, it lets you tick a box whether you want that check-in to go to Facebook or Twitter. Most of the time I don't, but there's those few places that are so tweet-worthy that I just tick off the box. This is convenient because I don't have to go to my settings, turn on feeding, check in, and then turn off feeding again.

Here's an example where it's done poorly. I have a friend who uses Buzz but won't get on Google Reader. This should be fine since you can automatically feed your Shared Items on Reader onto Buzz. I was doing this initially, but then I realized that my Buzz audience was different than my Reader audience, and I wanted to share like five things in one day, but didn't want to spam my buzzards. And so I disconnected the auto-feeding. But then every now and then I see something on Reader that I'd really love to auto-post to Buzz, especially so my friend can see it, but I can't bring myself to go through the copy-paste routine.

I think this is common. Everybody is now active on multiple social networks, but their friends aren't active on the exact same ones, and so there is an untapped potential for sharing across networks. I think I would be five times more active on facebook if I could just cross-post 10% of my tweets there.

All it takes is a slight tweak to how you design friend feeding to make it go from being something that people try-then-abandon to something that reliably connects people.

This talk has been making the rounds among my game designer friends. It dissects the meaning of Farmville and connects it to other tectonic shifts happening in the marketplace of "interactables."

In a nutshell, connecting with the real world is the predominant thread of innovative products today. The iPad portends this as Apple is encouraging developers to design apps with real world metaphors.

This snippet from a box office analysis of Avatar stirs up some thoughts about marketing:

Regarding the sentiment that Avatar would need significant "repeat business" just to make up for its budget and achieve box office success, Cameron commented on sharing being a part of successful films and believed Avatar could inspire this reaction. "When people have an experience that's very powerful in the movie theatre, they want to go share it. They want to grab their friend and bring them, so that they can enjoy it," he said. "They want to be the person to bring them the news that this is something worth having in their life. That's how Titanic worked."

There's probably a more accurate term for this, but here's a story:

What if I told you that I have a methodology that beats the S&P 500 eighty-percent of the time? And what if I added that I backtested it for the past 25 years? You'd be impressed right, given that only 10% of mutual funds beat the S&P 500 and that most backtests are 10 years.

But I'd be withholding some crucial information: this is the third methodology that I tried.

The first one I tried was to pick stocks according to the release date of game-changing products. For example, investing in Apple when the iPhone or iPod came out (Note: this assumes you can identify a game-changing product before the rest of the investors can, which is nowhere near a safe assumption). However, when I backtested this, the results were a wash.

The second methodology I tried involved investing in Fast Company's list of Innovative companies. The idea is that innovative companies have to keep growing. However, the results here were a wash too.

So now, we come to my third methodology (which I won't disclose right now), and aha! Not only does it have interesting narrative logic, it backtests profoundly well! So give me all your money!

The moral of the story is that given enough attempts, you can find a formula/methodology/algorithm/system that backtests incredibly well against benchmarks. Likewise, every year, 5-10% of mutual funds are going to have amazing historicals. But in a year, there will be a different list of funds, and a year later, a another list.

At best, backtesting should be a sanity check. If your formula doesn't backtest well, then it's probably not valid. But if it does, that should just be the beginning of your analysis.

For what it's worth, I have a unique vantage point to comment on these three services. I just posted the identical job for an illustrator on all three services, and of the three, Elance came out ahead, oDesk next, and Guru last. I got 17 bids on Elance, 11 on oDesk, and 2 on Guru (I also got 6 from craigslist's Austin gigs section). On Elance, 5 people submitted samples directly related to my project, on oDesk just 1. I got one sample from Austin's craigslist, but it was crummy.

I've also been using Elance for hiring iPhone developers and their web tools are slick and polished. I also unexpectedly found an Ace of a developer there.

So Bottom Line, go with Elance.

And I wouldn't bother with Rentacoder or scriptlance, their sites look crummy and they have nowhere near the traffic as the other three.