The AppsLab

I’ve been in software product management for about ten years now.

Connect, my latest product, has reached a critical stage in its life. It’s the first product I’ve managed from its inception, so I’m getting interesting new experience as it grows.

It’s pretty robust and has most of the big features people need in a social platform. So, we’re trying to decide what’s next: build something new or add incremental features.

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Our last release increased the codebase quite a bit, and Rich and Anthony are busy documenting and refactoring the code and writing tests for all the new stuff they built. I know, it’s backwards, but we pushed pretty hard to get it done on a timeline.

Since they’re tied up, Paul and I have plenty of time to noodle what we’d like to do next and what we should do next. Every product team is faced with this decision, and there is never an easy answer. So, in addition to pondering our future direction and strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of managing a product. Read More »

Photo by Ernst Moeksis on Flickr used under Creative Commons

The events surrounding the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death last week bring up issues with news reporting that I think are worth discussing.

Granted, this discussion isn’t new, but it’s interesting, at least to me.

Twitter offers a new channel to reporters, due to its immediacy and network effects, i.e. it’s very quick to publish and easy to spread a story to thousands of people. Obviously, this appeals to mainstream media as a distribution channel.

However, as we saw last week, Twitter doesn’t wait for standard journalistic practices like fact-checking. In the case of Michael Jackson’s death, Twitter (and TMZ) turned out to be correct, but I wonder if this will have a detrimental effect on future news reporting.

News outlets like to have exclusives and scoops because being first and exclusive adds readers and viewers. Adding readers and viewers means more advertisement, which means more money. Balancing the desire to be first and exclusive with accuracy has always been a fine line for every news-reporting outlet. After all accuracy builds trust, which also means more readers/viewers.

Twitter completely breaks this model because anyone can say anything and pass it off as truth, or mistakenly have it interpreted as truth. Read More »

I’ve been yammering on about trust as the key component to encouraging participation in online communities for a couple weeks.

Today, Facebook opened its walls to allow search engines to index anything you publish, meaning the layer of trust can be removed, and all your updates *could* be released into the wild.

The change has been rolled out to a select few beta testers, looks like those who already have public profiles. The ensuing uproar has brought a clarification from Facebook about future rollout plans, i.e. they say they’ll respect the privacy settings you have in place to keep your posts private.

I’m not really bothered by this change. People don’t pay enough attention to what is and isn’t indexed by search engines, e.g. Twitter updates are, unless you protect them, and let’s not forget that MySpace has always been indexed for all the world to see.

It is a departure for them. The Facebook experience has always been one of a controlled environment, where the symmetric follow model protected you from outsiders. Plus, they’ve always been the anti-MySpace, more private, less noisy. Read More »

Did anyone notice a larger than normal bump in their FeedBurner stats last week?

Last week, the FeedBurner numbers shot up from about 1,000 readers to more than 1,500. I’m behind on my reading, but so far, I haven’t seen this covered anywhere but on the FriendFeed blog.

Some movement in subscribers is common. However, this was an interesting surprise, since FeedBurner often erroneously lowers (not raises) the number of readers, sometimes by 50% or more.

Anyway, this is a welcome addition if you’re a blogger, mainly because it feeds the ego, but also it adds another channel to follow for comments and discussion of your content.

I’ve been a FriendFeed user since it was in private beta, and I love the app. The team behind it constantly adds useful features, months ahead of more popular services like Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook, only to see bits and pieces of their work added to these apps.

FriendFeed is an interesting hybrid. It combines the aggregation of Reader with the immediacy of Twitter (and now Facebook), adding that oh-so-important trust layer on top. Read More »

Last week’s post on the 90-9-1 rule was pretty popular. It bounced around Twitter and FriendFeed, and thankfully, Disqus’ Reactions feature allowed me to track comments on it.

So, like any good blogger, I’m going where the traffic is.

The 90-9-1 rule interests me for a number of reasons beyond the obvious applications it has to driving participation in Connect.

It’s an interesting study in psychology, especially when compared to social networks that inject trust into the equation. I really would like to see similar metrics for symmetric (ahem, classic) networks like Facebook and MySpace because of the addition of trust to the social equation.

This offhand mention in the Harvard Business School study alludes to trust as a motivating factor for participation:

“On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.”

As enterprise adoption of social networks advances, their participation metrics will also be intriguing. Do more people participate when you add another comfy trust blanket on top of the network? I have to believe that just providing a place to share information inside the corporate firewall drives participation, if only because it is sanctioned by the company. Read More »

Image by our pal Eddie Awad on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Mark your calendars for June 16.

The Oracle OpenWorld Blog announced today that Suggest a Session will be back on that day for this year’s mega-conference (which will be October 11-15, 2009 at Moscone in San Francisco as usual).

If you recall, last year’s Suggest a Session for OpenWorld was a big hit. Confused?

Here’s a recap:

If you have an idea for a session you’d like to attend or present, bounce over to Mix and add it. It helps to give as much detail as possible, including any speaker suggestions and agenda thoughts you have. Use this as the hook to get votes.

The top vote-getters will be added to the conference agenda. I just hope the other sessions won’t judge them as “online winners”.

And yes, I did just quote myself.

Why would you want to suggest a session?

Maybe you missed or didn’t know about the Call for Papers, which ended in April, or, maybe you have a burning topic that you don’t think will make the agenda. Never fear, submit your idea and get out the vote. You can do it. Read More »

Photo by powerbooktrance on Flickr used under Creative Commons

You’ve probably heard of the 90-9-1 rule of communities, outlined here by Jakob Nielsen.

If not, here’s the summary:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

News over the past couple weeks underscores this theory. First, we hear from the Harvard Business School that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.” Further, “a typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”

Not all that surprising. If you use Twitter, think about your usage. Generally, people join, plant the obligatory “checking out this twitter thing” flag and then disappear, frequently forever. Read More »

Image by LWY on Flickr used under Creative Commons

On Friday, I received a summons to appear for jury duty.

First, let me say that I’m in favor of civic duty, the right to a jury trial, all that.

I don’t think I’m the only one who dreads a summons to jury duty though. This is the first time I’ve been called in Oregon, and they don’t have an automated way to let you know if you’re actually needed or not. In California, at least one county I lived in had a call-in number that would let you know if you were excused or not. This saved me a trip to the courthouse at least once.

Anyway, over the weekend, I was watching Let’s Go to Prison. In one scene, the protagonist bemoans a jury trial as a group of people too dumb to think up an excuse to get out of serving. Funny, but not so much.

This sums up common perception of jury duty very nicely, and assuming it’s mostly true, it influences the ability to get a fair trial by a jury of your peers.

I think the process of serving on a jury needs an overhaul, and I’m probably not alone.

I have some ideas.

Read More »

Rich dumped his impressions and thoughts on Google Wave yesterday. Now it’s my turn.

In a weird coincidence, I heard Soundgarden’s “My Wave” earlier today and immediately thought of Friend of the ‘Lab Floyd’s penchant for beginning his posts with song lyrics. Not sure why he’s stopped doing that, it’s a great little calling card for his posts.

Anyway, as Rich mentioned, he and I riffed for a while on the phone yesterday about Wave’s potential within the enterprise.

From the beginning of the ‘Lab, on of our goals has been to investigate a simple theory:

Work should revolve around people because people do work.

Seems simple enough. No matter what product or service a business provides, people are involved.

Enterprises may coalesce around objects like transactions, which are easily modeled by software, but fundamentally, every business has people running it. The struggle faced by many businesses involves mixing automated processes with manual work that requires people. As enterprises collect more and more electronically stored information, the constraint becomes people’s ability to find, analyze and process information.

This is a tough nut to crack. Portals, knowledge management and now, social platforms have moved to solve the consolidation and collaboration issues faced by enterprises. Read More »