Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill September 18th, 2007

I wrote recently about different visualization techniques used by Digg, Lijit and Twitter. I wrote that I didn’t think the Twitter Blocks developer, Stamen Labs, got it quite right. They did a brilliant job with Digg’s visualizations so I’m sure they’ll work out Twitter as well.

The challenge in creating visual representations of text data, it seems to me, is to capture the essence of what the site does. Digg Stack beautifully captures both the flow of news across the Digg site and the voting element that (partially) distinguishes Digg from traditional news outlets.

Twitter is captivating for a couple of reasons. The “random discovery” element is fun- seeing what’s on people’s minds around the world. The more engaging element is following one’s friends.

Twitter Blocks goes after the latter, which is probably the harder nut to crack. Meanwhile, Twittervision hits the discovery nail right on the head. Watching the posts flow across the globe is mesmerizing.

A couple of requests, though- I’d like to see the tweets persist a little longer instead of fading out immediately when a new one comes up. I’d also like to see the history- it doesn’t seem to follow the Twitter timeline precisely and I can’t necessarily find interesting tweets easily.

If Stamen Labs can figure out how to combine Twittervision’s hypnotic visual timeline with the social relationship aspect that makes Twitter so engaging they will capture the full scope of the site perfectly. It’ll be fun to see.

• Web , social map , social media
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Jay Parkhill September 3rd, 2007

Creating ways to visually represent the social map seems very much in vogue. It makes sense in a certain way; there is a lot of dispersed content on the web and good business to be had aggregating it. Visually presenting the relationships among pieces of content- and the users that put it there- can help people sort through it all.

Lijit and Twitter both just launched visualization tools that are interesting and have neat animation, but also point to how hard it is figuring out what kinds of data are can be visualized well.

Lijit’s visualizer shows linking relationships between a user and the rest of the Internet. Lijit’s focus is on bringing out content that might be hard to aggregate otherwise, so I can understand the value in trying to bring together inbound, outbound and mutual linking relationships on one page.

The resulting animation isn’t hugely meaningful, though. For example, this blog isn’t really linked from anywhere, so there is no benefit to the animation- it just shows what is in the blogroll on the page. The other blog I write, Startup Review for doesn’t link to anything else, so it only shows a handful of inbound links. And a very popular blog like Brad Feld’s has three different clusters of lollipops, but they’re still just lollipops. They don’t offer any information that you couldn’t get from a simple list and they are a bit cluttered to boot.

Twitter’s blocks are similar, though not quite as intuitive. There is a nice animation that creates a stair-step effect and I get that the center line is my recent timeline and the paths branching away are the timelines of other users in my timeline, but I’m not sure this is actually a better way of discovering other users. The bricks themselves don’t say anything until I zoom in on them, so they don’t save me time or present more/better data than linking through user pages directly. I.e. I can “explore” just as easily on the main pages.

For me Digg has set the gold standard here. Its swarm, stack, bigspy and arc all show what is happening on the site in a way that shows off Digg’s core competence- aggregating and ranking news- while letting users easily scan the news items flowing through the site without having to do anything.

Guy Kawasaki blogged an interesting article about data visualization methods. It’s an interesting read and some techniques definitely seem to do the job better than others, or maybe some data is just much harder to present visually.

My personal favorite is a time-sequence graph of Last.fm listening habits, If it was actually a dynamic graph it would nose out Digg for “best in class”. It isn’t though; it is a “snapshot” of a particular moment in time for the developer.

Still it is gorgeous and presents the information in a way that would take many more words to explain, and be far less interesting, and that is the point. The web is still mostly about words because words work pretty darn well. If the picture isn’t worth a heck of a lot of them, it doesn’t really add enough value.

• Web , social graph , social map
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Jay Parkhill August 31st, 2007

Every web site of any substance has a “Terms of Use” policy, if for no other reason than to make sure that the site operator can restrict illegal, offensive or otherwise undesirable activity. I doubt many people would have trouble with this.

But what happens when the operator needs to change the terms?

Boring Legal Stuff- the Abridged Version
The Ninth Circuit held last month that simply telling users the terms can be changed at any time may not be good enough. In Douglas v. Talk America, AOL sold its long distance phone business to Talk America. Talk America posted revised contract terms unilaterally, Douglas sued and the Ninth Circuit drily noted that “Parties to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic basis to learn whether they have been changed by the other side”.

It’s the Notice, Stupid
Talk America charged a fee for its services, it changed the contract after AOL and Douglas had formed it and it declined to offer notice of the changes- putting the burden on users to check back (how often?) for changes (visible how?). It’s the last point that seemed to seal the deal for the Ninth Circuit. It is patently unreasonable to expect consumers to re-check every site where they hold accounts, and to compare use terms line-by-line for changes (assuming they retained a copy of the old terms against which to compare).

So Where Does that Leave Us?
Prof. Eric Goldman points to several alternatives, none particularly attractive, that businesses can use to avoid this problem. Of the three (”starting over”, notice of the change with implied right to terminate, and don’t change the terms at all except for new users), sending notice of changes seems like the most practical. I know I have gotten notices like this from eBay and other businesses.

More than likely most users won’t even read the notice, but the process is bound to produce a certain amount of anxiety, especially for companies that aren’t yet established. Spam filters make it harder to ensure that the notice gets full distribution as well, but 100% receipt is not mandatory either (no difference here from paper mailings from your bank). Still, there’s a certain circularity to it- once the contract has been formed there is no sure-fire, legally watertight way of changing it short of terminating every account on the site and starting fresh.

As a practitioner, my response to this is to draft terms of use extremely broadly, hoping that will help my clients to iterate without turning business and user-communications issues into legal ones. It’s no brilliant legal reasoning, but at least it lets companies focus on the bottom line- keeping users happy and the platform running smoothly.

• Web , contracts
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Jay Parkhill August 19th, 2007

Suddenly this week I’ve started hearing the term “social graph” all over. Brad Feld has been talking about it and so has Fred Wilson, though it looks like they both read the same piece published last week by Brad Fitzpatrick, developer of the LiveJournal blogging platform. As I understand it, the social graph is the glue that ties people together over the web- whether it be a set of Outlook contacts or MySpace friends.

I hadn’t heard the term before so I googled it and got a bunch of hits going back at least a few months, though it seems to have gained more currency in the last month or so. It’s a decent phrase, though a little wonky and hard to pin down (compared to say, “web 2.0″, ha!). Wikipedia doesn’t seem to recognize it officially and refers readers to the entry on “social network” instead.

Substantively, social graph is a much broader idea than the social network dashboard I have blogged about previously. Fitzpatrick’s article is essentially a manifesto for an open source framework that all networks could use as a backdrop for contacts and organization, among other things. It’s a cool idea for sure and I’d love to see it happen.

As I think about it, though, the work required for a user to flesh out a set of contacts on any social network is part of what keeps the user loyal to the platform. Loyalty means, largely, pageviews and advertising click-throughs, i.e. the main source of revenue for most networks. If my contact set becomes a “commodity” I can drop in to any network, will I jump around among networks more readily?

Maybe, or maybe not. Lots of people belong to six zillion networks already so it isn’t like we would suddenly all switch off Linkedin and turn on Facebook- maybe we just gravitate more toward one or another as featuresets evolve. More to the point, I read Fitzpatrick as saying in part that developing the social graph-building tools is hard work that essentially reinvents the wheel every time. An open-source social graph “standard wheel” would free up companies to focus more on the content. Actually, commoditizing the contacts would require networks to focus on differentiation of their content/platform/benefits rather than just locking in users.

As I write this, I realize that idea sounds a lot like Facebook’s F8 platform, but without the “inbound only” traffic flow that so many people have expressed frustration with. No wonder Fitzpatrick’s idea hit a nerve with Feld and Wilson.

• Web , neologisms , social graph , social media
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Jay Parkhill August 17th, 2007

Update:  athleague.com is the official site being rolled out to schools.  beta.athleague.com is for the general public to check out.

I met Ravi Mishra last summer and it has been an enormous pleasure to help him get his new business off the ground. He is a terrific guy and I am thrilled to see that the new site, athleague.com, has launched in beta. I told him that his business plan was the among the very best I have ever read- and I’ve read many.

Athleague plans to bring a new level of organization to “informal” sports- intramural at schools and adult sports leagues/teams in the larger world. It is a niche that is close to my heart. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will work for my bike racing team.

• Startups , Web , clients
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Jay Parkhill August 14th, 2007

I have posted before about my wish for a centralized place to manage profiles, invitations and other aspects of online accounts, but started to think it was unrealistic given the privacy and walled-garden issues involved in allowing one service control to the account information for a user at another service.

It may still be a pipedream, but at least I am not the only one having it. I just watched an interview on Wallstrip with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress/Automattic where he talks about the same thing. This pleases me to no end. If people like Matt are worried about the balkanization of online identity, I have to think a solution will emerge sooner or later.

• Blogging , Web , social media
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Jay Parkhill August 8th, 2007

I recently tuned in to Barack Obama and John Edwards’ Twitter feeds, which offer somewhat interesting, informal glimpses of the candidates. Shortly after, I discovered what is really a fake Bill Clinton Twitter feed. Someone reserved the BillClinton user name and posts asinine garbage that might be malicious if it actually had any relevance to anything.

Still, this got me thinking about “user name squatting”. It is pretty well established that someone with a “famous” name can oust a squatter from a domain name, but I wonder if they same is true of user names on social networks? If I went around and registered “RudyGiuliani” (to pick a famous and unusual name), would he have rights against me? My gut tells me that the larger the platform, the more likely name-squatting would be deemed impactful on the famous person (e.g. Mr. Giuliani). I also suspect that the nature of the platform would be relevant as well- fake Rudy Giuliani on MySpace is potentially more damaging to the candidate than fake Rudy Giuliani on Digg.

I’m going to poke around a little on this one to see if anyone has actually tried to bring “user name squatting” actions. I’ll update if I find anything interesting.

• Blogging , Copyright , Defamation , Intellectual Property , Web , legal , social media
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Jay Parkhill August 8th, 2007

Congratulations to the group at Kaboodle, who just announced their acquisition by Hearst Media. I was privileged to work with them at their inception- it’s a cliche, but you would be hard pressed to find a nicer group of people. They worked hard to build Kaboodle into a solid shopping bookmark destination, and I know Hearst has big plans for the future as well. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

• M&A , Startups , Web
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Jay Parkhill August 1st, 2007

I have written previously about my wish for a social network dashboard that will let me manage my presence on multiple platforms. It is admittedly a pipe dream since no service I am aware of publishes an API for account management information- and probably never will for fear of privacy issues.

Still, I was intrigued to see ProfileBuilder’s launch this weekend and I checked it out. Unfortunately it looks as though they weren’t really ready to launch at all. There’s no explanation of what the site actually does and the text is rife with typos. More to the point, it doesn’t work whatsoever with Firefox on my Mac. Maybe the traffic they picked up from the TechCrunch crowd will stay with them until they get the site working properly, but it sure seems like a shaky start- the downside of the “Launch Early and Often” ethos.

As far as I can tell, the site aggregates content from whatever feeds I add to my profile. Aggregation is useful- Lijit is a nice tool that offers cross-platform searches of my content. It would be really great if I could aggregate (or maybe even just search) comments I have made across the internet in one location, but I don’t see the value of piling up all my content in yet one more dead end. If I can’t post from it and I can’t administer my other various presences with it, then I definitely don’t need another place to send people. Lijit is useful because it works inside my existing networks.

I am scaling back my wish. For now, all I want is a single point from which I can send out social network “friends” invitations. I list which networks I want to invite someone to, then they can check the boxes to accept one or all in one fell swoop. Should be simple, right?

• Web , social media
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Jay Parkhill July 31st, 2007

I wrote a case study on Wallstrip that has just been published on Startup Review. Wallstrip is a really interesting little “test balloon” for what can be done with online video. Producer Adam Elend is also one of the brightest, most web-savvy guys anyone could hope to meet. His theme about “putting content where the audience is” is one of those things that sounds so elementary that once you’ve heard it you don’t understand why people aren’t constantly repeating it every day, all the time. The trick is that the simple phrase belies the difficulty of doing that properly.

Case in point is that the same idea was behind Paul McCartney’s Starbucks-released CD, and Prince’s distribution of his new CD through England’s Mail on Sunday newspaper.

To me, both of these efforts seemed like weak attempts to think outside the music distribution box. Yes, consumers are in Starbucks and they read the newspaper, but getting to them requires a bit more than just putting the music in front of them. These efforts lack authenticity, somehow- they seem like clumsy publicity stunts. Wallstrip’s genius is in being candid about foisting product on you, but being open enough, and entertaining enough in the process that lots of people don’t mind the pitch.

Intimacy, authenticity and getting to the audiences where they already live on the web- Adam’s insightful blog piece covers it all.

• Video , Web
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