Rule of Product Management #675: If you’re going to post your mission on your homepage, make sure people can get behind it. Vyoom, a new “real-time” social network presents their philosophy front and center on their homepage:
We at Vyoom believe members should be rewarded for connecting and sharing with friends, family and co-workers in a real-time environment.
Excuse me, what? Why exactly should I be rewarded for chatting with my friends and family? Shouldn’t the mere activity and social interaction of sharing helpful, entertaining, or personal information with my acquaintances be reward enough? It sure is on Facebook, Twitter, email, or even in person. Why do I need to be rewarded for this? If I’m using your site because I want to be rewarded, I’m likely to overuse the site, flooding my friends and family with information they don’t want, and ultimately having them all block me and/or add me to their spam filters.
Further down on their homepage, they claim they have a “real-time” social network that lets me see what my friends are doing and customize what updates I want to see. Their meta description (shown to search engines, but not on the site) describes them as a
Social network with advanced social capabilities and true real-time data streaming in both a public and a private network all in one platform
This featureset actually sounds like it might be interesting and differentiating, so why lead with the messaging about rewarding me for communicating with friends? If you have a great new tool that will make my communications easier, lead with that. You don’t need to bribe me. If the product is that cool, I’ll use it and I’ll do your marketing for you by telling my friends. This is a classic case of a split personality site - they seem to have a cool product, but their lead pitch doesn’t even mention its strengths.
And while we’re at it, Rule of Product Management #425: Avoid underlining words that are not hyperlinks. Their homepage is riddled with underlined words that unfortunately I just can’t click on.
And you might be asking if I actually used the site…well, no. I tried - I registered, but never got my confirmation email, and you can’t use the site at all without it. I tried signing up with a different email address, and the registration form broke. Sorry guys, I’m done.
According to the laboriously-named Participatory Media Network, 99% of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on “social networks,” but only 22% of people in that age group use Twitter. In their press release about the survey, the PMN concludes that Twitter “has yet to catch on” with Gen Y’s, and Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy parrots the PMN’s press release in her post “Young adults haven’t warmed up to Twitter.”
In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on? This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60’s are allowed to research things they don’t understand. Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.
PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large - it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota - Toyota has yet to catch on!” Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.
Google today announced the impending release of their new…product, Google Wave. I hesitate when describing it, because it’s actually pretty tough to categorize. Techcrunch has a thorough writeup of the functionality and Mashable has a brief of their own, but neither does much analysis, so let me try to summarize.
Google Wave is:
- Like email, but won’t work (navtively) with existing email
- Like IM, but it isn’t an application
- Like Facebook messaging, but without Facebook
- Like Facebook’s application platform, but without Facebook
- Like Twitter, but without a public-facing feed
- Like IRC, but less temporal
Does that help? Maybe not.
Let me try to sum it up in a positioning statement that I’m making up based on the proposed featureset:
Google Wave is a web-based messaging system that helps people communicate, share, and collaborate with friends, family, and business contacts both in real-time and asynchronously.
If we look at it in these terms, Google Wave is not only extremely ambitious but is also set squarely against Facebook.
You may consider this comparison invalid because Google Wave has so many features that Facebook doesn’t and Facebook has a ton of features that Wave doesn’t, but users don’t look at features, they look at problems the product solves for them. Is it filling a need that isn’t met right now, or is it filling the need better than existing services? It’s unlikely that people would give up Facebook for Wave, so the question for Google comes down to: will they use both? You can ask the same question about Wave vs. email, IM, and Twitter.
In order to think Wave will be successful, you have to think the problems it solves are important. Here are some of the problems it purports to address:
This is just a start of what they want it to do. One of the creators, Lars, said of Wave,
“My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things.”
Is it trying to do too much? Very likely.
I fear that Wave breaks one of Google’s own product development tenets: fail often, fail early (or maybe fail early, fail often, I don’t remember, but I know there was a lot of failing involved.) This project has been in development since 2007 and has 50 developers working on it, and it already has a plethora of what we product managers call “would-be-nice” features. I encourage Google to make sure the core features work and release this thing as soon as possible to see if people like it at all. If they like it, THEN add the silly extras like real-time wiki-style collaborative editing that lets you see what other people type as they type it.
I do like the concept behind Wave in how it aims to unify communication, but I want to see that happen in a way that simplifies my life. Read through the comments on the TechCrunch article, and you’ll see that most people think it looks too complicated. As a contrast, no one who saw the iPod or iPhone unveilings thought either device would complicate their lives - they are both beautiful in their simplicity, and that’s why they sell by the boatloads. Google will have an uphill battle marketing this product until they can show an average user how it will simplify their lives. If they clear this hurdle, Facebook needs to watch out.
The blogospehere has been all atwitter lately about Nielsen’s latest survey stating that 60% of new Twitter-ers stop using the service after one month. Many people doubted the number and ribbed Nielsen for perhaps overlooking the fact that many Twitterers use third-party apps to access the site. But Nielsen checked their math and they’re sticking with their original assertion: 60% of Twitterers leave the site after one month.
I suppose it might be hard to believe that a site that’s growing as fast as Twitter only retains 40% of new users for more than a month, but if you’ve ever run a user-generated content site, you’ll know that 40% retention is fantastic, and most sites would kill for retention like that. Most users who start a Wordpress blog, a Flickr account, a Delicious account, or an account on just about site, try it out for a day or two and never come back. It’s the nature of the beast. Further, most users are consumers, not producers, and while that trend is changing over time with the rise of the over-sharing Millennial generation, most users just don’t feel like sharing their stories, pictures, or current status with the world, so they try it out and then move on.
So congratulations, Twitter! 40% retention is awesome, so keep up the great work!
Who cares about comments on a blog? Answer: No one.
Think about it. How many times have you read a blog and actually read the comments on that blog? Maybe one time out of ten? Now, think about how many times you’ve read a blog and actually left a comment. Maybe one time out of 20? 50? Yeah, if you’re like the vast majority of internet users, you comment on a blog almost never.
So why are we now seeing all this activity around blog comment systems? You’d think that blog comments are the Friends List of 2007, at least to hear Techcrunch go on about them. Of course, TechCrunch tries to make everything sound interesting so they can justify all the articles they churn out every day despite the fact that there are only one or two Web 2.0 happenings that are actually important enough to write about on any given day.
But back to my point: blog comments just aren’t that important. In the big scheme of things, no one really cares. Read through the sites that have the most active commenting community like Digg and Slashdot, and you’ll see that most commenters:
- don’t know what they’re talking about
- don’t bother to read the other comments
- are illiterate
- can’t assemble their thoughts into a coherent point
The blog commenters have become victims of their own enthusiasm. These trolls who reside under the most-frequented bridges of the Internet have so much zeal that they ignore common rules of composition, grammar, and logic, and have therefore doomed themselves to irrelevancy. These trolls make up less than half a percent of the visitors to these sites (source: my flawless intuition), and they never click on ads, so they do little to actually contribute to the sites they comment on.
So, why do we need four companies (mentioned in TechCrunch’s article) devoted to helping us keep track of our comments? Why does the tiny, tiny fraction of people on the ‘net who comment frequently need such powerful tools to organize the dreck they serve up daily to the rest of us?
Of course, they don’t need them. No one needs them. These services exist because we’re in a bubble again, and any idea remotely related to social networking — or the new buzzword: conversations – can raise VC money and hope for a buyout by a company that makes a valid, useful product. And these companies are only buying because they’re also sucked in to the Web 2.0 hype, and they think they need some of that Ajaxy hawtness to justify their valuation multiples.
These comment systems are trying to exploit bloggers into sharing user data with them so they can because big all-powerful comment aggregators. Perhaps they’re trying to take over MyBlogLog’s market position? If so, they’d better focus more on what they can offer the bloggers and less on what they can offer the commenters.
So stop it, guys. Let’s make products for people who really need them. And for God’s sake, don’t comment on this blog.
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Posted by
joel |
Categories:
Blogs,
Internet,
Social Networks |
