social network

Still room for improvement in Google Reader

August 21, 2009 By Dan Thornton

A lot of people have commented on the new social features which have been released for Google’s RSS Reader – and most of them have been pretty positive.

Recent changes have included showing more information on who likes and shares posts, and being able to connect with more people who have interested with content you like. And the option to ‘Send To’ various listed or custom social networks from Google Reader has also been a step towards improving the influence it has.

Both the basic ideas behind the improvements are good ones, so it’s just a shame that there are a couple of major niggles which mean they’re not as good as they could have been.

Firstly, I use Google Reader for around 2 hours every day when I’m travelling to and from work by train. The access to free wifi means it’s completely replaced ever bothering with a newspaper or magazine, and I can get all the information that I’ve requested delivered to me.

But it also means that the fact the Send To option doesn’t occur within the reader itself means that I’m still stuck waiting for other pages to load before I can Stumble them, for example, and that’s no at option on shared wifi. It still means attempting (and failing) to remember which articles I loved and going back to promote them when I’m on a better connection.

Secondly, and this is the biggest problem – the more people sharing with me, the more times I’m seeing duplicate content. In some cases, the same feed item can appear 4 or 5 times – once from my own subscription and then numerous times from my friends and contacts.

That means I’m loathe to add anyone, particularly in my areas of interest, because I’ll end up with 200 items every day that I’ve already seen, added to the 150+ that I get anyway.

It’s frustrating, because I’d love to see what a ton of people are sharing, and it’s a nice alternative to short urls with no explanation on Twitter.

Still, it’s good to see Google investing some time and effort in Reader, even if the supply side of Feedburner is as flakey as ever.

And there’s also an interesting Greasemonkey script for Firefox (called gReactions) which has just been released to show blog comments, Friendfeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News and Reddit underneath each post.

Ditto.net gets put to one side by Bauer Media

June 24, 2009 By Dan Thornton

It’s with a little sadness that I’m writing about the decision by Bauer Media to shelve Ditto.net – the social entertainment guide which I was fortunate enough to have been involved with for a time.

It’s an understandable decision by Bauer Media. Having apparently spent £1 million on funding the site and development, there wasn’t a huge amount of either revenue or growth becoming available. And it makes more sense to use the technology to enhance the already popular brands in the portfolio than to continue trying to develop an entirely new one which hasn’t quite made it.

It’s understandable – but not necessarily the right move.

With some tweaks and some more time I still believe Ditto could be a major success.

If anything the need for a product to filter the sheer volume of entertainment content available has become greater in the time since Ditto launched. The amount of text and video online outweighs the production output of the printing press and the celluloid camera by some considerable margin. And there are relatively few solutions that work effectively – and even fewer from any established media companies.

But building growth, particularly organic, sustainable growth, takes a longer amount of time to show a return than a comparable print launch, because the combination of purchase price and higher advertising rates in print make an instant impact against the costs. It took Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Ebay, Flickr etc a surprisingly long period to reach the exponential growth which gave them the ‘overnight success’ tag.

Combine that with a revenue model which relied on traditional display advertising sales, and there was always going to be a problem.

Having said all that, there were some really interesting successes, including the promotion of ‘The Rock Stars of Web 2.0’, in conjunction with Dave Cushman, and which showed how traffic and inbound links could be generated.

Still, at the end of the day I enjoyed a great learning experience helping the Ditto team (And just to clarify after a flattering mention on PaidContent, I was involved as a marketing manager, rather than a developer. Sadly I can only aspire to the technical skills to be a developer!). And the co-founders have and will continue to have great success – Colin Kennedy was recently announced as the new Editor of FHM, and Dhiraj Mukharjee will always be working towards something interesting.

My only regret is not pushing harder for the revenue model I proposed for the project (but that means it’s still up for grabs one day!), and never managing to get them to redesign the Ditto Blog!

There really is nothing new in Web 2.0

May 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s been said before, but having chatted with some of my readers, and having been unable to quickly find a previous online example, I though it’s worth restating: There’s nothing new in Web 2.0.

And by that, I mean there’s nothing new about the facilities Web 2.0 offers. And now for some examples:

Tagging: Every time you’ve labeled anything in your life, you’ve tagged it. Putting your bills in a folder, putting a sticker on your homemade chutney, or creating a mixtape of songs. If only we’d called it labeling, rather than tagging, I’d have saved myself a few hours of explaining. And a Folksonomy is just what happens when information is structured by people labeling it.

Social networking: Every time you’ve been introduced to someone via a friend, or found yourself chatting to someone you’ve stood next to at a concert, or at the football, you’ve networked socially. Facebook and Myspace are the internet equivalents of your local pub, or the reading group at the local library.

Blogging: Diaries. Fanzines. The family newsletter tucked inside Christmas cards. Newspaper columns.

Crowdsourcing: Happened hundreds of years ago. Sticking up a ‘Wanted’ poster and offering a bounty was crowdsourcing people to catch a criminal.

Social news aggregators (e.g. Digg): Just recording online the same opinions you’d get chatting around the office coffee machine/smoking area.

Word of Mouth, Buzz, Social Media Marketing: When your pipe sprung a leak last night, and you came into work and asked your friend if they knew a good plumber – that’s Word of Mouth. Buzz is just getting lots of people talking and recommending. And social media marketing is just using the new online gathering places.

I did lie earlier.

There is one new thing about all Web 2.0 technology which radically changes everything we know. It’s made it so much easier to do all these things, that the amount of people involved, and the effects, have been amplified 100s, 1000s or even millions of times. It’s always happened. But now it’s happening on a global scale, and in a way that can change the fortunes of businesses.

Measuring marriage – and social media

May 19, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been involved in a lot of discussion about measuring social media and social networks, particularly around readership, influence, and social media and community marketing. And I quite often hear the quote that such measurement is like ‘figuring out if you have a good marriage’, which comes from Ian Schafer of Deep Focus. The Adweek article in which is appears goes on to say: “Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. “You can’t assign a number to that,” he said.”

I’m no analytics or statistics expert, but when I thought about, it occurred to me that there’s actually quite a lot of quantitative measurement of marriages that does go on. And judging whether you’re in a good marriage certainly requires benchmarking in some quantitative or qualitative way. Just the same as social media measurement can go pretty far in indicating whether your audience sees you as their one true love:

Anniversaries: Wedding anniversaries have rules (Paper for the 1st year? Gold for 50) to indicate the length of time to all interested parties – because a general trend would be that longevity equals a good marriage. By the same token, longterm, loyal, returning readers indicate you’re doing something right!

Divorce rates: By the same token, you can watch trends on divorces to see if a group is happy in marriage. And you can watch single visit users, and definitely unsubscribers and users deleting their accounts to gauge the same thing for your site. And unlike general figures for splitting up, you’re able to easily isolate individuals to explore the reasons in more detail.

Holidays and presents: Whether it’s a dowry, or the amount your partner spent on the wedding/honeymoon/Valentine’s Day/Birthday presents etc, at some point even the most romantic soul has probably looked at how much is being spent as a guide to how much their partner cares. That’s why engagement rings are supposed to cost 3 month’s wages, for example. And a key metric in the website/user relationship is definitely click-throughs and sales conversions.

Romantic dinners: One of the big tips about marriages is to make time to go out and spend quality time romancing each other. You could see that couples in a good marriage enjoy this time, chat all night, gaze longingly at each other across the table, etc. By the same token, you can monitor the bounce rate and time on site of your visitors to see if they’re visiting several pages and enjoying your company – or splitting at the earliest opportunity.

Doing the housework: Does your partner invest time and effort in doing their share around the house? Do they help to make it a home? And do your users invest time and effort in submitting User Generated Content? Do they customise their profiles? Do they comment on stories and forums?

Are they faithful?: In the modern digital world, it’s highly unlikely a visitor will use just one site in any area of interest. But rather than sulking about their polygamous ways, it’s about following them and looking at who their affair is with. Figure out what is so attractive about the other websites they visit, and look at whether you can beat it, or use it in some way. Rather than seeing them continue to stray, inject some romance by dressing up your website in the RSS feeds of the other destinations, for example.

Talking about your partner: One of the big qualitative and quantitative benchmarks is seeing how often your friends talk about their partners, and whether it’s normally in a good or bad way. That can be with friends over a coffee or a beer – or in a survey by a magazine. Whatever the source, it’s what prompts you to go home and ask why your partner doesn’t treat you as well, or tell them how badly someone else is doing. And it’s the big one for social media measurement, because it’s all about the referrals and the recommendations. Recommendations and links are the equivalent of public displays of affection.

Now, if you combine all that information about two individuals in a relationship, you start seeing that actually, there’s quite a lot of ways you could build up a reasonable idea of whether a relationship is being enjoyed by the people within it, and then be able to compare it to other marriages. It’s not 100% accurate, and maybe they’re staying together for the children, but metrics never cover ever 100%

And by the same token, there’s a huge wealth of information already available on social media marketing, especially if you’re already tracking the normal metrics via a standard analytics package.

The trick is working out what to add to what is already available (influence of prominent couples/recommendations for example), and how to bring it all together into something that is understandable. That’s the alchemy.