Ben Facts

Apple’s World Developer Conference is going on right now. It is the epicenter of the app creation world and should represent the greatest collection of taste makers and thought leaders in the mobile space.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to read the tea leaves of the Gowalla vs. Foursquare battle.

I started tracking the check-ins 30 minutes before the keynote. This started at 8:30 am pacific in San Francisco.

Some information about the setting: this event for 5700 sold out in 8 days. People from all over the world come in for it. The people I follow in Twitter who are there are from UK, Netherlands and Frisco, TX. The line to get in wrapped around the entire building. People are most likely to check-in when they have downtime, and want to advertise where they are. In line at WWDC is ideal.

Once the presentation started at 9:00 AM,  people are most likely absolutely riveted by the presentation. These are people who live and breathe apple and this is a big deal.

Searching Google News yields 2,104 Foursquare mentions vs. 264 for Gowalla. So Foursquare gets about 10x of  the press, and that generally reflects market share.  ”Ford” yields 17,693 results and GM yeilds 14,988. When compared, that’s a rough anagram to their market share.

So, given that information about the scene and news coverage, who won the checkin war?

Well, 30 minutes before Steve Jobs took the stage, Foursquare was ahead 286 to Gowalla’s 187 check-ins, or 60.5% of the total. That doesn’t quite live up to the 10x media coverage.

If you were going to get into the keynote, you were likely there 30 minutes before. I wish I had started watching this comparison sooner.

By 9:00 am, Foursquare was up 332 to 199, or 63%. Why would they be building share?

Now, 1 hour into the presentation, and 1.5 hours after I started tracking, Foursquare is up to 67% of the checkins.

The interesting thing is that in the 30 minutes up to the keynote, Gowalla went up 6% and Foursquare 16%. Ok, so maybe Foursquare users are tardy.

In the 30 minutes after the keynote started, and everyone who is there would have checked in, Gowalla went up 2.5% and Foursquare went up another 6.5%.

An hour in, Gowalla went up another .5% and Foursquare went up 7.6%.

Why would Foursquare get 24% of its checkins in the hour after the keynote started while Gowalla only got 3% after the keynote started?

Because 24% of the Foursquare users are not there! They’re cheating and diluting the experience for everyone else, and Gowalla’s users are actually there and paying attention to the presentation.

Ok, so that was the theory. How do you go about checking that?

Both Gowalla and Foursquare have checkin pages that you can monitor. Check Foursquare’s here http://bit.ly/bbzrEl and Gowalla’s  http://bit.ly/auKREZ. I figured I’d check out where people with the most recent checkins were from.

As I suspected, I had to go through 20 Foursquare users to find one from outside San Fransciso and only 3 Gowalla users.

To take out less chance, of the last 10 checkins for each (84 minutes in)

Gowalla 01011 01100 = 50% based in San Francisco

Foursquare 11111 11111 = 100% based in San Francisco.

Since Foursquare has less control and precision requirements than Gowalla, you have to be somewhere to check in. With Foursquare allowing users to check in places that they aren’t, the temptation to lie is too great and many people will.

This rings some bells for me.

History Repeating Itself

Something else like this came along 3-5 years ago that is remarkably similar. MySpace was the first breakout player in social networking. It started out simple enough. Then, people got the ability to customize their pages, and it got awful. It’s amazing how awfully most people will decorate when given the chance.

Facebook came along with less ability for people to muck things up and trounced MySpace.

This is just a fun opportunity to link to ugly MySpace accounts: 1 2 3 I would have added more, but the last one started playing awful music loudly.

What Wins, and Why

In the long run, I see quality outpacing quantity, and it will be more so for the location wars. If I’m going to be connected to someone on a check-in service, I want to know where they actually are, and not simply where they want to say they are. Those who “fake check-in” will turn their friends off and ruin their experiences.

Foursquare could tighten up their requirements, but they won’t. They have too much of a precedent for flexibility (positive spin) or sloppiness (negative spin). I don’t think they have the guts to remove the ability to lie.

Gowalla does this right, and as long as they keep doing it right, hopefully the press and the user base will support them.

Advertisers and investors should care about reaching the people inside WWDC and not the people outside, who are just lying about being there.

Raw Data

Kick users off Terminal Services (Windows server management)

Agile Manifesto (Software development principles)

NPR Story: Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older – We perceive time by how much we have to write into our brain. The older we get, the less new experiences we have, the less we need to learn/remember. When reflecting on our lives, our youth is more packed with memories, and therefore seems like time went slower.

Five Things MindBites learned from building their mobile site

The American government has some things that are worth considering fixing. (two suggestions at the end)

There are two items that are the cause of the issue, and neither are bad in their own right, but when put together cause problems.
1. Representation based on geographical districts
2. Bills get edited and end up much larger than when they start out.

The legislative branch is the strongest wing of our government. It is fractured by design to make sure that everyone is represented. The problem with this is that it leaves the executive branch to look out for everyone, as a whole.

Case in point: the current health care bill (12/2009). From what I can tell, it started out being relatively clean with the goal of reigning in the insurance industry, trying to cut down overall health care costs, and keep people from going bankrupt to pay for health care, with the expansion of government coverage.

The bill as it stands has been diluted from two directions in order to get enough legislative support to pass it. First, things like the public option and single payer have been removed. That must have earned more votes than it lost. The remaining votes had to be bought with earmarks, or giveaways to their districts.

So, anyone who is going to support the bill now, because of earmarks for them, is no longer voting for the bill, but instead voting for the earmarks in the bill.

So, how to fix this.

1. A per-capita tax of 50% for benefits within a bill based on district. Does the federal government give your town $50m to build a dike? Great. The 300,000 voters in your district now pay $83.33 as their share of the dike. But now, rather than it being paid for at a rate of 0.0005%, it’s now 50%. Pork projects by representatives would be received differently if the represented people actually had to pay for some of the pork.

2. Each bill only does one thing. Sure, you’ll have gridlock without people voting for their earmarks. But there’s gridlock now, and the price for unlocking the gridlock is tons of unnecessary spending. So, if you want earmarks write it so people will vote for it on its own. Your district will be paying 50% of the cost, so sure. This also removes the need for a line-item veto.

Over the last two years, I have been a heavy user of the Apple App store. Based on data, my usage is in line with average usage, but at about 4x the volume of average.

Part of this heavy usage is due to being product manager for an app, and the rest can be chalked up to curiosity and an addictive personality.

In discussions with businesses about a mobility strategy and how they can use mobility to communicate with their customers, their first impulse is to listen and discuss.

The second impulse is to think “Branded App!”

Why a branded app is almost always a bad idea

Just a little bit of research will show two points:

• Most apps that get downloaded are never used within 3 days of being downloaded
• Most apps are barely ever downloaded

Stats to back it up:

• It is hard to get downloaded at all: AndroLib (fantastic live Android stats) as of 12/16/2009: of 20,164 apps, 30.5% have fewer than 50 downloads. Only 14% of all apps have more than 10,000 downloads, and less than 1% has more than 250,000 downloads.
• Once downloaded, few applications are kept: Pinch Media has an excellent report. See slide 12/33. The day after a free app download, usage drops to 20% and continues a logarithmic decrease, hitting 5% after a month. If you’ve made it that far, congrats, you are only going to lose 50% of your users over the next month. “Long-term audiences are generally 1% of total downloads.” “Branded applications care deeply about engagement.”

So, some quick analysis of this. Say PicoPaint makes car paint, and they want to drive you to car painting places that use their paint, and sell you on why to use their paint. They start talking mobility and think “Let’s get an app!”

An app can cost as little as $5,000. That’s not much more than an ad in an industry magazine. Sold! Right? No.

To integrate location based recommendations for where to get your car painted once launched, that means a database of all vendors with your paint. It also means web services to populate that recommendation. You’re now at least $15,000 invested, and that’s just the outsourced time. PicoPaint’s marketing department has now been distracted from core marketing on this side project.

So PicoPaint goes ahead and spends $15,000 on the app, and four weeks of marketing time in planning (another $8,000).

What do they get:

• An industry press release, and buzz at being cutting edge.
• Employees take pride in being associated with something as cool as the App store.
• 40 people who aren’t employees or competitors download the app.
• After 24 hours, 4 people still have it on their phone.
• Maybe one person is influenced to use PicoPaint rather than an alternative.

That looks like a horrible return on investment to me.

What would be better

Get listed in apps that are established and have dynamic content. Options:

• Mobile ads. Pay to be part of a local newspaper app’s add content. $23,000 would go a long way at $0.10 per click.
• Content in a location based content server.

InView Mobile Solves This Problem

Disclaimer: I product manage InView Mobile

This problem is solved using InView Mobile. InView Mobile is a directory of content that is nearby, and a player for mobile content, just like an app, but with many sets of content within the app.

The content in the directory may be an ad, or a coupon, or just information about a location. It has value for being dynamic content, which is more appealing to consumers. As they move around, the top content changes. That adds to the appeal of keeping it longer than one day. The PicoPaint app would always be the same.

Also, with InView Mobile, there is far less cost to update the app with new content. InView Mobile content can be created within hours, by anyone, and updated within minutes. App store approval lead time is 2-4 weeks. With 50,000+ apps needing updates, and apps every day, there is no telling what lead time would be required.

The big value here is that with many venues pushing InView Mobile as a source to see their content, it creates an ecosystem within one app to drive usage. The more venues that have InView Mobile content, the more nearby venues will also have their content viewed.

So, if PicoPaint went with InView Mobile, someone at TacoTaco who launched InView Mobile for a 2-for-1 special may see the PicoPaint listing and check that out. Almost nobody will search for, find and download a PicoPaint standalone app. And nobody would keep the PicoPaint app after a few days.

Search the Apple App store for InView Mobile for samples. Hit up @benguthrie @inviewmobile for feedback.

These are some things to show HTML5 Functionality

Simple Samples:

• HTML5 Demos.com
• http://htmlfive.appspot.com/

Show-Off Sites:

• http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/

These are a list of mobile sites with good examples of webkit code that is easy to replicate, or used to show potential:

Easy to replicate

• GroupAware - Site that replicates native apple mobile os navigation, lists, orientation hooks and external docs
• JQTouch - JQuery extensions for webkit
• Fixed Positioning / Context (Referred by Sherif Tariq)
• GirlieMac – Blog filtered by “webkit”. Many good code examples.
  • Snow - Falling snow animation. Fading in and out, with fluttering.
  • Matrix – Text at different speeds, oriented 90 degrees
  • Glossy Button – No images used.

Show offs

• Pie Guy – PacMan clone using html+css. (Apple Mobile OS, added to home screen only)
• Falling Leaves – Animated falling leaves.
• Electric Box – From Post – Spinning 3D Box with light shoots
• AT-AT Walker – With a silly frame.

Feel free to email me or add a comment with more examples that you’d like to have on this list, and I’ll include it, and give you credit for the recommendation.

A few months ago, my manager asked his team what podcasts/RSS feeds we read. It was a nice exercise, and led me to re-organize Google Reader. and one that I’d love to have access to from everyone.

If you want to share/suggest, I’d love to get your feedback either on Facebook or at http://ben.bemily.com

Here is my list of media that I read/listen/watch all of:

Podcasts:

• Radiolab
• This American Life
• Stuff You Should Know
• NPR: Planet Money
• Geekbrief.tv
• The Onion (audio and video)
• 60-Second Science
• The Current Song of the Day
• NPR: Story of the Day
• NPR: Technology
• 1310 The Ticket
• KEXP Song of the Day
• President Obama’s Weekly Radio Address
• Today In The Past (Jonathan Hodgman)

RSS: Work related

• The Design Blog
• AppleInsider
• Engadget

RSS: Entertainment

• The Gourds live concerts from archive.org
• The Big Storm Picture
• Probably Bad News
• There, I Fixed It
• GordonKeith.com
• Ackward Family Photos
• The FAIL Blog
• garfield minus garfield
• xkdc.com
• Boston.com’s The Big Picture

RSS: Personal Improvement

• Lifehacker
• Metaefficient

Over the last five years or so, there has been an explosion of social media offerings, and many have unique value. There is enough content and enough potential connections for most people to easily spend 40 hours a week maintaining/monitoring all of them.

The way I use these networks takes about 10-15 minutes a day and is more benefit than cost. On Facebook, I read my friend feed about three times a day, until I’ve read to where I left off. Anything that makes me laugh or that I particularly enjoy, I “like” or comment on. I should post more than I do, as often as 1-2 times per day. However, like everyone else, I lurk, reading far more than I write.

In order to have networks improve my life and not detract from them, I have developed some policies to keep them in their place and keep them optimized.

First, some general guidelines for how I manage my online presence:

• No whining. If you must whine, do it to someone who cares about your venting and helps you feel better after getting it off your chest. If your social network is your support group, you’re in trouble.
• Curate your posts as a log with a purpose.
• Don’t clutter your network with off-purpose posts or irrelevant contacts.
• Delete contacts who add clutter.

Twitter

Twitter is the most misunderstood social media channel.

Twitter is for hype. Share what you want people to know about you, and if they care, it is available to them. There is not an easier way to allow people to opt in to learning about you.

Essentially, it allows you to subscribe to a stream of communications from many different sources that do not need to be read. I can get up to 200 emails a day. Most are not just to me. Many are marketing communications. Twitter allows me to subscribe to the marketing messages I care about (buy.com/mwave/politicians) all in one feed, without worrying if I am reading all the messages, and now communications are no longer hitting my inbox.

Sure, people could tweet every time they go poop. They aren’t doing it in a way that I’d be interested in following. Unless it’s the co-worker prank where they tweet his toots.

A great aspect of Twitter is that it is so casual. Following/unfollowing people generally doesn’t require any reciprocation or permission.

Who/What I Follow:

• Friends/Neighbors who I’m interested in following
• Thought leaders – People who research and stay up on topics, and share highlights from their research and also their thoughts about topics
• Funny things: the onion, shitmydadsays
• Hot deals: MWave has hourly Specials. Buy.com highlights “What’s Shakin” items.
• My elected leaders. Sheffie Kadane is merely squatting. Angela Hunt does it right, highlighting her actions and what is driving her policy decisions.

 Facebook

Facebook is probably over 50% of all social media traffic. When used correctly, it enhances real, offline relationships. It’s much easier to meet up with your friends and not have to go through the “so how have you been”, and cut straight to the “So how did your costume end up? Did that wig really stay on?” 

Facebook defaults to private and relationships are required to be reciprocated.

It extends your network by showing you content about your friends when friends that are not in common posts something about them. Because of this, you have to think of your least presentable state that you may ever be photographed in, like drunk at a costume party when you are in drag and hugging strangers. If you get tagged in someone’s picture, all your contacts will be pointed to that picture. Now, what contacts do you want to see you in that state?

That said, here are my Facebook policies:

• I do not “friend” co-workers or clients. That’s what Linked-In is for. 
• Drive traffic to my other networks: this blog, Flickr, anything else I want to promote
• Think about my contacts and post things that I think they would be interested in.
• Only friend people that I would want to sit with and have a conversation. Personal threshold: If I see them out, I would want to go talk to them, and if it was at a restaraunt, invite them to sit with me.

Linked-In

Linked-In is a professional networking site. It’s a good way to find people to hire, and find connections to jobs. It’s one of those places that are not that useful until you need it, and then it is indispensable.

There is almost no deterrant to growing a giant network.

Myspace

Myspace let their users ruin the presentation of Myspace. However, they did get the band presentation right, and still have a value there. Any band will have a Myspace page with concert dates, songs, news and pictures. The Polyphonic Spree has a hard to navigate official site and I get what I want from their Myspace, so will rarely go to their official site.

Others

For me, other social networks are

• niche (goodreads)
• an aggregator (tumblr, maybe)?
• redundant: orkut, tribe.net…

The above categories are optional, and useful to some people, but will never have the universal applicability of Facebook/Twitter/Linked-In.

Ancedotes:

• In early 2009, a web design company made huge buzz by giving away some computers for mentioning them in tweets. They took all tweets that mentioned them, and drew from that. They were one of the top trending topics for days and days, above Iran, which was having a huge feed due to their goofy election. Two of my contacts started cluttering up my Twitter feed with posts just to enter. Thankfully, I was able to unfollow them easily for a couple weeks until the marketing campaign ended. I told them that I was un-following them due to them spamming. After following them since, they have not done this again.
• A colleague of mine who I am fond of sent me a Facebook friend request. I let him know that I don’t let work onto Facebook and wrote him a LinkedIn recommendation instead. He did not reciporcate the recommendation, but did write a nice note about understanding the different use cases.
• I tweeted how a good use of Adobe Flash is one that doesn’t look like Flash, and referenced samsung.com. Within 30 minutes, SamsungUSA was following me on Twitter. That was cool.
• Facebook allowed me to go see Mates of State with a friend who had a late cancellation.

Conclusion

Social networks require management and enforcement of policies to keep them from being valuable tools and keep you from turning into one.

I say things like “Did you hear Bob went to Germany?” and not “Did you see that Bob posted on Facebook pictures from his trip to Germany?”  I’d rather talk about my impressions of it with them than have them visit Bob’s page to see it for themselves.

Some people don’t seem to care when their virutal interactions actually get in the way of their real interactions. As for me, I aspire to make the most of real interactions, and therefore will wrap this up and go hang out with my in-laws.

If that dog trainer guy and one of the special nannies were to swap programs, I bet the dog trainer guy would be better than the special nanny.

On the airplane yesterday, a girl in her 20′s is on her starter child: a beagle she got as a puppy and is now about one year old. Developmentally, there are a lot of paralells between things she is going through with her dog, that we may be seeing in Joseph and Felix.

Her vet said her dog needs 45-60 minutes of excersize per day or there will be behavior problems. It is easy to see how this could also be applied to children.

Thinking about the excercise parallel also got me thinking about what other parallels there may be. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll read up on dog training to think about this.

1. Loved the running through the country. Generally impressed with his running prowess, and the commitment to many different actual venues across the country. Excellent.
2. Nice old school peacock logo
3. General negatives on keeping the same theme song
4. Four thumbs down for keeping Max Weinberg
5. Big ups to Andy Richter being back
6. Questionable first use of video posing the VP as a racist
7. Conan as studio tour guide: par. Would have been great as a regular bit, but this is premiere night, and could have had more of a bang. Bus going on the streets was a nice touch, but showing the police escort ruined some of the magic.
8. First commercial break 25 min in. The tone has been set. Different from Leno, but generally appealing. Hopefully he’s grown out of the over-deprication and puppeteering with his pockets.
9. I wonder how Letterman is going to react to being bumped as the quirky everyman of prime-late-night, and pushed into the “safer” position.
10. Hollywoo: nice. Making effective progress toward establishing himself in LA/California.
11. Taurus bit: no, he is not Leno. It was awesome when Brad Pitt drove it like he stole it about ten years ago. Good to know he still has it.
12. Ashton Kutcher is a blight upon the image of Nikon. He’s a fantastic over the top pompous jerk on Punk’d. But as a pitchman, he gives me the creeps.
13. Will Ferrell entrance: nice. Fun, silly, premiere appropriate, and ties in with his movie, kinda.
14. Nice that the first Conan deprecating comment comes from Will Ferrell and not Conan himself.
15. “Liza Minelli is a communist. Voting for her is like pissing the American flag.” – It’s nice that Conan didn’t try to squelch it too much. I can just hear Leno or Letterman trying to poo poo that kind of crazy talk.
16. It’s funny that this is toned-down Will Ferrell on Conan. All his other appearances seemed to be him dressed in a green sequined bikini bottom and acting insane. It’s still quirky and funny, but not as crazy as it has been at times.
17. It’s a nice touch how they’re using Conan’s hair as part of the show’s branding, but his real hair, not that cartooney dot-eyed charactacture from before. And only from the bridge of the nose up. Again, another subtle “not Leno and his trademark chin”.
18. Pearl Jam: Stone Gossard? Where were you? Their music has gotten sloppier with time. In Vs. and Ten, there were hummable riffs. Recent albums don’t seem to have anything that showcases instruments and single riffs. But on the Conan angle, it’s a stark and welcomed contrast to Leno’s last musical guest James Taylor.
19. It’ll be interesting to see how Andy will be integrated into the show in the future. It was nice that he came to talk to Will Ferrell at the end of the show to remind people that he was there. Tonight did, and should have highlighted Conan. Hopefully Andy will be a big player in all the skits. Jimmy Fallon’s integration of  his announcer Steve Higgens is nice, with him being on stage and available for obvious eye contact.

Well, show’s over, so Live Blogging must now end. That to everyone (Ryan Burke!) for their participation.