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Just two days after laying off 480 U.S. employees, with more to come internationally, in an effort to cut costs, MySpace is celebrating today the one year anniversary of the launch of MySpace Karaoke by giving away a trip for 2 to Las Vegas. Well, I guess we know where some of the money saved from the layoffs is going to, since there is no mention any where on the home page announcement or on the Karaoke page about the contest being sponsored by any company. Way to go MySpace.
Many people claiming to be current and, now, former MySpace employees have been posting on TechCrunch alleging that the management teams (mainly VP’s, SVP’s, etc) are the one’s that should be cut for under-performance. Perhaps SVP & GM of MySpace Karaoke, Nimrod Lev (dead serious that that is a real name) should be one of them out the door?
So. Twitter is down for maintenance right now. Interesting to note, the U.S. State department is claiming a bit of credit for that.
Oh and I’m working on a 15 step program, written by MG Siegler over at TechCrunch.
This blog post, is step 8. 😉
After the first couple of weeks on Twitter, tweeting about very mundane tasks, getting a grip on what the site was really about, I finally fell in love with Twitter, essentially, for one purpose: the flow of information. When news happens, it’s on Twitter long before any editors can approve an article for web publishing, and before the major news outlets (eg. AP, Reuters) even send out notices. I remember specifically a plane had crashed, and news of it spread on Twitter. Michael van Poppel of BNO News called the coroner’s office in the town the plane crashed, to the shock of the clerk that answered the phone. Poppel tweeted out that the clerk asked, “How did you hear so FAST?” And that’s where I think the real power behind Twitter lay. Something happens, and the Twitterverse knows instantly.
When Trending Topics were moved from the less-than-obvious search page, to the home page, I was quickly disappointed to find that memes were taking the place of information. #3turnoffwords and #3turnonwords hit the trends and are still being tweeted about. I’m not sure why I was so surprised by this. I expected there would be fun and games, but I suppose I didn’t imagine the games would quickly out weigh the information. I started thinking Twitter was losing a small bit of that information flow. It’s always nice to have a reminder that things just aren’t what they appear. I think that, most likely, Robert Scoble deserves credit for this one.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares victory in the Iranian Presidential election, the government shuts down mobile phones, and access to YouTube and Twitter within Iran, opponent Mousavi accuses Ahmadinejad of rigging the election, and Tehran is set ablaze by protesters. Twitter is flowing with real-time updates, photos and videos of riots, and police action. Meanwhile, main stream media, specifically, CNN, is running Larry King discussing David Letterman vs Sarah Palin. Enter Scoble. “CNN: you should be ashamed. Horrid news judgment today. Absolutely horrid.” It didn’t take long for disgust towards CNN to migrate from FriendFeed to Twitter.
As I type this, #iranelection, #cnnfail, Tehran, and Mousavi are all in the top five Trending Topics. Although CNN has been the one graced with a failtag, it’s not the only main stream media that’s ignoring the events taking place in Iran. In a retweet, Scoble points out that all of the networks failed. Luckily, Twitter’s on this story. Otherwise, who else would?
If you’ve ever been to a candy store, you’ve seen how the store has tried to make as large and wide variety of candy available to you as possible, and it works, because you walk around the store, over and over, just trying to decide what you want. Eventually, you have chosen a few different types of candy. Many services try to recreate this idea on the web. The goal is that if they provide you with enough options, you’ll spend a lot more time wandering about on their site. This works, too, for some time. We all want to try the different flavors, but as every one knows, too much candy leaves you with a sour stomach and a toothache. Just the same, too many features on a web site leaves users wanting less.
As a website is growing, expanding product offering is a huge driving force to keeping older users entertained, and generally speaking, it’s not a bad idea to move forward from your original idea, as long as you are still true to the reason you made the site. However, it’s far too easy to go over board with your offering. Product dilution can be thought of as a bubble. As we all know, bubbles pop eventually. Each feature needs to have a dedicated team that understands the back end behind the feature, and they need to be ready to search out problems and errors and, as timely as possible, solve any issues before it burdens the end user. And this is just the start of a dangerous cycle.
Too many options available is the perfect way to meet a stagnation in new user sign ups. If there’s no clear direction for a website, any potential users will turn away for another website that does have a clear direction. Your existing users will start converging into their own niches on your site, where they only really use a certain few features, while ignoring the rest. If you ignore any particular one, especially older features, you alienate the users that are dedicated to it. Of course, if you’ve moved on from developing the existing products, the users are likely to feel they’re being left behind, and what they are going to do is begin migrating to another website that caters specifically to the product they used most at your site. It only takes a few members to say, “I found a better site. Come join me,” before your user base starts dropping.
So, here’s where we get to more problems. Your user base is dropping, your new sign ups are stagnating, and you’ve got a plethora of employees working on products you’re not sure you can financially support. You have to start cutting employees. The remaining users will notice this cut, too. Why? Because you have less people paying attention to the products you’re offering and the issues the users are having. Why is that significant? A few lines up: if you don’t pay enough attention to a product, your users don’t feel important, and they leave.
MySpace is one of the most recent victims of product dilution (among other things, but we’ll stay on topic.) Way back when, MySpace was a music oriented social networking site. In the process of competing with other sites in the market, MySpace began developing new features left and right. Taking a look around the site, you’ll find a myriad of wide ranging things to do. Blogging, messaging, forums, groups, karaoke, videos, restaurant reviews, and chat/IM are just a few of the features on the site. MySpace has overwhelmed itself, and, ultimately, its users. The company lost view of its original goals and purposes, so it’s users are flocking to other sites that have clearer intentions, such as Facebook, who, as MG Siegler recently pointed out, has a problem of their own: keeping it simple. Despite this problem, putting MySpace next to Facebook and it’s quite obvious which site is more bloated.
So remember, don’t attempt to be the site that has every thing. In the end, the one thing you won’t have is success.
As if I needed another reason to spend too much time on the Internet, I have come across Addictomatic. This is search on steroids. I did a review recently on Search3.com. Search3 lets you search, from their website, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and Ebay in one shot. Addictomatic is the site Search3 wishes it was. I’m having trouble finding a definitive list of where Addictomatic pulls information from. It’s almost overwhelming. So far, I see results from Google, Bing, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Twingly, WordPress, Technorati, Bloglines, Wikio and more. Simple to use. Enter a topic, click create, and be overwhelmed.
Addictomatic crawls the web in search of the terms you’re interested in. The amount of results is pretty impressive. The layout, on top of being clean, is customizable. You can drag your favorite sites for a term to the top of the page, then bookmark it, and come back again and again to get new results. One draw back is that there’s nothing to suggest that the results are 100% relevant. It seems to just look for the terms you input and give you any page with those terms. But really, it doesn’t get better than this. Addictomatic earned instant bookmark for me. Go on. “Inhale the web.” You’re sure to like this site.
When it comes to Wolfram|Alpha, let me just start by saying, stop reading anything that wants you to believe Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine or is “close to being” a search engine, because it’s not. Wolfram|Alpha is a computational engine. It does not provide “search results.” It provides “data.” It is not a link between you and a website relevant to your interests. Wolfram|Alpha is more of an encyclopedic-super-calculator-data-aggregator/comparison-information-machine. And that’s really just scratching the surface of Wolfram|Alpha‘s capabilities.
I want to start “small” with what Wolfram|Alpha can accomplish. It’s actually taken me a bit to really understand the power this site has, and all of the tech articles out there passing it off as “The Google Killer That Couldn’t,” didn’t help in the least. Mathematics is going to be the most common aspect of the site that is used and mentioned. Enter in any simple equation–(2+2)4 for example–and Wolfram|Alpha will provide the answer, nice and sweet. Now, throw in something a little more exciting: x^2 sin(x). Wolfram|Alpha chose this particular input/result with good reason, that being, it shows off. From plots, to roots, to alternative representation, Wolfram|Alpha gives you all the possible data related to the input.
Moving on from equations, let’s talk historical data. Try December 7, 1988, in Philadelphia. The first information given is about the date, specifically. How long ago was the date? What day in the year was it? Which week in the year? Then, it moves on to the city on that date, giving the temperature throughout the day, including high, low, and average, cloud cover, time of sunrise and sunset, and moon phase. Finishing it off, Wolfram|Alpha provides data strictly about the city/area, such as the city center elevation and population at the time of the closest census. I think first of story writers. Not all writers want to be factual about small details, such as the weather or when the sun rose, but for those that do, this is perfect.
The informational scope that Wolfram|Alpha encompasses is incredible. Maybe you’re into buying and selling stocks. Type in a few stock symbols, and Wolfram|Alpha will give you side-by-side comparison. Maybe you’re a musician, looking to find scales. Or maybe you’re just into music and want to know who wrote that song and when it came out and how high on the charts it got. Into astronomy (or working on a school paper?) Find the position of nearly any celestial body at any date, or find specific details, such as mass and orbital period, about them.
On a diet? Figuring out a mortgage? Play the lottery? Are you a physicist? Interested in political figures? There are piles upon piles of uses for this site. Wolfram|Alpha‘s about page says it “contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains.”
Overall: Even if you think you’re never going to use Wolfram|Alpha, stop reading this blog right now, and head to WolframAlpha.com/examples/ and look around at just some of what the engine is capable of computing. This is the website I wish I had when I was in grade school using Microsoft Encarta for research, and it most definitely gets play with my current studies.
TechTimmy 
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