Solving the Social Intent Problem, or Why Facebook Will Succeed

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This is one of the biggest issue needing to be solved for the current and future crop of social media companies. As I had ran down in the previous post on user intent, Social Intent is lacking a direct monetization system. I believe that it can be solved and will be; this is my run-down of the issues and a few points of focus that maximize potential. Throughout the post, I’ll try to keep the points mostly agnostic, but still make specific points in the case of Facebook.

As is well known by now, Facebook recently had it’s financial potential put into question. The question came in two rather bold points, the faltering of the IPO and GM’s decision to pull it’s ads from Facebook. In my mind, both are wrong-headed if you look at it from a long-term perspective, believing Facebook can solve the Social Intent problem.

The first step in fixing the model is understanding what type of associations and products lend themselves to socializing in the real world where the money is. One area sticks out instantly here, communications and mobile, which I’ll come back to momentarily. The other areas to focus on are where we’re already doing in-person socialization and real sharing: sharing food(at restaurants), sharing music(albums and concerts), watching movies(at home or in the theater), other forms of in-person entertainment, and even things like sharing tools at work.

I have just listed a few different areas where advertising still makes sense on the platform, and enhances it. The next step is figuring out where and how to do the advertising. A few things that I think will work in the environment is promoting deals to groups of friends, using a focused approach to kick-off a word of mouth campaign, or promoting tools that extend or even compete with the platform.

Promoting deals to groups of friends is focused on experiences, and sharing them. Offering small group-buy discounts on services that bring people together would be a good sell. Also things that people would want to share with their friends after buying. The biggest thing though is where this should be, it needs to be mobile. Mobile means you can promote live deals on location data, this will be key for Facebook.

Facebook provides one of the most detailed systems for focusing on specific user for promotion. Using this to promote to a specific market that will love and share it with others will be gold. If you can find a product that is shareable enough, and can get some enthusiasts hyped about it, it makes sense to try this approach to reach a broad base cheaply. Not all products have a broad capacity though. Take GM for instance, vehicles aren’t one of the products that individually have broad capacity. GM’s ads weren’t fit for the market and eyeballs still don’t mean much ever after a decade.

This one is a bit questionable, considering I mention helping to promote competition. Of course, if they’re paying you, you get to see some metrics on how they’re doing, and you the sub-graphs may still be maintained or tightened by them. Promoting extension and competition make sense for a platform as it keeps the network tight, while allowing a form of escapism. In many ways, Facebook has huge advantages over most other companies in that they have both a large network that has hit critical mass and have a successful platform for extension.

This is a market or two and it’s currently anyone’s game to solve. I don’t know who’s going to get to the fruit first, but it’s there and I see it. Time to figure out if and how to sneak past the giant and grab it.

Ok, now mostly FB. There have been rumors and talk about Facebook phones or advanced cameras to compliment their service and photo-based extension of that service. I think, as I pointed out reason above, this is a no-brainer. You want to maximize the sharing on the site, but also promote real world interaction for the substance to share. If you can provide the tools to make this seamless in setting up and sharing experiences, from beginning to end, you’re in control. I’m not saying they need their own device, but it would make it more simple to do.

Facebook as it stands is profitable. They have the time and resources to solve this problem, and most of the secondary and sub-problems that I have missed and would surely arise during the process. If they figure this out they won’t have to worry about the doubt. It’s also why I feel long on Facebook, though I still believe it will come down further.

User Intent

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What is the intent of users on the web? I’ve been engrossed by this idea for a few weeks. It’s obviously not a simple question with one answer, as it has many; the value of the question is when used to answer specific cases. Let’s break down the concept into a few quick areas.

Primary Intent:

  •   Looking for something to do (Entertainment)
  •   Looking to buy something (Purchase)
  •   Looking for information (Research)
  •   Creating, Sharing, and in-taking information from others(Socialization)

Those four primary intents, and their combinations, define why users are on the web. Each provides an adequate monetization strategy, though that strategy isn’t always straightforward. Let’s look at a few examples of how I classify things.

Entertainment:

Purchase:

  •   Big Online Stores: Amazon, Newegg, Zappos
  •   Services(categories): Hosting, Web Design, Niche stores

Research:

Socialization:

That is just a quick run down, and I could easily move some of those freely between more than one category, e.g. Reddit could also be placed in Research/Socialization, Zynga in Socialization, and Google Search in Purchase.

Purchase intent is likely the easiest to monetize. There are two primary goals that need to be met, capture that interest and then maximize profit in an optimal fashion. Amazon wins by capturing interest with selection and pricing, then maximizes by setting bars such as Free Super Saver Shipping. Newegg, Zappos, and other smaller niche stores capture by catering to a specific buyer.

Entertainment and Research both have positives and negatives as far as monetization goes. They can both come with a purchase intent, though it isn’t necessarily a given. Both have similar monetization strategies, direct and ad-driven, yet each has inherently different ways of handling them.

Entertainment services are often closer to a direct monetization. The reason for direct monetization is partially due to higher costs, either via licensing, bandwidth and storage, or to protect from cannibalization of physical services. The ad-driven approach works okay at larger scale, but with it comes issues of possible mismatch among intent, interest, and the ad. If the user isn’t interested or has no intent in what the ad is providing, that ad is wasted, this is in general.

Research services however are more commonly using an ad-driven approach and it fits. The reason it fits, particularly in the case of search, is because the user may be looking for a solution and have a secondary intent willing to purchase that solution. If you don’t have the solution, but you and someone offering a solution can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. There are also services that offer primarily direct monetization, like academic journals.

Socialization is the hardest intent to monetize, because it has the least correlation to a intent to purchase. Ads aren’t going to work as well as when the intent was on research or entertainment because the ads are often highly irrelevant to the reason the user is there. Promoting word of mouth will likely be more efficient than ads. And since the services often require users to get and retain other users the up-front direct monetization strategy is limited.

TL;DR: When a user decides to use a service they are doing so with specific intent in mind. There are four primary categories that web-services fit into: seeking entertainment, seeking to purchase something, looking for some information, or interacting with others actively or passively. Of the four, the intent to purchase stands out above the rest as far as monetization goes; entertainment and research have similar models but different usage for them; socialization sticks out due to it’s weaker capacity for monetization using the current models shared by the other areas.

Paring Back

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I’ve found that I lose focus too often over the years; actually, to say I’ve lost focus would be the wrong term, instead I should say, “I’ve misplaced my focus.” I never stopped focusing, but my focus shifted so rapidly I failed to accomplish anything. I don’t feel too bad about it, it sucks, but it has already happened and I can’t change the past.

Over the past month, or so, I’ve managed to focus on learning Ruby and Rails, but I’ve also realized that I was spending time on things that no longer mattered. I was wasting my life on things that don’t amount to much. It was inevitable, eventually something would have to give, and with waning interest the choices were made much simpler.

I’ve cut what I read daily on Google Reader by 60%, by cutting out things I should have cut much sooner like TechCrunch and Mashable; I can still do more here, but paring back things with less volume doesn’t feel like a necessity. For the past several months, I had been getting overwhelmed by the end of the week, and would spend 4-5 hours on Sunday crunching through 1000+ items.  

Also, I’ve also all but fully retracted from Friendfeed. I still post stuff via the bookmarklet and a rare sarcastic comment or two a week, but I don’t visit the site more than once or twice a week. When I visit it just reminds me that “It’s dead, Jim.” There are dozens of people I love and care about there, but I’ve lost interest in the shell of a dream we shared. Hey, we had a good solid run with it though, nearly 3 years without any active development and it’s only just beginning to collapse.

Where will I expand and go from here. I don’t really know. I guess I’ll probably start using the time to chew through my backlog of ideas. Here I am, nowhere near where I had expected 5 years ago, when I left high school. I don’t know if I’ve grown that much, since then, but my appetite surely has. It’s time for me to enjoy the journey and let go of the scars of the past.

Impact

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Over the past year, I’ve noticed myself suffering from various seemingly odd emotions, the gamut between sheer joy, broodiness, to something of despair. I wasn’t sure the reason, or what set it off. The other day I came to think of where it seems to have started, but I’m still not quite sure the reason it impacted me.

A few months ago, an acquaintance passed away. We attended school together, but her and I may have spoke once over those 3 years. My only true interaction, one I don’t fully remember, was at a small Halloween party that a few of my friends threw in college. For some reason, her death has haunted me, it’s something I think about several times a week; I wish I knew why because without an real connection, only a closeness in age, it feels weird.

Obviously, she has had an impact, even on those like me. The ripples from her loss are greater than I would expect. While the full impact on my life might not have came from the events related to her; I can point to several things that have changed at least in part because of them.

One of the most notable things for me has been that I’ve felt broody. Some of it I know comes from my cousin’s pregnancy, but some of this I feel comes from facing mortality. Sitting there during the memorial service, watching snapshots of her childhood pass before me it touched me, and made me wish I was there. There not just as a form of nostalgia, but also as something I felt the need to be part of now. The happiness of childhood and innocence provides such intense joy to those around.

Another thing that’s changed, is that I have become more open to religion. Something about watching the community in and from the church during the service, changed something for me. While I am still not religious, my view has changed, and continues to change. I’ve always leaned more on an agnostic front personally, with a belief in some form of karmic justice. I know that from experience what I do always is almost always returned greater in the future. I cannot say that it is by fate, or by the hands of a deity, any more than I feel I can say it is by luck. More and more, I seek to find a shared faith, even though I don’t truly believe, and part of that is due to the warmth of the community I saw that day from our shared grief.

We will all have an impact and it cannot be measured or seen. Only once we have passed and settled will the scales truly show the difference we made. Change what you can, for you and those near, and even if the impact isn’t large or doesn’t occur swiftly; your impact will be felt. Do good.

Usage Caps: Hidden and Invisible

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I’ve been thinking about it, usage caps make sense, but the implementations that providers are offering don’t, with these arbitrary usage caps, that are mostly hidden. There is already a theoretical cap, that for all current intents and purposes seems invisible. That theoretical cap exists do to the maximum bandwidth that the provider supplies you with.

Let us look at some of those numbers. I’ll start with a simple example for a 1Mb/s connection and assume that this contains both up/down streams.

1Mb/s connection = 1/8th of a MB/s ;

MB/30 day month = 60s*60m*(24h/8)*30d = 324000 MB/month = ~325GB/month.

That’s the invisible bound on a 1Mb/s connection for 30 days, you can’t achieve greater than ~325GB/month. Then you have to factor in decay caused by latency and dropped packets on the line and assume maybe 90% capacity is possible, which brings you further down to ~290GB, realistically.

Taking that information, I think I would start people off with a percentage based amount of their bandwidth. I’d start off with a provision of a 40% utilization(~130GB/month), and allow it to be increased/decreased. It’s entirely possible that this is too high of a utilization offering to start with; for example,  when you get to 5Mb/s lines that same 40% is ~650GB/month. On the other hand, some companies want to cap it at 250GB/month which is less than 20% utilization of a 5Mb/s connection. It is my belief that they need to scale their utilization cap with their speed offering; to me, it doesn’t make any sense, otherwise.

If I can do this math, I’m sure they can and have done it as well. They already know what they are theoretically being asked to provide at peak times, and also what they’re capable of handling. How hard would it be for them to optimize this, and increase their efficiency?

Maybe offer a 10% utilization at 1Mb/s(~32GB) as a baseline, for those like RMS who don’t use the web with the exception of email? Then they can automatically roll you into the next 10% for the month, if you go over that limit. You automatically get rolled up 5 or 10%, at some percentage of cost. Once you have the roll over and initial utilization provisions determined, you can go about extrapolating and targeting different areas of what you provide.

Lets assume that you start with a base fee of maybe $10 + taxes and then a rate for bandwidth/speed similar to this:

For a 1Mb/s  plan: 32GB(10%) @ $10, 64GB(20%) @ $12, 96GB(30%) @ $14, and 128GB(40%) @ $16.

For a 2Mb/s plan: 64GB(10%) @ $15, 128GB(20%) @ $18, 192GB(30%) @ $21, and 256GB(40%) @ $24.

For a 4Mb/s plan: 128GB(10%) @ $25, 256GB(20%) @ $30, 372GB(30%) @ $35, and 512GB(40%) @ $40.

You can extrapolate further.

Maybe my scaling is a little off, a little too linear, as I’m not really accounting too much for trying to limit peak loads. Also I’m starting each tier at roughly the cost of the tier below at 35% utilization. There are lots of inefficiency in my model, but that’s because I don’t have the actual data required to see if this is feasible. I think it is still better than their blind caps that they try to hide.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on how this could be done, or if it’s feasible, leave a comment.

PSA: Time To Step Out From Under Text-Shadow

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Over the past few, weeks I’ve been noticing more and more often that when I highlight text it gets blurry and muddled. The culprit that causes this being text-shadow. Until now, I’ve normally marked it down to some obscure default in a theme, or something that makes it appear so frequently.

Twitter Text-Shadow

Can we please stop this.

Unfortunately, I noticed it on the new StackExchange homepage and decided to tweet my outrage. While I was there I decided to check Twitter. Sure enough, in their footer box they had the same damn affliction. While they do it mostly right, it still bothers me. Can we please get to grips with this.

Here are a few rules:

  1. If it’s content that is meant to be read, and actually consumed, don’t use text-shadow. Period.
  2. If it’s a headline/html5 logo, you might be able to use it, but 90% you shouldn’t. Think hard first.
  3. If you don’t know why you need it. You probably don’t. Let it go, you won’t regret it in the least.

So let’s all play our part and clean it up. Stop using text-shadow in your stylesheets.

Why I Don’t Use Google+

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I was asked for feedback in a conversation about the new names policy for Google+ by Louis Gray, Product Marketing Manager for Google+. I had pointed out that this doesn’t solve any big issue I have with the service. This statement provided no value, and I felt that my response deserved to be more thorough and possibly actionable. My biggest issues revolve around responsiveness of the site and the social experience.

My experience with the site has been pretty crappy as far as responsiveness goes; I can’t put all of this on Google, as I do have a slower connection. I can like, er, +1 an item and it doesn’t take, I do it again, and then it takes and un-take simultaneously for example. Posting has horrendous lag particularly when trying to select circles, all 8 of them, in which to display. Notifications are so slow, they’re sometimes as far off as several hours at this point, which is the worst I’ve seen since launch and continues to degrade. If you’re browsing, occasionally comments don’t show up without a refresh of the page or opening a thread in another window. So as far as responsiveness of the site, I’d put them above Twitter, barely, but still way, WAY, behind Facebook or Friendfeed. They’ve made improvements, but even so it still seems to be degrading faster than they can keep it up, this without mention of the memory issues.

My personal social experience with the site has felt off. It is okay at a lot of things, but isn’t the best at any. Circles are in theory good, but in practice this doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m not going to share anything I want my close friends and family to see, because Facebook already does that and is more closed off; there is no need to try and pull all these people over and shove in a circle. It’s hard to find valuable content, without immense amounts of effort at some point in the loop. If I follow someone who occasionally shares something I find interesting, or shares a topic I want squared away to the side; the only recourse I have is to put them in a circle, otherwise I have to wade through the noise, and even circling them isn’t a perfect solution. Twitter is much better at handling noise, by having compressed context. I can parse a tweet a lot faster than the longer form content shared on Google+.

The service just feels like a waste of time, when there are alternatives that aren’t as much of a waste of time and more productive. The only exception I make is when I have specific need to share with a few specific people that do use Google+, and it would be quicker to contact them this way. I don’t have any good ideas on how to fix the social experience, but they can start with the responsiveness of the site.