So lots of friends have been messaging and emailing me about my bizarre Fanning behavior on Facebook. Weirdly none complain when I fan someone/some brand on Twitter. I guess cause that affects my feed, not theirs (Facebook apparently informs them about my fanning?).

In any case, I thought I’ll fire up a blog post about it, and guess where a few of these things are headed, and why its important that people fan brands, things/people they like etc.

Firstly irrespective of how many friends you have (I have around 250) on Facebook, there is no way your stream has new things to show every time. It simply doesn’t happen. For most people who check their Facebook 1-2 times a day its fine, but mostly people probably are spending north of 1 hour on Facebook (site/mobile etc.).

For the latter, fresh content is important, otherwise they are simply wasting time. Many people are getting their news, thoughtful articles etc. simply based on this feed. I can imagine 15-18 year olds not caring much of Yahoo! news, Google news etc.

Now back to the fanning behavior, the more things you fan, the more realtime your feed can be. Now if a brand spams my feed, I simply remove them. But most brands are being creative, they don’t talk about themselves all the time. In fact they provide thoughtful notes, links and commentary on things that have absolutely nothing to do with their brand.

Facebook Pages is going to evolve, and my money is on the fact that its going to really make Social (e)Commerce skyrocket. With the pending launch of Facebook Payments, its going to make for one heady mix! Imagine Brand X launches a product Y. They inform all their followers (say10k+). These followers with a few clicks can buy product Y off Brand X’s facebook page, without leaving Facebook, without entering their address/credit card # etc. cause Facebook already knows those details. Whats more these people get to share their purchase with their friends etc.

Now all this can be done on www.brandX.com also, and they can possibly (and most probably will) use Facebook Connect on their site, and make it social. But the idea of going to one place (Facebook) and being able to get all your news, catch up on friends, order product Y (maybe some flowers for your Mom) etc. etc. is pretty nice!

So there you go, I don’t really love each of the brands I fan on Facebook, but thats a cost I am willing to pay for a realtime stream, interesting links/discussions and getting to know more than I will from just my friends (who are awesome too!)

As many of you know I recently started working at Tivix. Working to solve problems faced by social entrepreneurs and Non-Profits is a good feeling. I came up with an idea similar to igive (there are others out there too), but wanted to make it simpler and easier to use (without forcing people to login for example)

I came up with a rhyming name for this concept, Givix: Giving while shopping! Thanks to Amazon Associates, commission junction and linkshare it was made possible!

Also thanks to the simplicity and free scale of Google App Engine I am able to write the code, test and launch Givix (on another note I think the Django model interfaces are easier to use, or maybe I’ve simply become used to them. I do like App Engine’s online dashboard, ease with which I can edit model instances, see logs/performance etc.)

I enjoyed writing this simple app, I hope to enhance it more next year. Hopefully Givix will be able to raise some (however small) money for a few causes this year. Given the looming recession I don’t have high hopes, but if you’re reading this and are going to be shopping at Amazon.com, buy.com, sketchers, macys.com, cafepress.com or others, then do consider clicking through Givix before making the purchase. Every cent counts!

This post could easily have been named “Targeted Blogging” or “Feature requests for Feedburner”

So I started thinking about a RSS/Atom feed that is intelligent. Meaning each of my blog’s feed subscribers can potentially be offered unique content. So let me present a few scenarios:

- Wouldn’t it be great to be able to write a blog entry about music, and have only people who had “music” as one of their interests, be the only ones who see it in their Google Reader/My Yahoo!/NetNewsWire ?
- What if I was organizing an event in San Francisco, and wanted to let only people who are in California know about it ?

Problems:
- Doing Geo Targeting for ads within feeds is easy, since they load within the browser as a separate request, hence the ad server can act with intelligence about time of day/location etc. Sadly the same is not true for my blog entries. I write them once.
- Scenario#2 above is a bit flawed, because what if my friend from NY is going to be in California during that time period, then he/she will not be able to attend, since my blog entry won’t show up in his/her feed!!

Solutions:
- When the user comes and clicks on my “Add to Yahoo/Google” button I ask them for some basic info, such as age/location/profession etc. They may chose to ignore it of course, but if they don’t they are giving me important information.
- A better solution is for feed burning platforms such as Feedburner to maintain a persistent profile of users who are subscribing to feeds. So my profile would read: “Sumit Chachra, Male, 26, San Francisco, CA ……..”. This information will *never* be shared with feed publishers, but they can use it to target content (much the same way Facebook ad targeting works)
- The problem with scenario#2 can be resolved using a few techniques. Assuming Google Calendar has a feature called “Location” where in I can feed in my coordinates for specific dates, and this information can be shared with Feedburner, then my feedburner profile is really “dynamic”! We’re headed down the path of intelligent agents here really, and its all starting to sound like a scifi (scary) movie at this point

All this implies that each subscriber to my feed has a unique feed url, which will spit unique content to each such subscriber, based on certain data points that the feed url platform knows about them, and using which the feed publisher can do targeted content delivery!

I wish this existed!

It was a long time coming! Yahoo! chose to use Flash (Flex?) to build the online version of messenger. Will I use it, probably on my personal laptop at home (one less piece of desktop software to install… phew!). Does it even come close to the Gtalk that comes integrated with Gmail (launched more than a year back)? Not for me, but I can imagine people who would want all the bells and whistles of their regular desktop messenger (fonts, text size, bold/italic etc.) to like the new Yahoo! Web Messenger. Some of my comments on this new products and ways to improve it:

History: So finally I can see my chat history. But why not give a search box right at the top instead of making me click on a link? Pretty basic interaction designer stuff I assume? Instead a web search box is provided at the top.

Cntrl-W / Cntrl-G / Cntrl-Tab: None of these nice shortcuts works. Cntrl-W should close my current chat tab, Cntrl-G should let me buzz my friends (my friends can buzz me, but my window doesn’t vibrate!) and Cntrl-Tab should let me move between chat tabs, just like I can on my Firefox (or at least Tab like the way it does in the Gmail/Gtalk)

Copying multiple lines: Doesn’t work. Only one line at a time. Thats pretty lame.

Banner ad on the right: Was it very essential to put that ugly banner ad on the right, specially when a new product like this launches? If I were the Product Manager on the web messenger team, I’d instead match (and rotate every 10 minutes or less) text ads related to my past/current chats. I’d bet this would increase CTR significantly. Irrespective its worth an experiment for sure. Simple bucket test to conduct.

Login popup: Why does a new popup window need to be opened to make my login? Its a very jarred user experience, different from every other Yahoo! property I’ve used before.

The concept is simple. You have a 1-N person company and have the domain www.mystartup.com. You want to provide all your employees with basic email, Instant Messaging, Calendaring etc. capabilities. All of the above can be bought or set up in some ad-hoc manner. But this is where Google Apps comes in. It gives you all the above and more for free (at least initially… till they come out with premium services for which you would have to pay for). Not that you can’t already have all these services ala carte but with Google Apps you get a admin interface through which you can administer your users. You can set your own custom logo for all the services, time zone, color schemes etc. Not only that all your employees get the services with the mystartup.com domain. Here’s a screenshot:

This is an excellent way to increase usage of services like GMail, Gtalk etc. which otherwise may not gain as much traction. I can imagine companies that buy domains/hosting space from dreamhost or godaddy making use of this service. Better still I can imagine the ISP’s or hosting providers giving users the option to use Google Apps in a much more out of the box fashion. So for example instead of using the slow and old squirrel mail interface I use, dreamhost would offer me a gmail interface. This is a win win for Google since the gmail text ads are highly targeted and may make enough money to keep writely and spreadsheets ad free for a long time (or forever?) to come. One thing that also caught my eye was the capability to create mailing lists. This is an extremely useful (and painful to manage) function most companies like to have.

Now there are concerns about doing office work like composing documents and excel sheets online, since you can’t edit or access all this data on the plane or when not connected to the internet. There are 2 things that are going to solve this problem or alleviate it to a certain extent. One being that internet is going to be omnipresent in the not so distant future. Here again Google is making some impressive strides. The other solution path which till this point hasn’t received much attention is one wherein some or all of the data can be stored permanently or temporarily on the client side itself and somehow kept in sync with the central servers. Dogo.Storage and JavaDB come to my mind in this context. There is no doubt in my mind that the big Web2.0 players are already trying ti come up with solutions to this daunting problem.

All in all give 2 thumbs up to Google Apps!

My last blog post was on Google checkout (I like the product). This one focuses on something new I saw today. Google using its most expensive real estate (www.google.com) to promote checkout as a “faster, safer online shopping” method.

Now had they been simply linking to the checkout homepage I wouldn’t have even blogged about it! Instead they link to this page in which they explain what Google checkout is all about. The 3 step process that Google sums it up as is:

Step 1: Search on Google (presumably for things / services that can be bought…). Look for the shopping cart icon in “sponsored links” (doesn’t say “click” … but then its assumed, otherwise you can’t go to step 2).
Step 2: Do your shopping
Step 3: Click on Google checkout and complete your order @ Google.
The image below (from here) highlights step 1, since thats the most contentious one.

I think had Google not advised users to click on sponsored links or put the link to this page on their main page, it would have been OK. By doing so the number of non-converting clicks will increase drastically in the near term. I don’t know if its a good or bad thing for the companies that advertise with Google though (at least in the short term). But this definitely is the first instance I have come across of Google promoting people to click on ads. Given this fact I would buy at least some Google stock (if I had the money)!