Today I’ve finally decided to shut down the current version of conversationlist.com.
It’s been a fun project to build and maintain over the past couple of years, but interest seems to have plateaued over the past six months and we’ve never bothered to try and turn the project into a profit center (honestly, I’ve never tried to make any money with it at all - instead I just keept it running because it was a fun little project that had got some good attention).
Still, it’s at a level now that costs me about $70 a month in server resources (it rebuilds about 15,000 twitter lists every day)…and honestly I feel like Twitter lists (at least as far as I’m involved/interested in them) have run their route as well.
So I’ve decided it’s best to commit that $70 towards other projects that I’m currently excited about.
As with all the projects I do, I’ve got backups of the code and underlying data sets…so there is still a chance I might do something more with the domain in the near future (I’ve actually got a lot of interest and ideas around the general ‘conversation’ theme - so don’t be surprised to see it emerge as something new before long)…but for now it’s going dark.
If you’ve got questions, concerns, or comments around this decision please feel free to leave a comment below…just because conversationlist.com is going away, doesn’t mean I am ;-)
Today I’m making the first public mention of a new little service I’ve built called whoclicked.it. A simple service designed to tell you who actually clicks on the links you share around the web.
It’s an idea that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now, but was primarily driven by two things:
1. Prior to building whoclicked.it, I used bit.ly for almost all my link sharing on Twitter. With bit.ly, I’ve seen on average that I generate about 15 clicks on anything I share, no matter what time, or what, I share.
On one hand it’s a nice little boost to the ego to know I’ve driven some traffic, but on the other hand it drives me NUTS to see that number each time and have no idea what to do with it. I also always wonder how many (if any) of those clicks are real people vs. twitter bots that just follow every link shared on twitter (I suspect a large portion of those 15 clicks I generally log are actually from bots). I needed to fix this problem.
2. Within knowabout.it internally we track what links people click on from within our emails and system (using the halfbite.com system I built). I built that service to help test and improve our recommendation system and algorithms…but since first building it, I’ve been completely obsessed/hooked on looking at who clicks what links. It’s very addictive and so I’m betting that many ‘normals’ would love to know who actually clicks on the links they share as well. I wanted to share that power and knowledge.
Beyond those two primary motivating factors, and after I started playing with the prototype a bit, I really got hooked on some of the additional things this service opens the opportunities for…specifically:
1. Restricted links. Because people have to log in before getting redirected to the proper long url, you can now control who actually gets to be bounced and who doesn’t. So fan clubs, private groups, and other exclusive services can now publicly share links that only certain people can actually use. Granted, it’s a pretty niche need, but still one that I think is pretty unique and cool…so I’m excited to see if people actually use it and what their feedback on it is.
2. Personal engagement. Again because you know the set of people that actually clicked through a link you shared, you now have an opportunity to have conversations with just that set of people on just that set of data. You can have these conversations outside of the content itself so that the conversation is essentially private for just your group of ‘clickers’ (actually I can put in all sorts of levels of privacy options around this engagement if users want — clearly I haven’t completely thought this part through yet).
As I slowly put the MVP for this together nights and weekends of the past month, I’ve also been explaining the concept to a few influential and opinionated friends that always make me think about things in new and interesting ways.
One of the more interesting conversations around the project I had was with Arnold. As I introduced the idea to him, he stopped me and asked me a very awesome question. “Why should I care?”…I thought it was a great way to think about any new project from the user’s point of view…so here’s what my response (more or less) was:
Why should I care?
Because you can’t engage with people, or connect on any personal level, if you don’t know who they are!
My core thesis behind this project is that 99% of the time generating an anonymous click is basically generating a worthless click.
I believe the only time that an anonymous click is valuable is when you are trying to generate volume traffic to content (which you generally only do for the content you generate yourself).
I also believe most (or at least many) link shares are not actually from the content creators themselves, and so they don’t really care about the volume of traffic they generate from the links they share.
So these beliefs caused me to wonder, if most people don’t care about the volume of traffic they generate from sharing links then why do they share links? What do they really care about when they share a link? What do they want to happen?
The answer, at least for me on a personal level, is that I share links to content I find interesting. Links to things that I want my friends - and like-minded people - to know about. Things that *I* would want the people I follow to point out to me. I share links to things that *I* want to discuss further with people.
I think that last point is the kicker - “things that *I* want to discuss further with people.”
In the world before whoclicked.it, the best I could hope for was a user or two that clicked on a link I shared taking the time to actually engage with me via the network I placed the share.
The trouble is, that leaves all the opportunity for engagement in the hands of the clicker.
Since I have no idea who is actually clicking on the links I share (or even if it’s real people clicking)…I have no way to be proactive and engage those people. Instead I’m left shouting questions and opinions to the crowd, hoping someone takes the time to shout back (loud enough that I can hear them).
But now whoclicked.it opens up the ‘opportunity for engagement’ for the link sharer.
You can find out when real people click on your links, and then you can reach out to those real people to engage with them on a personal level around the shared topic interest.
Sure you might get lower click thru counts on each of your shares, but the ones you do get will be of MUCH higher value because you’ll have the opportunity to engage with the set of users that are actually paying attention to you and have at least a little interest in a shared topic!
So…stop losing out on all those opportunities for personal engagement…check out http://whoclicked.it and then let me know what you think!
So you want an investor in your business. Here are some rules that I, as both an angel investor and entrepreneur have found valuable:
- Don’t pitch to strangers: People very rarely invest in an idea. They invest in people with ideas. If you don’t know anyone, get started now. Investors are more…
love it all.
All the power and intelligence of google … and this is the ad they choose to show on a post about social data, context, and my vision for knowabout.it … online advertising still has LOTS of room for improvement!
Twitter’s gigantic freakin’ revenue opportunity is promoted tweets. And similar to how Google found its business model at Goto.com/Overture, Twitter is taking its cue from StumbleUpon. But first….
Remember when Google didn’t have a business model? Yeah, the Internet and media giant with a valuation of $150-200 billion, $35+ billion in annual revenue, and ~$15 billion in annual cash flow couldn’t figure how to generate revenue while it was growing like a weed before 2000. Then they ‘adopted’ the paid search model; i.e., took it from Goto.com (which became Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo), got sued by idealab (Goto.com’s parent), settled for 2.7 million Google shares (which would be worth over $1.5 billion today if they never sold it - but they did), and yada yada yada for more information, well, Google it.
feel like there is a def. mind-meld going on here… :-)
