The bit.ly redesign

I want to start by saying that I love the bit.ly brand. Even more, I love almost all of the team that powers bit.ly. Hillary, Todd, Jehiah, Justin, Matt, Matt, and Jeff (to name just a few of my favorite of the bit.ly staff) are all much much smarter than I am. So I’m sure they knew what they were doing with these changes and that it was all done with a lot of forethought and intention.

Still, I have to say, as a long time fan and user of bit.ly…I just don’t like it.

I have historically used bit.ly for two main reasons:

1. I can generate custom short urls - things like knwb.it and turfd.it that help me push my own given brand when I (or my users) share a link. It’s not a must have feature, but it’s certainly a nice ‘put me over the top’ thing when deciding what short url service to use (honestly without the custom url thing, I would just switch to goog.le at this point).

2. I can get click stats - this lets me know exactly how many clicks a shared link I, or a user via one of my services, generates. This is the original reason people fell in love with bit.ly, and I think it’s still the most important service they provide to users.

That’s it.

There is nothing else I directly need or want from my bit.ly experience. And the sad truth is that, if you don’t care about click counts and you don’t care about a custom url, then you probably don’t need a link shortening service these days anyway (most services that require short urls have that feature built in now anyway).

But don’t get me wrong, I do believe bit.ly is sitting on a gold mine of data and I do want to see them do more than just custom short urls and link shortening.

I just don’t think it should be the front and center experience for the core bit.ly service.

In fact I would go so far as to say that I think whatever they do shouldn’t be called bit.ly at all but instead be a completely new brand…or at the very least a new brand that is ‘powered by bit.ly’.

To start, I would argue that bit.ly itself has long survived on a mantra of ‘avoid bloat at all costs’…they should be eating that dog food when it comes to the bit.ly product itself.

Make the service short and clean just like the urls they deal with. Do the bare minimum that differentiates you and continue to kick ass at it.

Then with your new brand(s) ‘powered by bit.ly’, take advantage of all the awesome data you have pumping through your system and go out and invent the next wave of amazing services.

Make something that focuses on bookmarking (not interesting to me, but others will love it).

Make yet another social network for me to see what links my friends are saving and sharing (also not interesting to me, but sure others will love it).

Reinvent what ‘news’ can be as it relates to things of interest across the web right now (or maybe just continue to help news.me do that).

Make a kick-ass real-time search engine that is purely based on the data behind the links people are currently sharing (very interesting to me and something I know they already have working on the backend).

All of these things, and much more, are completely possible from the bit.ly data set (and easily achievable by the amazing bit.ly staff)…and I would love to see them progress on each…but not as one big, unified, bit.ly service.

None of this is how bit.ly got to be the amazing company that it is…and none of it speaks to the core reason people fell in love with bit.ly in the first place…worse, none of this speaks to how bit.ly actually make money right now!

I get that they are trying to drive more user interest in bit.ly, that they are trying to get more and more people to create and share bit.ly short links, to build the bit.ly data set and extend bit.ly’s reach…and they should totally be doing just that. Just not at the expense of the core bit.ly brand and service.

That’s all I’m saying…

Gawk.it - making conversations searchable.

I’m the cub master for my kids school cub scout group, an assistant coach for one son’s baseball team, and an assistant coach for the other son’s track & field team. So this past weekend I was busy with a camping trip for the scouts Sat. night, a baseball game Sunday, and a track meet Sunday (the typical fun filled weekend for me these days).

Anyway - because of my schedule, I couldn’t make it to the Techcrunch hackathon this past weekend. But just because I couldn’t physically be there doesn’t mean that I wanted to miss out on the fun…

So I took a few hours this past weekend (mostly at night after the kids were sleeping) and threw together my own little hack which is now live and available to experience at - gawk.it

Since I don’t get the chance to get up on stage and introduce gawk.it to the world (like I did a few years back for appsigot) — I’ll just give the quick pitch here instead:

What gawk.it is today

Gawk.it started as a tiny experiment.

I wanted to see what would happen if I built a dead-simple way to search the content of avc.com that included both the blog posts AND the Disqus comments.

I wondered what kind of information is really in this data set? Would it be something that I actually used? If so, how often would I actually use it? What other ideas and projects might it spawn? Is there a larger idea that it might lead to?

I didn’t know, but I figured why not hack something quick together and try to find out? So that’s what I did.

Right now your gawk.it experience should provide a simple, yet powerful, way to search the blog posts and comments found on avc.com and cdixon.org (after I got this stuff working for avc, the first thing I wanted to do was expand the data set [and what better source than my currently 2nd favorite blog?].  Expanding the data set also helped me to streamline the process so I could continue to expand the data set down the road [i.e. I’ll be releasing features soon to allow others to add their blogs to the master index]).

Admittedly, only offering up search across these two blogs (and their comments) is a bit limiting at the moment…but the good news, these two blogs actually represent an extremely diverse and active group that generates lots of interesting discussions every single day. So I think even with this limited first version, you’ll find some interesting content and conversations when you gawk.it.

All that being said, I’m happy to say, the gawk.it you see today is really just the starting point (turns out the answers to the initial questions I listed above are VERY interesting and flush with opportunity).

So here’s a little bit on my thinking on what gawk.it will be in the near future.

Ever learn something from listening in on someone else’s conversation?

Bringing that ability into an online tool is the core idea behind gawk.it.

If you take a look around the internet today, you’ll notice that there are actually billions of conversations happening.

Some of these conversations have sat idle for years, just waiting for a random person to come along and breath new life into them. Some are brand new with a frenzy of action being added every second.

If you want to get involved in any of these conversations, or just mine them for the amazing history/knowledge the best ones contain, how do you find them?

Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are great search engines (and there are others too) but they treat every set of data the same way.

They’re not focused on conversations, or getting you into the right conversations, they’re really just focused on getting you to quality web content and facts (sometimes this content turns out to be conversational, but the chances of that are random at best).

Add to that fact that many of today’s most popular commenting systems (like Disqus) are implemented via Javascript and most popular search engines don’t actually index data loaded via Javascript (yet)…and you quickly realize that today’s “search” just doesn’t work for finding or getting involved in good conversations.

gawk.it is going to fix this problem.

…or at least that’s where I’m heading with the project at the moment.

So why not jump over to gawk.it and give it a try? (and don’t forget to give it a go on your mobile web browser as well!)

Then let me know what you think and what ideas you’ve got in the comments below!

Today’s random idea: Disqus search

First a disclosure: I believe there are a few people already working on this idea (actually I know for a fact that at least one company already has a working prototype in this realm ‘in stealth’). Still, I don’t believe anyone is purely focused on it as a stand-alone service or with the specific details I would like to see, so I thought I would dump out my random thoughts for the idea anyway.

First a few important things I believe to be true:

1. Tons of interesting conversations, often even more interesting than the original content that sparked the conversation, are happening within Disqus across the internet.

2. Most search engines (especially Google and Bing) are not currently indexing Disqus comments in a ‘useful or meaningful’ way.

3. There is a clear, and successful, revenue model to implement around quality search.

So, what’s the actual idea?

Simple to say, slightly hard to do. Build a search engine that indexes, in a quality way, all the content flowing through Disqus in as near-realtime as possible.

You’ll notice the subtle, but key, thing in the idea is the ‘in a quality way’…what does that mean? That’s the tricky part I think.

To me, it would mean do some auto-tagging and contextual grouping (ie. analysis) between the content within a comment, the content the comment was associated with, the content within the thread as a whole, and then of course the relationship/meta-data associated with the commenters themselves.

That is, you need to develop a ‘conversation rank’ algorithm.

As you can imagine, this quickly becomes a massive data set problem (with many interesting variables)…so it’s really not a trivial thing to get correct (and there are quite possibly many ‘quality’ ways to approach/solve this).

And this is why I also believe that, for it to work well, it probably has to be it’s own standalone service (and not a feature worked into another, larger, service — though a service with a large enough scale might be a ‘good enough’ solution for now since nothing else exists).

Doesn’t Disqus already do this? If not, shouldn’t they be the ones to implement it?

Disqus does actually have a search feature built in…but it’s not at all like what I’m talking about here.

(As an aside I suspect that no one really uses the version of search they currently offer up — in fact I urge you to go play with it and you’ll see why).

So while I agree that they *should* be the ones to do it, I don’t think Disqus will actually build something like what I’m talking about/envisioning any time soon.

Why?

The reason is, I believe they are mostly focused on the blogger and helping the blogger to engage with the audience around the blogger’s content.

Beyond that primary focus, they care deeply about the experience for the commenter but from the view of making it easier/better to engage with the blogger (and others around that bloggers’ content).

So I don’t believe they are currently that focused on the data set across the Disqus universe, and the amazing stuff that *could* be done with it.

This leaves a huge opportunity for the rest of us if we so choose to act.

Side note: I do suspect that a successul implementation of what I’m talking about here, even at a small scale, would be a high acquisition target for Disqus. If nothing else, it would force them into thinking about, and acting on the bigger picture, about what people really want from the Disqus data set (ala the Summize deal for Twitter back in the day).

The other advantage that I see around this being a standalone service is that you could include many other data sets around conversations that are not currently being indexed (in any quality way).

So anyway - if I were to be thinking about building a new search engine, this is the angle I personally would be the most interested in working right now (and the one that I think is currently being the most underserved)…

What do you think?

picking a revenue model

Step back from your project and clear your mind for a second…now without thinking about what you are already doing, or could be doing, think about this:

How would you like to make money? What would you like to be paid for?

Once you’ve got the answer for that, dig back into your project and start making a plan to connect the two.

Explore how the things you are doing now can or will eventually lead you to the answer you gave above.

Did you cop out and say “advertising”? Then it’s all about eyeballs and clicks…what are doing to ramp that up? How long is it going to take to get to the scale you need there? How much is it going to cost (yes, the dirty secret to making money via advertising is that you generally have to buy your way into it).

Did you say “subscriptions”? Then what experience do you need to provide to make it compelling enough?  How long is it going to take to get that experience perfected? How much is it going to cost to acquire a user (yes, the dirty secret to making money via subscriptions is that, like mail order, you buy your customers and profit from the lifetime value they bring you — so you better be planning an experience that keeps them around over the long haul if you intend to profit)

Did you say something else? Then you’re heading down a road less travelled these days…fret with questions and unknowns, but also lots of excitement and potential rewards…and I would love to hear about it and your journey (in the comments).

Some random thoughts on the social web…

I’ve been meaning to flesh out some thoughts on the ‘social web’, but haven’t found the time to sit down and actually do it. So instead of the nice, clean, thoughtful post I wanted to do, I’m just going to do the rough cut version and dump the basic notes I’ve got floating around in my head…

Social is really all about showing that you care and that you are paying attention to what someone has to say. Therefore, software should do what it can to also ‘pay attention’ to what users are saying/doing…it’s probably the best way to build an online brand and offer up an unbeatable experience for users (something worth talking about and sharing).

Looking at a few services/features that I think are good examples to help prove this point:

1. bit.ly - killer feature is analytics…basically it’s a service to help you measure how many people are paying attention to you.

2. chartbeat - killer feature is real-time analytics…basically it’s a service to help you measure how many people are paying attention to your website/content right now.

3. Facebook likes - easy way to say “I am paying attention to you and appreciate your thoughts”

4. Instagram/Pintrest - I see you and am paying attention to what you are pointing out.

5. Comments/discussions (ie. Disqus and the like) - I’m paying attention…and here are my thoughts/reactions to it.

…there are of course many more examples that I could go into…but I think, if you’re paying attention (*har* *har*), you see my point. The social web is really all about paying attention and letting the people you are paying attention to, that you are in fact paying attention.

If this is true, then I think the ‘next big thing’ on the internet is likely to be something that helps make ‘paying attention’ or ‘showing that I’m paying attention’ easier…

What do you think?