Just the other week, my co-worker Todd Singleton and I competed in the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York City. Mashery was a sponsor of the event and we were there to spread the good word about the Mashery API Network. Prior to the event, Todd and I came up with a few ideas but never came up with any solid plan. So we winged it!

We recruited a couple of young graphic designers on-site because neither Todd or myself are “front-end” guys. The idea that we decided to pursue was building a replacement for “Googling” individuals by utilizing social media profiles and related meta-data.

In the spirit of tech buzzwords, we pivoted our project several times in a matter of hours. We tasked our young graphic designers, Kate and David, with building a UI to nameless product that had no clear value proposition. All we knew was that there was a multitude of data about people out in the wild, and we wanted to build something that would replace “Googling.” And then came Harold from Hunch.

Harold Cooper, an engineer from Hunch, was giving an API workshop talk about their API. Hunch is a product and technology company that is building a taste graph — a way to make and discover recommendations based on users’ tastes. Harold was discussing Hunch’s get-recommendations API call which provides an incredible amount of retail, travel and other recommendations based only on an individual’s Twitter handle or Facebook ID – and they don’t even have to be a Hunch user. Harold also mentioned that Hunch was awarding $1,000 to the best hack that utilized the Hunch API. Wow!

We had about 18 hours total to build something, and what we ended up submitting (with just minutes to spare) was Whodata, pronounced  like, “Who Dat? Ahh..”  A little Detroit flavor.  Over 100 teams presented their apps in front of a panel of judges including Jeff Clavier, Christopher Poole (moot) and Bradley Horowitz. With nearly a full days of hacking and no sleep, we were given only 60 seconds for our demo pitch. Despite the lack of sleep and turbo demo, it all worked out.

Whodata was built with PHP, Java, Perl and JavaScript. It uses the Qwerly API to get social media profile information based on Twitter name. Next, it uses Klout API to pull down social influence data. And lastly, it uses the Hunch API for taste graph/recommendation data.

Whodata was awarded with the “Best Data Integration” by Palentir Technologies who sponsored the hackathon. The prize was $1,000 of Amazon Web Services. We were excited and flattered to win. The hackathon was incredibly fun and very well organized. Big thank you to TechCrunch for holding an incredibly fun and well organized hackathon. And of course, a big thanks to Palentir for the AWS credit.

Shout out to team Whodata – Kate Proulx (@proulxsie) and Dave Caputo (@davecaputo), two young roller derbying graphic designers from New York.

As for the $1,000 AWS credit – I’ll be using that to spin up instances and provide environments for people participating at future Mashery sponsored hackathons coming near you!

About a year ago, I told a friend of mine that I’d like to take the work I’ve done for seller real-time SMS notifications on eBay, and bring it over to Etsy.  Etsy is a marketplace for handmade goods.  I tabled the idea until last month when Etsy announced their next generation API (v2).  I figured it would be a fun project to hack and give me an opportunity to pick up some new skills.  For those that know me well, I’m on a mission to learn new stuff, and my objectives of the project were to:

• get an actual artist to make the art
• layout the the Web app with nothing but <div> tags and CSS
• use more jQuery and less hacky JavaScript
• OAuth using a generic OAuth library (ended up using PHP)
• do it in less than three days

Mission accomplished (sans less hacky JS).  It’s EtsyText, version one and free.  Sell an item on Etsy and you’ll instantly receive a text message on your mobile phone.  There are hundreds of Etsy community members using it, and it’s just fantastic to hear their enthusiasm and feedback in both the discussion forums and convos (internal Etsy member messages).  For the Etsy sellers, this helps them stay informed about their sales immediately, without having to be near their computer.  There are many more EtsyText features to come as Etsy continues to enhance their API offerings.

There will be at least a six-month window between the original date of a tweet and its date of availability for research use.

Thus, according to my MySQL date query, Twitter will dump the entire tweet database to the Library of Congress on: “2010-10-10 10:10:10″ — okay, I added the 10:10 AM for dramatic effect.

Dude, Idiot, It’s Public Man, STFU, RTFM, RTFTOS.

There have been numerous arguments made regarding the fact that tweets are, as stated in the Twitter TOS, licensed royalty-free and can be used in any way that Twitter sees fit.  In the same document, it also states that we still own the content that we tweet.  These are, after all, our chunks of data we’re submitting about ourselves and what we’re interested in at the time. These are our synapses, be they profound or inane,  embodied into 140 characters or less, shared with social networking community.  So, why am I concerned?  I mean, we did publish these messages for everyone to read, in plain sight, correct?

Which brings me to my main point — communications on the social network that are intended to be “social” [interacting with others]  are the most valuable and useful in the context of the “real time” — the moment they are published.  I believe the value of a tweet diminishes over time.  The accuracy of the intent of the tweet  may change over time.  The likelihood that the tweet will provoke a response from others lessens over time.

Additionally, and most importantly, as time passes, the tweet serves little positive value to the publisher.  In fact, it carries potential negative value.  The only benefactors are those individuals or companies that wish to data mine your content.  A commercial purpose could include market research and targeting.  A business’s or individual’s purpose could include competitive analysis, legal research, and any other nefarious reasons for dirt digging.  That archived tweet can nail you down to a personal or political view, affiliation, date/time, and even geolocation.

Benjamin Franklin Said It Best

And if he were alive today, he might prepend his famous quotation to read: Tweets, fish and visitors smell in three days. The only reason to read your tweets several pages below the fold is to study you.  Through the years I have been using Twitter, I can’t think of a single time I’ve paginated down deep into someones tweet history for the sake of interacting with them.  So, assuming that you’re not using tweets to publish solely marketing messages, and you’re actually responding to current events and interacting with others — what is the value to you of having your tweets archived and available to the public indefinitely?

Surely, the value, at the time of the tweet, was to interact — possibly for sharing knowledge, humor, letting off steam, being goofy, responding to current events with commentary, etc.  But after that moment is passed, how does that information being stored in perpetuity (that’s forever) serve you? When we socialize in the real world, doing the same things that I described in the first sentence of this paragraph, the interactions take place but are not recorded.  If these social interactions were recorded, and played back for an entirely different and larger audience at a different point in time, the content of the interaction could be taken completely out of context.

Weighing and Watching Your Words Wil Wheaton?

Depending on who you are, and what your purpose is for tweeting, determines if you should be concerned about watching your words.  I have another blog article I’m working on now that addresses this issue titled, Sally the Sixth Grader to Dave F’ing McClure.  It’s an exploration of the wide range of users and uses of social networking, and how those factors play into long term privacy and control.  Generally, if you’re Sally the Six Grader (or her guardian), it’s incredibly important to manage the information that Sally posts online because of how easy it is going to be to recall that information decades later.  However, if you’re Dave McClure or Robert Scoble, who live in the Valley, and it’s part of your job to be clever, gregarious, and mostly wide-open, then maybe you’re not so concerned about what you say now and how it will be interpreted 5 or 10 years from now.  Danah Boyd refers to these folks, who blog and micro-blog their hearts out and are better off for it, as the privileged.  (BTW, Ensign Crusher is up there purely for alliteration)

Set Your Tweets Free with #NoLOC.org

My conclusion: delete your tweets before they get archived.  So, rather than just talk about it, I’ve actually hacked a technical solution!  Head over to http://noLOC.org.  It’s a registered Twitter application that will allow you to place a simple hashtag on a tweet that will trigger the automatic deletion of that tweet in 23 weeks.  Why 23 weeks?  Because on the 24th week, your tweet will sent over from Twitter to the Library of Congress.  There’s a 6 month delay/embargo, and any tweet that is public, and has not been deleted, will be archived… forever.  So, with NoLOC.org, you simply tweet like you normally do, but just embed a tiny little hashtag, and your tweet will no longer be archived by the Library of Congress.  The web site has more links/information about the Twitter/LOC archive deal.

Hopefully, one day Twitter will make opting out of the Library of Congress archive a user setting.  But I’m not sitting around and waiting for that day to happen. #noloc   By the way, NoLOC.org responds to hashtags #noloc, #noarchive, #noindex, and the incredibly short #n.  I welcome any questions or suggestions about #noloc, either here, or on Twitter @mansilladev.

• “Dude, you’re putting it out there in the public. If you don’t want it out there, don’t share it.”
• “This is the new paradigm of how people interact. In the future, we won’t be so critical about what people said, 5, 10 or 20 years from now.”
• “It’s Facebook’s platform and business. Don’t chastise them for monetizing it.”

So, despite the privacy and control SNAFUs of Facebook and the notable voluntary account deletions, a majority of the 12 quadrillion users remain, doing their social thing.  I mean, who would want to give up Facebook?  Imagine not being able to lurk, spy, goggle at pics (not Google).  I’m not certain what FB’s ratio of read vs. write activity is, but I imagine it leans very heavy to the former.  FB is the best voyeuristic platform ever.  So if a lack of controls and a binge on over-sharing is taking place — that’s a small price to pay for what we get out of Facebook, right?  Maybe… until one piece of data is no longer private.

I Know Which Facebook Profile You Stalked Last Summer (and just this afternoon)
Browsing data. We all know that FB has that big juicy access_log.  And that, my friends, is the holy grail of  privacy for all of Facebook’s users.  Every single action you’ve performed.  Every profile you’ve visited.  Every photo you’ve viewed — yes, every time of the last 45 times you’ve looked at that photo, that action has been logged.  That is valuable data.  It’s much more valuable than “Like” button clicks.  Hell, you just don’t “Like” that photo, dude, you’re in love with that photo.

There are several degrees for which this browsing data can be misused/abused or Zucked.  First degree — Facebook allows advertisers to see page view metrics in raw form, and potentially mash in some meta data for increased profile building and targeting for both the publisher and viewer of data.  Second degree — Facebook puts a visit counter on all pages/photos/updates/comments.  It’s a fairly normal thing to see around the Web, and it’s a silent measurement of what is popular.  View counters are on YouTube, TwitPic, Flickr — it’s considered acceptable in those contexts, why not Facebook?  N-th degree, Facebook publishes your Facebook browsing data on the open graph, so everyone can see who the profiles, posts, and photos you read most often.

“You’re Crazy, Man. They’d Never Do That.”
What prevents them from opening up these statistics?  I mean, the Facebook Open Graph is the perfect vehicle.. all of your visit and click statistics wrapped neatly in a JSON object, real time, on demand.  Marketers thirst for this data.. like Edward to Bella.  Voyeurs and exhibitionists, shuddering, clamoring.  There’s a lot of money locked up in those access logs and statistics.  So again, what prevents FB from unlocking that data to the general public?  Surely, no law will be broken when the terms of service has been amended.  So maybe… respect?

And Now, A Message to the 26 Year Young Wise Man
You see, Mr. Zuckerberg, despite the fact that we are changing the methods of human interaction through technology, opening up and sharing things with each other in new ways and with increasing abundance, there are social axioms.  The most basic and simple expectation is that, in any system, be it online or offline, we will be treated with respect.  That’s the lowest common denominator.  For users to question whether this most basic expectation is being met should make you think twice before you make that next policy change.

“It’s public, dude. If you don’t want your browsing stats out there, don’t visit Facebook.”
This all may sound like a stretch — Facebook outing your browsing data, and then people coming out to defend the outing of your browsing data.  But if Facebook ever does this, then yes, there will be those boneheads out there that just take what they give you (and take from you) and never question why.  It is not a stretch.  If Zuckerberg sees this as an evolution of social norms and just goes for it, maybe then you will rethink the value, trust, and relationship you have with Facebook.

In 1994, SXSW added Film and Interactive to the festival agenda, dubbed SXSWi.  While there have probably been some pretty notable tech company launches during SXSWi, the most famous would be Twitter back in 2007, who also won a SXSW Web Award that year.  Hulu took home a Web award in 2009.  This year, Gowalla took the mobile Web award over location based networking app leader Foursquare.

At SXSWi this year, the ongoing theme was the battle between market leader Foursquare, and Austin native Gowalla.  As I said earlier, Gowalla won the award; however, they all came out ahead.  They all received thousands of new account registrations, and a whole lot of social media and press coverage.

So, if you’re an iPhone user that is into social media trends, you’ve probably used (or use) Foursquare, Gowalla or Rummble.  For those of you that do not participate, these are apps for your GPS-enabled mobile device that allow you to “check in” wherever you may be, and broadcast to the network exactly where you are, in real-time.  You can also see who is in your vicinity.  To a majority of the world populous, the whole notion sounds pretty silly.  Why in hell’s half acre would you want to let everyone know where you are and when you were there?

We asked ourselves very similar questions when My Space entered our lives.  And with the advent of Twitter and Facebook, we asked ourselves those questions even more.  Apparently, at the heart of it all, we want to connect to other people, and if there are tools out there that allow us to connect without much effort, then by all means, sign us up.  Location-based apps fall right in there, too, appending X/Y coordinates to a verbal yawp and time stamp.  I’ve not heard of it yet, but now that I’m putting it out there, I’m sure the Z axis will soon be a new column in the table.  “You have checked in along with 37 others, and 24 feet above the second highest person!”

One thing I have learned by participating in social networking, and observing the landscape morph and evolve — we can no longer just be skeptical about the purpose (why we do it) or the business model (how they/we will monetize).  There are hundreds of millions (if not billions) of human participants, and they’re all ready and willing to tell you what they’re doing/thinking, where they’re doing it, all in real-time.  By all means, it’s time for you to check in.

Oh, and SXSWi was a wonderful experience.  It’s not just a tech conference, nor is it just a wild party.  It’s both, and more.  The native Austinians are warm and inviting.  Great food was everywhere.  And 6th Street was like Bourbon Street every night, sans stupidity and overdrunkeness.  The conference sessions spilleth over with interesting and useful content.  But, in the spirit of social networking, SXSWi is mostly about connecting with other like and not-like minded people, which is great, because I’ve never been to a tech-theme conference that attracted such a diverse audience in such vast numbers.  I will definitely be back.

Cutting to the chase: you know you’re in business with the wrong person when he wants to move your Internet technology company into peddling automotive spare tire covers.

The tire cover product isn’t even the worst part of the story.  All of this was going down in the middle of the dot-com bubble.  The perfect time to peddle techno-pyrite (fool’s gold), get rolled up into another tech giant, go public, and get Jay-Z rich.  Right?  No.  Lets take a trip into Bizarro World and sell covers for spare tires on the back of sport utility vehicles.  I earned Uranium Medallion Status for my round-trip flights to Business Bizarro World with my old business partners.

What was the attraction?  Money.  Easy money.  No effort required.  Brand licensing through existing business contacts.  Manufacturing all figured out (yes, we’re even talking about having them made here in the US).  Rehashing this story makes me feel, well, stupid.  But back then, it was such a sure-fire opportunity.. I mean, really — everybody wants their favorite major league team covering their spare tire for $75.  And trademark licensing should be a snap.  Wrong, and wrong.

But rewind — how in the heck did I get sold on this gold-plated opportunity?  There was an Internet component — an e-commerce site needed to be programmed to handle the masses of transactions from customers rushing to claim their tire covers.  There had to be an online presence for all of the dealers/resellers to sign up so that they too could be a part of this tire cover revolution.  This opportunity, of course, is in perfect alignment with building micro and vertical search technology or IP-based geo-location technology, right?  Dead wrong.

If anyone, including a trusted business partner, approaches you with a sure-fire idea or opportunity that will not require time and money resources — tell them to drop off the bags of cash and bricks of platinum on your desk, and then get back to work on your core business.

So, back here on Earth, harmful opportunities aren’t nearly as stark as that train wreck described above.  Most of the time, they’re more subtle, such as ideas that would appear (on the surface) to complement or enhance your business objectives.  A new Web analytic tool, SEO campaign, social media strategy, site redesign, public relations initiative, and so on.  One way to identify a harmful opportunity is to listen closely to the person who is making the pitch.  If it’s an unsolicited pitch coming from the outside, you’re likely to be scrutinous.  If it’s coming from inside the company (such as my foray into tire covers), your knee jerk reaction to give it the nod might be an incredible mistake.

Listen closely to them.  Is this a completely new direction or does it complement your core business?  Is it being pitched with life and death consequences?  Is this idea or direction suddenly being referred to as “our bread and butter”?  Does it sound raw and unrefined, possibly catalyzed from a blog article or from a competitor’s feature list?  Does the idea sound neat but not really about your core business?  Has the idea really been fully researched and developed, or is it just a synapse that fired and shot out of their mouth?  If any of those conditions are met, then for the love of Pete, do not say yes.

Notice that I’m not suggesting to shut it down.  Not right away.  If it isn’t part of your core business, it’s probably just going to whither on the vine no matter how many resources you pour into it.  If the idea isn’t fully developed, the person has already wasted company time, and your time.  Defend your resources from these black holes.

Be conscious of how often you’re being asked to divert your resources.  Be conscious of how often you’re actually allowing yourself to be distracted, too.  If the problem is chronic and you’re having to refocus your team over and over, then shut it down.  If it feels like I’m speaking directly to you, then you know exactly what you need to do.

Moral of the story — tire covers sold: zero.

Original photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/naughtomaton/388242905/

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard about Java support in GAE.  Getting GAE/Java up and running couldn’t be easier because it’s packaged as an Eclipse plug-in.  When you’re setting it up, you also get GWT bundled right in.  And deploying your first Hello World application?  Easy as microwave popcorn.  Ola Bini (ThoughtWorks) of JRuby notoriety gave a session at Google IO on JRuby on GAE, which means that Rails fanatics should be happy to know that their apps should deploy on GAE with little modification.  Ola also built a demo of (probably) the first 3rd-party Google Wave robot extension (with early access to Wave sandbox)… written in Ioke, a folding programming language (designed by Ola) that runs on top of the JVM, deployed on GAE.  A demo without the fancy IDEs.. just Emacs and deployed at the CLI.

Google Wave was announced at the keynote presentation (HQ YouTube video) on Thursday morning.  I walked in a few minutes late, and they were showing real-time chat between two different client computers.  Imagine onKeyPress event triggers, as opposed to waiting to hit Send.  That’s what I saw on the big screens.  There was a huge applause, which puzzled me, because I used to use this all of the time back in the days of ICQ chat.  But as the demo went on, it became far more impressive… far more compelling from a product/service development standpoint.  Google built a set of APIs that allow us to construct real-time collaborative apps — built entirely on GWT.  Wave keeps a history/timeline that tracks revisions and can be played back by the user to see the state of the collaborative work (whether it be a wiki, blog post, map, anything really) at any given point in time.  And because it’s based on GWT (AJAX), the same code can be deployed on mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone.

Google also made the conference fun.  Kicking it off by giving away a free HTC Magic… I felt like a kid (but from a movie) under the Christmas tree (in real life, I usually received an envelope with cash).  Wednesday (day 1) night, there was a nice “after hours” party (21 and up), with lots of drinks, food, authentic party-rousing DJ (Mike Relm), Maker Faire gadgeteers, and video games.  I played Missile Command and Centipede, and pwnd.  There was also a bar-code scavenger hunt with our new Android phones.  I haven’t heard what the first place winner received.  I shared a lunch table with the winner, Abraham, a few hours before the hunt ended, and he was guessing the prize was a t-shirt, whereas I imagined it was a Google-branded hybrid SUV that gets 130 MPG.

To sum it up, I thought it was a great conference.  I only wish I could have attended more sessions.  I look forward to playing with Google Wave, deploying actual production JRuby apps on GAE, tooling around with my new Android phone, and hacking my first Android app.  It was  also very affordable ($50 academic, $300/early-bird).   I’ll definitely be back next year.

The last part, startup metrics, is the topic that Dave covered in his talk.  He started giving this talk a couple of years ago.. and he calls it: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!! (Startup Metrics for Product Marketing & Product Management). You can see his SlideShare presentation here.  AARRR is an acronym that stands for:

Acquisition: users come to Web site from various channels
Activation: users enjoy 1st visit and have a “happy” experience
Retention: users come back , visit site multiple times
Referral: users like product enough to refer others
Revenue: users conduct some monetization behavior

I’m not going to regurgitate his entire presentation in this article.  Dave presents a lot of interesting ideas and tools that companies should use, but I’m here to get specific about Measuring What’s in the Middle.  As Dave puts it, that’s the good stuff, referring to what’s in the middle, Activation, Retention and Referral.

Caveman Metrics – Ugh.

If you’re an entrepreneur or have ever been involved in an online marketing campaign, one of the first questions you ask yourself (or get asked) is, How do drive millions of people to our site? That’s acquisition.  There are many ways to obtain traffic, from paid advertising campaigns, promotional offers, getting online press, as well as a host of sinister methods.  Recently, a strong emphasis has been placed on building traffic through social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  So, lets just imagine you plan on doing all of these above — paid advertising, SEO for organic result boosts on search results, blogging, Twittering, promotional giveaways, the whole nine yards.

What do you do next?  Naturally, you log into Google Analytics, Web Trends, or look at your Webalyzer reports and say, “Wow, look! Last week we had 3,000 visits to our site, and 2,900 were uniques!” You take a look at your subscription/signup stats, and say, “Whoah, dang. In that same period we had only 12 account registrations and 3 inquiries.”

With out-of-the-box Web measurement tools, that’s pretty much what you get.  Search keyword referrals (how people found your site), ad campaign CTR (click-thru rate), visitors/uniques, day/time graphs, and so on.  They look really cool, but what are they really telling you that’s valuable?  This is what I call caveman metrics.  You take a cursory head-count of visitors coming in, and take a look at the bottom line of how many signed up.

Pirate Metrics – Aarrr!

Be very specific about what you’re measuring.  Within the activation, retention and referral categories, define goals for which you can measure conversion (success).  For instance, create a metric for a “happy first visit” — such as spending X time on the site, and performing Y actions.  Another metric could be the measure of sign-ups for a specific feature within the site that you’re trying to push the user to, such as signing up for a free widget, newsletter, etc.  Only with specific goals and measures can you tweak and re-measure with any level of confidence that you’re steering user behavior in the right direction.

Revolving Door or Turn-Style

Depending on how well you tune your internal Web strategy, your site can resemble a revolving door or a turn-style.  A revolving door meaning that people walk into the roating glass cylinder and exit before they even step into your establishment.  Or your Web site can resemble a series of turn-styles where you strategically lead them into actions for which they pass through (and are counted) with the expectation that they’re moving forward and getting some value/benefit out of the experience.

When you visit a Web site (even one that you traverse often), take notice of how this site leads you to actions.  That’s not by accident.  It was designed to lead you there.  When you visit a new site that is a complete turn off, or just doesn’t engage you into action, also take notice.  Those are every day examples of turn-style vs. revolving door experiences.

Conclusion: The Fundamentals Apply

There really is no short cut, no silver bullet.  Tools exist that can help you measure more effectively and efficiently, but these tools do not know your business.. they do not know your goals.  Only you know what those goals are.   The point of this article: go beyond basic metrics (i.e. WebTrends, Google Analyitics, Webalyzer, etc.) because alone, they do not tell you anything about your Web site strategy.  Get specific about the user segments that are visiting your site, and what you want each of these segments to do so that they’re happy, they come back for more, and they refer their peers to your Web site.  Keep tuning your site strategy so that you continually increase those results, and reap the plunder… aarrr!

Of course, I’m not doing Dave’s presentation/content justice.  He speaks at meetups/conferences often, and I highly recommend seeing him because his lessons are easy to digest and immediately applicable.  Here’s a video from a couple years back of Dave McClure giving a turbo presentation.  The content of his presentations today is very similar, which in my opinion, speaks volumes.