January 26, 10 by Craig
Facebook is where I have more noise than any other social site, twitter may even tie facebook at amount of sheer content I receive in my feed. With regards to the ratio of what I care about to what I see facebook is a lot better, due to their news feed versus live feed. However, their news feed is still very often off. I wrote some time back about web 3.0, and how essentially showing what I want to see is what the web will become. You’ll take the vast amount of content and distill it into what I want to see. People seem to be taking very half-hazard shots at it and its quite a let down.
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January 25, 10 by Craig
I often encounter people whether at my office or at other places of employment that are distraught after getting an earful from a manager from some problem arising. The problem usually isn’t in their control, and therefore they don’t understand why they get heat for this. Most managers though do actually understand when issues come up, however what they don’t appreciate is late notice, lack of problem solving, and dictating what should be done next.
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January 21, 10 by Craig
I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.
With marginal improvements you have to:
- Convince the customer it’s not good enough today
- Convince the customer that you’re better
- Convince the customer you’re worth the headache of changing
While a lot of companies focus solely on taking an existing problem and solving it better than someone else has, I have my doubts about how reproducible this model is. If I’m a large company with lots of resources I’m going to keep iterating and improving myself, which means a smaller company really has to have some magic bullet that will displace me.
In contrast if I address a problem that hasn’t been solved my life instantly becomes a lot easier. I no longer have an argument of something not being good enough today, it becomes a question of value and how much its worth to solve the problem. Haggling over price is a conversation I’d rather have than trying to justify value and convince a customer they’ve been wrong in their choice for so many years.
Over the coming days I’m going to be posting a few of these examples/ideas and why I like them. Many of them are still being thought through, and while as I sort them out, I’m generally happy to publish high points about them. The even bigger key here is that success is typically in the execution and less so in the idea, though even then I’d prefer to execute on something that has less battles than something that from the onset has more. By doing something that is being done today you get no advantages of penetrating the market.
January 20, 10 by Craig
A few days ago I was told things needed to be parallelized, not serialized with regards to the process. To me there could not be much more of a detrimental approach.
To give some background there is currently some selling going on, as the case often is with selling you sell the next version of what you’ll have. Or really sell what you think customers want, and that gives you validation if you should build it or not. I’m generally quite happy with this process, assuming you’ll have some time to test the market out, then build it. In fact this is the way a lot of businesses proceed and is a valid process. My problem isn’t with this process, it’s that I was told that we have to deviate from this process due to time constraints.
January 19, 10 by Craig
The web is becoming saturated. It’s no longer the pimply faced 20 somethings living in their mom’s basements that are the key users and the source of most of the traffic on the web. Now you have communities for pregnant moms, sites for elderly widows looking to date, and social sites for kids from the time they’re able to talk. So now that the web is hitting its saturation point of types of people interacting it becomes a critical issue to take advantage of those users and get them to do more.
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January 14, 10 by Craig
There’s a continual shift that seems to be happening on whether contextual advertising is better than behavioral. It seems that most people are becoming bigger and bigger on behavioral, and assuming that contextual has reached it’s peak. After meeting with a company that at first started to do both, blurring the lines, taking advantage of each when they had appropriate data it started to become clear that they more so have their place and time. Behavioral and Contextual shouldn’t be direct competitors.
