After submitting the CS3216 feedback form, I realized that all I needed to submit was this diagram. (Would have saved a lot of time too!)
*Adapted from XKCD…
Ever had lots of things to blog about (after being really busy for a while) and am simply too tired to write properly? After 2 weeks of 1am nights at COM1 & E3A, plus a 2.5 day dash, I really felt this way. In the spirit of ensuring that I do not look back at these 2 weeks and wonder what exactly happened (it just hit me today that we’re nearing the end of February already!), here are some quick recap of events, thoughts and ideas through the past 2 weeks:
Recap of Events:
1. Attended 2 technical-oriented Google presentation (about 1) Gears, App Engine, OpenSocial and 2) Android & OpenSocial)
2. Developed a RSS Reader and a To-Do list application on Adobe AIR (tutorials available.. go try)
3. Dumped interface developed on AIR for NÜS Über Stop because Programmers loved Gears more.
4. Attempted to learn FLEX but bolted when it didn’t seem feasible to roll-out anything useful within 2 weeks
5. Learnt AJAX and Javascript
6. Rolled out NÜS Über Stop (Only for Current NUS students)
7. Began working on SaleSeeker project of 2359 Media
Recap of Emotions:
1. “****! Why doesn’t it work on IE! It works fine on all other browsers!”
2. “I hate this part right here…”
3. I used to like creating things with my hands (e.g. sculpting, making music). Nothing has changed since except that my hands are now on the keyboard.
4. “What? I have this, this and this to complete for my other modules?!?!”
Recap of Ideas:
1. All lecturers should shape classes to be like CS3216 (reasons to be published in another post)
2. Development work is actually quite easy to pick up (given the basics in programming). However, it doesn’t necessary mean that one should pick it up. Focus on the area of expertise if possible.
3. Good designers in an app’s early life-cycle will provide an immediate professional look & bring a greater sense of trust towards the app
Overall, it was an excellent sprint for me. Proved once again that sprinting does help accelerate one’s learning curve. Now.. On to the panting (recuperation)..
Singaporeans are not the only kiasu people around. While we can boast of the Bubble Tea phenomena, the Hello Kitty queues and the Donut craze (among others), the herd mentality as a result of “kiasuism” seems to also be present across the world.
Within the last few years, the Facebook explosion and $1.65b buyout of YouTube have gotten everyone crazy about social media. This is no different in Singapore, with the greater use by and coverage of social media news through media companies giving it exposure to the average citizen. Organizations too, have began jumping on board, evident through the increase demand for Social Media consultancy, and the many organizations that pitched with a Facebook Application idea in an attempt to get developers to work on them.
Big Problem though: Social Media is NOT for everyone!
As such, I took some time to compile 7 of the most important things an organization should know before wanting to get onto Social Media (or get a Facebook App for that matter).
1. Focus on Channels with your Audience
Social media is just a MEDIA. Similar to traditional campaigns, pick and choose the media where the target audience can be found and USE THAT MEDIA. There is no point being on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube & Flickr at the same time – there is no such thing as diversification of “risks” by being on all these media.
2. Tribes vs. Eyeballs
There is a need to choose if a campaign is to get as many eyeballs within a short period of time or to build a community around products and services. Having a cool application or social network or YouTube video is nice, but what is the business objective? To have a tribe of fans around products (e.g. Macrumors.com)? Or perhaps just to create buzz around that product?
3. It’s not about what you want
Social Media is not about pounding advertisements down people’s throats, and there is no way to “force” a community to develop. In order to meet the desired social media objective, value must be provided to the community that the organization intends to reach out to.
4. Social Media might not be Cheaper
Whopper Sacrifice might have been cheaper to do than a whole page advertisement on Wall Street Journal, but how many failed Internet campaigns have you seen? In addition, once a community is built around a product, how much future money is to be spent maintaining the community?
5. Get an Expert & Leave it to them
Similar to how campaigns are left to PR and Marketing Consultancies (unless you have the expertise), it may make more sense to leave social media work to the experts. These are the people with the latest Social media news, religiously check Twitter, and love contributing to online communities. Spend time doing what you’re world’s best in, give a direct on where you want to go with social media, and let these people work their magic.
If one has all these thought out properly and still want to pitch about a Social Media idea, then I have great news for you. Through the experience thus far from the CS3216 module, all you need is a Good Developer with Passion for the idea, and the idea can be done on ANY platform. Be it on Facebook, OpenSocial or any other platform, magic can be done within 3 short weeks!!
Most appropriately, at the midpoint juncture of the “Software Development on Evolving Platforms” module (which most seem to not know what this is but instead know about the “Facebook module”), we arrive at one of my favourite parts of software development – User Interface Design. Quoting from an expert, “It’s like golf: a handful of ways to get the ball in the mole, a million ways not to.”
In this particular case study, we analyze the first iteration of a now defunct Facebook Application – Get Help. The concept is straightforward – it is a portal to help you get help from your friends and their friends. Think Yahoo Answers that leverages on your social graph on Facebook. A screenshot of the application is shown here:
Given that most readers of this entry would probably have read the case study already, allow me to jump right into the analysis of the application’s user interface. (Do send me an email if you would like to know more about the case study.)
Don’t Make Users Think!
Before performing the analysis, “Don’t Make Users Think” is a key principle that we need to agree upon to assist us in making comments about the application. This principle roots from the following observations:
1. Web users have short attention spans and will “bounce” if they don’t see what they want quickly.
2. Web users scan instead of read (unless its an information site).
3. Users like mindless choices – e.g. Books, Electronics or Toys
First Impressions
Moving onto Get Help, an immediate look gives me the impression of the average game/entertainment application on Facebook. The questions that come to my mind include “Are the people answering my difficult question kids?”, “Is this a professional site?” (Compare this with Wikipedia, Investopedia, or Adobe’s software tutorial sites.)
Navigation Panel
Looking at the application in detail, we first look at the navigation panel that is on the top of every page and a precious piece of real estate on the application. (Comments marked in red).
Suggestions:
1. For branding & as a reminder of the location, the logo (or design) should headline (usually top left)
2. Key Functionalities (Overview, Recommendations) need to attract visually – perhaps shape it as a button to let users know its “click-able”
3. Peripheral capabilities (Badges, Profile, Stats, Invite) might not be used as often – shouldn’t take as much real estate space
4. Thinking is required to understand the links as well (Invite.. who? Stats.. of what?)
Homepage Usage
The homepage is the landing page for all users. As such, instead of being used purely as a Query creation page, it might be good to include updates on the other key functionalities. These updates could answer questions such as:
1. What are other people asking?
2. Are there answers to my previous questions?
3. Are there people introduced to me to answer my questions?
(4. Perhaps the most recent badge can be placed here too.)
For me personally, I thought that the Overview page was more relevant as a Homepage.
“Help Creation”
In addition, it might be vague how “big” the project should be. Is a desired question: “Help needed to find accommodation in New York” or “Help needed to write Facebook application”? Also, it might have been good to categorize requests so as to create “forums” around the projects to see if similar projects have been completed previously.
Overview
In the below diagram, the arrows show how I would use the site once I see it, which could have been a shorter “path” if rearranged (e.g. section navigation moved to left).
Interaction wise, it might also have been ideal to allow users to state their interests while setting up the application so that only projects in the categories of interest to them would be shown in the feed (this brings back the need for categories in the projects).
Project Management
In this section, the layout of the page might have shone some light on the type of projects which can use this application, or has it not? What happens when the “help project” only requires someone to answer a question really quickly (e.g. needs help to debug this software)? Is there a “close project” option for users?
Enhancing Interaction through Rewards
Get Help uses Statistics and Badges to reward users by giving them Badges and featuring them on Statistic tables (similar to leader board). Assuming that there is a network of users on the application, these rewards may/may not appeal to the audience (again depending on the type of “help projects” created through the system). A professional crowd would not be as likely motivated by such a board as compared to a young crowd.
However, the cold start strategy seems to not have been solved since the invitation of friends into the application seems to be away from the process flow of the project creation, but we’ll talk about that later.
Is Facebook Suitable?
Taking a step back after the detailed analysis, is Facebook really a good place for this application to exist? What type of questions do the developers imagine the users to ask? Work related questions or fun related questions? Facebook is generally used to network and have fun with friends, so are there questions that is relevant to this general use case so that there will be people who answer the questions actively? (I won’t answer a question about using Adobe Premier while using Facebook, but I will if I am at a Adobe forum.) As an example, LinkedIn might do better to target professionals and Twitter would do better for short answer help projects.
Other Key Challenges/Suggestions
1. Cold Start Strategy
Given the fact that this is a third party application to Facebook, it must have significant value for users to want to add/try out the application. While the value of the network (or reciprocity as mentioned) will be an excellent pull eventually, there is a lack of motivation to be the first on the network. This can perhaps be solved by being really good in performing certain “help projects” and attracting an initial crowd in that category.
2. Branding
To summarize a common suggestion that littered prior comments, the team needs to identify its exact target audience and solve their category of problems. By allowing for too much flexibility around the word “Help”, users won’t know if this is the app for them or not. On the same note, the developers could reshape the theme of their application to fit the use case.
3. Use Conventions
Given that the application is trying to build an application that is an innovation in using social graph to help solve specific problems for users, the developers might want to focus on attracting, educating, and retaining users and just use conventional practices in other areas such as user interface. This way, users are already familiar with the environment and would only need to focus on the “help project” portion of the application.
Revamp and Focus
Overall, the developers of Get Help has identified a good problem – the need for a way to identify specific skill sets to help solve problems. However, there are problems of audience identification, lack of clarity in user interface, as well as a solid method of attracting new users to install the application (virality). Resolving these issues and identifying the right platform to build the application upon might deliver a solution that I hope to use!
P.S. Do Check out Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” – It is one of my favourite books of all time, and a quick guide to web usability
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
“The activity patterns of exciting projects are intermittent in nature, consisting of repeated bouts of brief maximal/near-maximal work interspersed with relatively short moderate/low-intensity recovery periods. This is generalized description currently provides the best means of directly assessing the physiological response to this type of activity. During a single short sprint, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is resynthesised predominantly from having a vision of future achievements, with a small contribution from possible financial gains. During recovery, new ideas sharing remains at a high level to restore motivation via processes such as networking sessions, attending inspiring talks, and seeing others on the same path as you.”
Researching into the successes of the Apples, IDEOs and Toyotas of the world, a common theme of start-ups is often the seeming lack of fear – the singular focus on the goal at hand, ignoring all odds and giving it all you can.
Quoting from Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “The best way to overcome your fear… might be to sprint… all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can… you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run… You can’t sprint forever… the brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.”
“The project deadline is tomorrow.”, “You have 24 hours to plan and execute the entire roadshow”, “(from Prof Ben) Learn an entire new programming language and API, and deliver an application within 3 weeks”. All of us, in a point or another, have achieved something extraordinary by sprinting, often egged on by external motivation factors, so we know that it is possible. Sometimes, we might even only realize the enormity of the project on hand after we had completed it.
How often do you sprint? Only when people ask you to? Why not decide to sprint regularly and build up your stamina to take on larger projects? Build the next Google? Be the first non-astronaut on the moon?
One thing from the journal to note for the chronic optimist (like myself) though, “if duration of the recovery periods is insufficient to restore the metabolic environment to resting conditions, performance during successive work bouts may be compromised”.. Pick your battles and sprint through to the finish line!
I’m not a big fan of MS. If anything, the WPF developer kit installation process was so long that it irked me. That being said, I’m a big fan of Bill Gates and his work nowadays. While the Internet, or more specifically, tools such as Facebook Causes has given arms and legs to the various causes that we stand for, there’re just some problems that are gigantic, but are only being solved slowly due to the lack of market motivation.
Enter visionaries like Bill Gates and Peter Diamandis. Extremely successful people, with significant influence in both public and private sectors across various geographies, they identify the significant problems faced by the world, and am willing to put in not just money, but time and effort influencing others to focus on solving the problems that the world faces.
In the latest talk given by Gates as part of TED 2009, which is an annual conference that brings together thought leaders from the Technology, Entertainment, Design worlds and more, he share about 2 problems that he is currently passionate about solving:
1. How do you stop a deadly disease that is spread by mosquitos?
2. How do you make a teacher great?
Interesting Notes
- More money put into baldness drug development than malaria as the rich man are bald
- Malaria control requires skills from all areas (math, computing, pharma, etc.)
- If US had top tier teachers, gap between US & Asia in Math & Sci would go away in 2 years
- Masters degree doesn’t correlate with teaching quality – Past performance does
- Slightly better teachers leave the system, not the lousy teachers
- Check out KIPP teaching styles through the book “Work Hard Be Nice”
For all current and aspiring leaders out there, What are you doing today (to change the world)?
Side-note: Check out the multi-inbox view on Gmail! Love it!
First, my thank you speech: “I am most honoured to win this prize. It has been my lifelong dream to appear in everyone’s presentation!” 
Seriously, thank you everyone for using me in your presentations. I’ve never felt so loved in NUS ever.
Next, I’m really worried about the predicament of being friends with people in the class, with groups intending to sell you and sacrifice you. What happened to the scared bond of friendship under the influence of Facebook?! Still, I am inclined to provide commentary about these applications given that I have wasted hours on one and was disappointed that the other wasn’t available in Singapore.
Friends For Sale
Key Viewpoints by the Team: (my immediate comments in brackets)
1. Simple UI & Easy to use (seems that FFS stopped crashing after I quit)
2. Good for interaction & Ice-breaking (when trying to chat up a pretty girl… but is she really a girl?)
3. Involves strategic thinking & is a competitive environment
4. Facilitates communication – creative interactions (but isn’t that done with Superpoke?), unique relationships (your friend is your pet.. hmm..), 2.3m active users (used to be 5m++ at one point I think)
5. An excellent platform for advertisers – Could improve by having sponsorship to get sponsored chores/gifts (e.g. BK Burger)
6. Could Improve by – Add animations to chores & gift giving
It was a fun presentation and I agree with Points 1, 5 and 6, but having spent hours “researching the economics of FFS”, I must say that there is a fundamental flaw in the game that is not being addressed. Inflation in the game is THROUGH THE ROOF! For the sake of those who have never used FFS before, let me explain. Let X denote a pretty girl, and A & B be 2 guys wanting to buy her as a pet. Each time A & B buy X from each other, her “value” increases in a compounded manner (10% of previous value). From $500, X’s price could possibly go up to $50m in a day, and just by trading X, A & B’s cash holdings could each increase by millions! (“The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest” – Einstein)
From a game player’s stand point, all one does is to find the “rising stock” (popular pet) and chase it all the way till the pet’s price goes out of your buying range, and do this regardless whether you really want the person as your pet. This is flawed on so many levels! For new users, you can never catch up with an experienced user unless you spend all your time on FFS riding all these “rising stocks” (and you need to be beside your computer all the time in order to ride that stock). Only then can you possibly have enough $ to buy the pretty girl (or handsome guy) that you have been looking to take in as a pet. This “barrier to entry” turns people off quickly and one might not get the opportunity to interact with the people he/she wants to.
For the conduct of its Commercial Activities, the hyper-inflation makes it hard for sustainable revenue for FFS as well. With its advertising being run by MyOfferPal, one of the most popular ad service on Facebook, users using multiple apps began choosing to earn points for the other apps (performing the same activity) when they realize that the points earned in FFS are not as useful in achieving the desired goals.
FFS did re-adjust the “economy” recently by changing the value of the new user to $100k, but the problem is only going to come up again unless the rules of the game are changed. Maybe a recession might help
Whopper Sacrifice
It wasn’t in my intentions to comment on the application presentation actually, but given that the Whopper the group Sacrificed me for was given to me, it was only right to leave some comments.
Firstly, Crispin Porter + Bogusky is brilliant. Just go to their site and take a look at the stuff they have done for various companies. Not such a big fan of their work with Microsoft though – most seem too reactionary to Apple’s ads. Next, the team that presented it was on the cutting edge of FB Apps. The App was only up for a week or so before being banned on 14th January. Great job people!
The key point that might be of interest, is whether this phenomenon can be repeated. i.e. Can an advertiser gain that kind of publicity enjoyed by BK by repeating the “sacrifice your friend” campaign? My thoughts on it? No, it will get eyeballs, but it will not be as successful as this first attempt. Buzz Aldrin was never as famous as Neil Armstrong, attempts at a sex-focused drama is unlikely to be as well-received as Sex and the City. You get the point. Despite the possibility of using bots to delete friends, I seriously doubt the effectiveness if this were to be repeated exactly for another company. Any ideas for auxiliary features/marketing gimmicks to augment the delete friends feature?
Now all that’s said and done, the final thing I need to do, is to complete the rest of the song and post it onto YouTube. That’s-What-Friends-are-For-2.0
Stories of how companies are born are without fail, one of the genres of stories that I find most exciting and most appealing to the entrepreneur in me. That’s a major reason why I attended the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series when I was in SV, still listen to its podcast regularly, and am involved in In3, where we try to bring such entrepreneurial leaders to share their stories at NUS to all Singaporeans. I was therefore, very happy when greeted this morning with a tweet from @dom about How Twitter was born.
Let’s do lessons learnt before we go on:
1. When you have an excellent team, try and try until you succeed - Odeo didn’t, but Twitter sure did
2. For the people – People didn’t understand the value of Twitter till much later, given its lack of a special feature. However, what they missed is the only important feature – People.
3. Keep a record of thoughts – Tweet #38 said “Oh this is going to be addictive” and sure it was. These records make for excellent stories, both in success and in failure.
4. Go for glory – Being B2C, without the huge events that Twitter supported, it couldn’t have gotten the network effect that it currently has
More straight-to-the-point than the article itself, though, is the comments that one of the co-founders, TonyStubblebine wrote:
“… Odeo was made up of a lot of past and mostly present company founders… I think we needed that many rockstars to turn the middling opportunity we had in podcasting into the major opportunity that Twitter has”
Throughout all these start-up stories, it is clear that persistence is one of the few persistent topics. By persistently pursuing dreams and aspirations, one naturally will attract people who are as passionate as they are. While along the way, each one of us may fail in our own projects, but when we keep at it, and find others on the same path to band together, great things are bound to happen.
Never give up pursuing entrepreneurial aspirations – it is going to be addictive!
If you Googled at all at about 11:30 pm Singapore time last night, you must have seen something similar to what I did on the left. Google listed that its website “may harm your computer”.
In Marissa Mayer’s posting on the Google Blog, she gave the explanation that she gave made me think about the CS3216 WPF Workshop immediately. (Btw I love how interesting Marissa was during her ETL speech on 9 Lessons Learned about Creativity at Google.)
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.”
Didn’t that sound so much like half of the bugs that happened during the workshop? A missing closing parenthesis, a missing line here and there, causing the entire database to be messed up. Difference though, is that we’re still testing our products while this came out and had millions of people Twittering about it immediately. Don’t think it will make a difference to Google’s market share of search over Yahoo though.
With so many of my friends involved in a presentation or a pitch recently, I thought I might post some notes that I have from a short lecture by David S. Rose on 10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money. Why is this relevant? One of the worst presentation situation to be in is when you have to ask someone else for money, hence being able to do so effectively would give one wings when in other situations. (I will not discuss the fact that VCs actually need credible entrepreneurs as well to achieve their investment requirements.) And of course, there is a fair number of people actually looking for funding.
Having attended so many such lectures throughout my days in ASES and NOC, and read more detailed commentary on the topic (do check out The Art of the Start if you’re interested), the content wasn’t anything out of the blue, but it was a good lecture nonetheless.
Key Ideas
1. Define your goals – VCs invest in people, keep in mind that you’re really trying to say “I’m the one you’re looking for”
2. Manage Emotions – Grab attention, Wow with solid content, end off by hitting the homerun with something they cannot resist
3. Use Imagery instead of bullet points (I am a huge advocate of this)
4. Go to the point – Give them what they are looking for (adhere to the conventional templates which VCs are used to looking out for)
5. Give attention to detail – It tells what type of person you are when you don’t check for typos
Jumping right back into the great Mac vs PC debate, an interesting take away from the lecture might be that despite Jobs having raised “corporate presentations and product introductions to an absurdly high level”, one can more than make up for the inability to do this by being extremely good in everything else like Bill is.
Enjoy the 15min video and share any comments that you might have!
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