Evan Williams | evhead

YES

2010-08-19T22:12:00.001-07:00

Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island

2008-10-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life—or convince someone to send you more.

You don't know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.

There's always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.

Eventually, if you're successful, you'll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you'll die—or, at least, have to go home.

Either way, it's a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).

Further notes on my TechCrunch50 session

2008-09-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I was one of the judges for two different sessions at TechCrunch50: Mobile and Language and Communication Tools. Doing the sessions was kinda fun, and I was glad to be a part—especially alongside Tim O'Reilly, Josh Kopelman, Om Malik, and Rafe Needleman, who co-judged the sessions I was on.

It was a little be strenuous both to see the presentations and hear them. It was also tricky to be insightful and provide meaningful feedback in such a short period of time. I find most of the implications of a product or company, if it's really interesting, aren't immediately obvious. You need to have some time to sit with it. If you have a really good presenter, he or she can help get those non-obvious implications across. But if the presentation is unpracticed or hard to understand, there could be a great idea hidden underneath that doesn't shine through—especially in this sort of rapid-fire environment.

For that reason, I'm writing up a few more notes on the companies I judged. I still haven't thought about them too much (too busy thinking about other stuff). But nonetheless...

MyTopia is not what it looks like from the web site. While it looks like a games/virtual world site, what they presented was a very impressive-sounding development platform that lets you write once and deploy native apps to iPhone/Symbian/Palm/Java mobile phones...and more. They started out with the games and created this platform for their own use (which wasn't apparent until I talked to the founder later). They got beat up a little for lack of focus. But I'm big believer in side projects that scratch your own itch. And if what they built really works, it's extremely valuable. I'd definitely check it out for Twitter's purposes.

Tonchidont/SekaiCamera was just wacky. It's amazing if it works. There was no way to really tell. And an unfortunate language barrier kept us from getting the reassurance we needed. It may have deserved to win the whole thing, but there was too much left to the imagination. Definitely an entertaing presentation, though, and it's a glimpse of the future that I hope they pull it off.

MobClix is a straightforward business that has a clear value proposition (tracking usage of iPhone apps) and looks very well done. It didn't blow anyone's socks off, I think because it's not particularly sexy. Also, there's some clear competition. If I'd developed an iPhone app, I'd look into using it, though.

Fitbit, the unanimous winner of this session, was fantastic from my point of view—for many reasons. I'm a firm believer that giving people data on their behavior will change their behavior. In fact, If I wasn't working on Twitter, I'd likely be doing something to give people more data on their behavior. Fitbit gives people data in an area where people generally have no data and where many people need (and want to) change their behavior. And it looked (from afar) to be very well-designed. (I've already ordered two.)

AlfaBetic is in theory a good idea. In practice, I'm not sure if it will work or not. It didn't hit any of my hot buttons, and it was hard to tell how well it was done. Best of luck to them, but this wasn't their stage.

Postbox is a new email client. It looked pretty slick. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I'm very open to the idea of new approaches to email. Unfortunately I didn't really see a new approach here—just some UI niceties. If you're going to do something as bold as take on email, I think you need to be more radical. That said, I'll definitely check it out when it launches. Maybe it'll still be a worthwhile improvement.

Swype was the winner of the second category. It was a new way to input text on a touchscreen that's faster than current methods. Obviously a big need, and it seemed well done. Their success largely depends on their ability to do OEM deals, which is impossible to judge. One big reason I voted for them is because it's from the inventor of T9. From what I understand, T9 was/is an amazing business. Of course, it's completely dependent on having patents and defending them, so I have mixed feeling about that.

Dropbox underwhelmed me—not because it was poorly done or there wasn't a need. It just seemed like well-covered territory. Sharing files amongst multiple computers? Uploading to the cloud? Haven't we seen that? I use FolderShare and am pretty happy with it. But then, there's no clear winner in that world, so that might indicate there's still a huge opportunity. Just not hugely innovative.

Devunity seems like it might be very cool. Although, I couldn't devine that from the presentation. From what I understand, the idea is it's a collaborative development environment. Instead of just moving a code editor to the web, it takes advantage of the network and lets people collaborate on development projects much more easily. Seems like a neat idea. I have no idea how well it works. But I'd check it out.

All in all, the quality of the products seemed quite high—even though the quality of the presentations varied a lot. (That's okay; I'd rather see people spend time on the former.) Best of luck to all.

Me and Miles

2009-11-30T22:13:00.001-08:00

Originally uploaded by sem

They're not talking to you

2009-12-28T17:23:00.000-08:00

In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky explains one of the biggest reasons people continue to misunderstand online sharing:

"Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we're so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people's phone calls, we'd know to expect small talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people's phone calls aren't out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user-generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to social cul-de-sacs like the phone."

I've been trying to tell people this for years. Clay does a great job all through this book, by the way, of explaining how our online tools are changing group-forming, which is changing society. Another choice quote:

"I have a terrible singing voice, but my children would be offended if I played a well-sung version of 'Happy Birthday' on the stereo, as opposed to signing it myself, badly."

Trazzler

2008-06-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Trazzler is a cool new travel site that doesn't try to help you book trips, but instead helps you figure out where you want to go. Personally, I love going places but don't know where the cool places and things to do are—whether in foreign lands or in my own back yard. Trazzler gives you a quick and simple way to develop a travel "wish list" that's pretty fun. Obvious (aka, me) is an investor in Trazzler. And Biz and I are both advisers.

The Processizer

2008-09-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a half-baked web app idea I was talking about with Stirman over Thai food a while back. Please take it.

Think of any process that has multiple steps and that you do repeatedly. Say, deploying a new feature on your web app, bringing a new person on to your team, setting up a new server, or anything that you can imagine creating a checklist for. (I'm thinking mostly about those in the work context, but the same idea could apply to baking a cake or getting dressed -- if you have trouble remembering all the steps.)

There are lots of ways you can create a to-do list. But how about a templated to-do list? So, first you define a process and its steps. E.g.:

Design signoff
Brief support
Run tests
Etc....

Then you kick off a new instance of the process each time you need to, which gives you a new checklist. For each instance, you can modify the list as needed. Future versions would have assignments, notifications, and dependencies -- which starts to mirror sophisticated enterprise workflow apps (I imagine). But I'm not familiar with anything like this (and, preferably, clean, simple, and 37signally) on the web.

@ev me if I'm missing something.

Why Retweet works the way it does

2009-11-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

This week on Twitter, we're rolling a feature we've been working on for a while out to a lot more users. (If you don't have it yet, you will soon.) That feature is our native version of Retweet, which Biz posted about on the Twitter blog a couple months ago.

I'm making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that's gone into it. I've been a big proponent of this particular design internally at Twitter, because, while it won't serve every use case, I think it offers something new and powerful.

Background
As you know, retweeting is a very cool thing that emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information. Third party developers who make Twitter clients embraced it and added retweet functionality to their apps without us at Twitter doing anything at all with the feature. This isn't the first time this has happened, and this kind of emergent behavior is one of the best things about our ecosystem of users and developers.

People have long asked when we're going to build a RT button on twitter.com. While it would have been pretty trivial to do the way some clients have, the reason it's taken a while is because we wanted to do something a little more fundamental that we thought would add a lot more value.

While retweets as they work today are great, they have some drawbacks. Notably:

Attribution confusion. With regular tweets, you have a user picture, a username, and the tweet text. They all have a particular relation to each other. We call this, the "anatomy of a tweet."

With what I'll call organic RTs, you have the same elements, but they have a different relation to each other. Most notably, the text of the tweet is not written by the person whose picture you're seeing, nor the username that's at the beginning—except for when the retweeter annotates the tweet, so they have written part of it. (And sometimes that's at the beginning, sometimes the end.) Even once you get used to the common syntax (and there's not just one), there's extra mental parsing to associating the text with the right username and not the picture.

I believe this is a bigger issue for the readability of tweets than is obvious. I also often receive @replies from people who clearly think I said the thing that I just retweeted.

Mangled and messy. The attribution is confusing in the best case. But it's worse because different clients treat RTs differently, and if someone retweets a retweet it gets messy fast. Because organically retweeted tweets can be edited, even if the original author is properly understood as the author, it's not necessarily for what they really said. Inaccurate attribution is possible in any medium. But in Twitter, because of the character limit, it's often necessary. People shorten and edit retweeted tweets to make them fit along with the extra metadata. Even when for legit purposes, that can be misleading and unfair to the author. Worse, RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

Redundancy. If five people you follow retweet the same thing, you get five copies, which can be useful but is a lot of noise. This comes up even more in search. Popular users can get retweeted enough to saturate a search query. Coincidentally, as I'm writing this I came across this:

Noisiness. Let's face it: Some people over-retweet. You may be interested in what they personally say, but you don't need to know about every link and charity cause they pull their RT-happy trigger finger on. The only choice you have today is deciding if the benefit of getting their occasional gems is worth the cost of their retweetarrhea.

Untrackable. Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data. After all, if something's worth repeating out to all your followers, that's a signal that it's more interesting than something that's not (over-retweeters aside). If something retweeted by a bunch of people, relative to how many are following the original author, that's valuable data that may help people discover interesting news more quickly. Third-party developers have recognized this and built sites to try and track this information. But it's fundamentally hard because the data isn't structured.

This last point is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow your friends, organizations, public figures, or strangers you find interesting. But no matter how carefully you've groomed your following list, out of the millions of tweets written today, are you seeing the absolute most relevant ones to you? Or are you getting some good stuff, some stuff you don't care about, and likely missing a whole lot of other killer tweetage you don't even know is there?

I would argue it's the latter. The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about—relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you're most interested in—even if you don't follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.

Foreground
Toward that end, we've designed Retweets in a way that helps people get more good stuff, while solving some of the other problems described above.

In an announcement a few weeks ago to get developers building new RT functionality into their clients, we released some preliminary mockups showing how the new Retweet functionality might work on twitter.com. (I've read a couple times today that we're apparently keeping this feature only for twitter.com, which is exactly wrong. Most of the clients are working on incorporating it presently.)

The design is simple: There's a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet (more on that below). The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they're built natively into the system, they're trackable. And because they're trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.

It will be very quick and easy to retweet, you'll never have to edit the text, and you also won't have to worry if your followers have already seen something, so this should encourage retweeting more and more useful stuff flowing farther.

The noisiness problem is taken care of by a new setting that will allow you to turn on and off retweets on a per-user basis. That is, if you only want to see someone's personally authored tweets, you can shut off just their retweets altogether but still follow them.

The attribution problem: In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath. The decision is that this:

...is a better presentation than this:

No fault of @AleciaHuck's but the first is simply easier to read, and it gives proper credit to @badbanana. Even if you know @AleciaHuck, there's no benefit to having her picture in there.

The drawback is that it may be a little surprising (unpleasant even, for some) to discover avatars of people they don't follow in their timeline. I ask those people to keep in mind the following: You're already reading the content from these people via organic retweets. This is just giving you more context. My experience is that you get used to this pretty quickly, and it's a welcome way to mix things up. If you find someone constantly throwing people in there you don't like, as mentioned before, you can turn off Retweets from them (while still following their non-retweets). And if you really don't like it, and you only want to see what people you follow wrote themselves, you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually). Organic RTs do not offer nearly this flexibility.

The other thing some people will not like is that, unlike organic RTs, there's no way to annotate or leave your own comment when you retweet something with the new system. Some people annotate with every retweet, some don't do it at all. But it's definitely useful in certain scenarios. We left it out of this first version mostly for simplicity. It's especially tricky when you consider transports like SMS where adding a lot of structure or additional content is hard. But we have some ideas there, and it's possible we'll build that in at a later date. (This point should not be missed.)

What about those cases where you really want to add a comment when RTing something? Keep in mind, there's nothing stopping you from simply quoting another tweet if that's what you want to do. Also, old-school retweets are still allowed, as well. We had to prioritize some use cases over others in this release. But just as Twitter didn't have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.

The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what's happening now that they care about.

To give you a better sense of what we're trying to accomplish, check out this guest post on Techcrunch from back in May by David Sacks, CEO of Geni and Yammer and former COO of PayPal: The Awesome Potential of Retweet. In it, he lays out much of what I do above—describing the drawbacks of how RTs work today and proposing a native solution that's pretty much identical to what we've come up with. (Believe it or not, we had this design before he wrote that—not that we would have minded stealing the idea from him.)

I'm excited to see what our users and developers do with it and teach us about Retweet, so we can improve it more.

Just a story.

2008-12-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

While being interviewed on stage last night at the Churchill Club, mentioning how I hardly ever blog anymore because of Twitter, my wife texted me, saying: "You should blog more, it is what gathers your big ideas!"

She's right.

She then texted: "You really shouldn't check your phone while on stage."

Which is also true.

This is not a big-idea post. Just a story.

What companies say

2008-10-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Some companies say, What product should we build with this technology?

Some companies say, What technology do we need to build this product?

Some companies say, What product would this customer buy?

A new email system?

2009-03-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a system that will work with Gmail and do the following:

Make it easy to maintain a white list
Auto-respond to and forward every email from someone not on the white list
Bonus: the forward goes to to different address, depending on contents of email

(I realize I can accomplish the above with Gmail filters and the new canned responses. But maintainability is key. Editing the white list from from: -address is hard and seems like it likely (?) has a limit well below the hundreds I'd need.)

Does this exist? If so, @ev me.

What Blogger Should Do

2008-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked about the "death of blogging" for this article in The Economist. I didn't get back to the reporter in time, though, so my comments ended up, ironically, on his blog.
(Conclusion: I don't believe blogging is dying, but...it's complicated. Like in most healthy ecosystems, new species are breeding. Whether or not they're called "blogging" is a question perhaps best left for scientists, but there are many new forms that are undeniably part of the blogging genus.)

Last night at the Churchill Club, I was quoted as saying that Twitter "will dwarf Blogger." I do believe that, but it will be no easy task and will not be soon. Blogger is big. Really big. That chart was from six months ago. Is it losing traction? I don't know. It doesn't look like it was then. And since then, the team over there seems to be kicking ass. A glance at Blogger Buzz show's they've been launching feature after feature the last few months. Launching any features when you're that big is usually a daunting task. Shows that a lot of years building a solid platform have paid off.

So, the question is: Where do they go from here? Part of that, I suppose, will be determined by where the Google powers-that-be decide Blogger lands on their priority list, given the leaner times. Clearly it's not one their cash cows, but it's also not a side project they're dabbling in. I've heard it makes money (from AdSense on blogs they host), but I really don't know. In fact, I know so little about Blogger these days, I feel like I can actually write about it as an outsider.

From a product perspective, I do feel like they could get more out of the capabilities and incredible usage they already have. Here's an unordered list of some of the ways I'd look to do that if I were in charge:

Build a Network of Networks: Building more interconnection between users and blogs is clearly part of the focus now with "followers." It's something we realized we were remiss in not doing more of way back when we built the (not very good) profile pages in 2004, when Friendster was the big thing and Orkut was launching down the hall. There are a ton of mechanisms to do this, but one thing to consider: Don't try to make one big network. Perhaps enable anybody to create a blog network/community thingy. (There might be a doc around there about "Blogger Hubs" -- not sure if it's still relevant.)

Point People to Good Content: When it comes to interconnectedness, don't just try to make it more "social." Social is important, but pure socialness can be achieved elsewhere. One unique thing about Blogger -- vs. say Facebook or MySpace -- is the content. How can you make the content more interlinked and use the network to get more attention to the good stuff, thus rewarding the creating of more good stuff? You know what the most-viewed/commented/linked-to post on Blogger was today. Show it to me! I bet it's interesting! (Even better: Show me what's most popular within my blog network.) BTW, if revenue, not just usage, is a priority, this plays to that, because it's the content focused blogs that can make the money.

Get More Out of the Navbar: The toolbar you have at the top of millions of blogs could do so much more. This is where you can put the feedback mechanisms, interlinking mechanisms, etc. NextBlog could be a whole thing! Make that so I never wanna stop clicking because it always shows me something awesome. (Think StumbleUpon within the Blogger network.)

Prettier Templates: When it comes down to it, many people just want a page that looks good. This a large part of Tumblr's appeal, in my opinion. You gotta upgrade those templates. I know prettiness is not a focus in your culture, but bring them into 2007 at least web design, if not 2009.

Help People use the Layout Engine: The new templating system does everything anyone would every want. But you kinda gotta be a programmer who likes programming in production, in a textarea, in a language you've never used, to tap into it. Yes, there's point-and-click design and widget goodness, but it seems...hard. Can you make it seem fun? Can you make it so pseudo-developers can figure it out and others can leverage that? Layout sharing perhaps (kill two birds)?

Make it Fast: You've made some progress on slimming down the posting form page (at least in Draft). But I don't know if we've fully embraced the Google mantra of speed is every. I predict you'd see a 30% increase in posts if you made posting twice as fast. (That goes for the whole workflow, not just the posting form.)

Become the Aggregator: One possible answer to the question to what role does the stand-alone blog live in the age of a million-and-one generalized and specialized participatory web experiences is as a personal aggregator that reflects back the other stuff one does on the web. Yes, I'll load all that stuff into FriendFeed, but that's not my "online presence" as we used to say back in the day. Everybody (or at least a lot of people) needs an URL -- and one without a ? in it. I want my tweets, and my photos, and my whatevers to show up on evhead.com (hosted by Blogger) in an attractive way.

Put Ads in the App Interface: For example, the published landing page alone must get millions of views a day. And it's the perfect point for someone to go elsewhere. See if you can target it off what they wrote about. No one will mind (much). And strengthening your revenue story will strengthen your position in the company.

Do Something Radical: I almost feel like this list is way too conservative. Not that I think Blogger's in trouble. But I suspect there something potentially more awesome that you could pull off by leveraging what you already have. You probably have those ideas. When there are so many great things to do that you know will work, it's hard to not focus on them. But it might be time to try something wacky.

Sorry, I know you've already thought of these things. When you're working on a product and people on the outside tell you what you should do, acting like they're all smart, it's annoying. The hard part is building stuff, not thinking it up. Carry on. (But seriously, the prettier templates thing.)

Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

2007-12-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I've been trying to come up with a more structured way of evaluating them. Here's a first attempt at defining that. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be. But perhaps you'll find it useful.

Tractability

Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?

Blogger was highly tractable. Twitter was tractable, but sightly less-so because of the SMS component. Google web search had quite low tractability when they launched it. Vista?: About as low as you can get.

Tractability is partially about technical difficulty and much about timing and competition—i.e., How advanced are the other solutions? Building a new blogging tool today is less-tractable, because the bar is higher. Building the very first web search engine was probably pretty easy. Conversely, building the very first airplane was difficult, even though there wasn't any competition.

In general, if you're tiny and have few resources, tractability is key, because it means you can build momentum quickly—and momentum is everything for a startup. However, tractability often goes hand and hand with being early in a market, which has its own drawbacks (e.g., obviousness, as we'll discuss below).

If you're big and/or have a lot of resources—or not very good at spotting new opportunities, but great at executing—a less-tractable idea may be for you. It may take longer to launch something worthwhile, but once you crack the nut, you have something clearly valuable.

Obviousness

Question: Is it clear why people should use it?

Everything is obvious once its successful. Big wins come when you can spot something before its obvious to everyone else. There are several vectors to this: 1) Is it obvious why people should use it? 2) Is it obvious how to use? 3) Is it an obviously good business?

Number two is more affected by the design of the product than the idea itself. You don't actually want number three to be true. You want it to be a good business, but not an obviously good business, because than you get more competition. Web search was not an obviously good business before Google demonstrated it. This allowed them to leap-frog the competition that was in it for years, but not taking it very seriously. But, like Google, the business may not be clear until later.

The key question for evaluating an idea is number one: Is it obvious why people should use it? In most cases, obviousness in this regard is inversely proportional to tractability. The cost of Blogger and Twitter's high tractability was the fact that they were defining a new type of behavior. The number one response to Twitter, still, is Why would anyone do that? Once people try it, they tend to like it. But communicating its benefits is difficult. We're heartened by the fact that Why would anyone do that? was the default response by the mainstream to blogging for years, as well, and eventually tens of millions of people came around.

On the flip side, if you can build an ad network that makes people more money, a better search engine, or a productivity app that actually does tasks for people—all, less-tractable solutions—it will be highly obvious to people why to use your product.

Sometimes you can come up with ideas that are highly tractable and obvious. For example: Top Friends or HotOrNot. These products were not hard to launch and yet, were immediately appealing (to their target market). What was not obvious, in either case, is that they could also be great businesses. HotOrNot has proven this to be true. And I suspect Slide will, as well.

Deepness

Question: How much value can you ultimately deliver?

The most successful products give benefits quickly (both in the life of a product and a user's relationship with it), but also lend themselves to continual development of and discovery of additional layers of benefit later on.

Facebook is incredibly deep because it leverages your connections, which touch practically every aspect of your life. Scrabulous, on the other hand—a Facebook app for playing Scrabble—is not very deep. How big is the Scrabble-playing part of your life, and how much can it deliver beyond that?

But most things are deeper than they seem at first glance. Practically any application, once people start using it, can be used as a lever to more activity and benefit delivery. Being smart about what you're leveraging is key.

When Feedburner first launched, their only feature was the ability to take an RSS feed and spit out multiple versions, depending on the capabilities of the feed reader requesting it. It seemed useful, but hardly something to start a company around, especially because that particular problem would probably go away over time. Or so I thought. What I didn't get and they did (because Dick and gang is smarter than me) is that they were setting themselves up at a great leverage point—between publishers and their readers—where they could offer an ever-deeper value stack. Soon it was feed stylesheets with one-button subscription, feed stats, feed flare, blog stats, email subscriptions, and, of course, advertising, where they made their money.

While we're talking about Feedburner, its worth mentioning that their product was also very obvious for their core user-base. There were clear benefits and very little drawbacks. They also had no competition, even though there were tons of companies in the RSS/feed space, because most of the others were battling it out on the reader side.

Other times, you stumble into deepness. When they put up HotOrNot on a whim, Jim and James didn't know they'd be able to leverage it into a highly profitable dating site. Okay, so HotOrNot's still not the "deepest" of sites, but it's deeper than you think.

Wideness

Question: How many people may ultimately use it?

Wideness, like deepness, is a fairly classic market analysis measure. They are usually inversely proportional—do you try to offer the mass-market good or the niche one?

Feedburner is not particularly wide. Their market was those who published RSS feeds (and cared about them). This was in the hundreds of thousands, not a hundred million. Turns out, it didn't need to be used by a hundred million to be worth a hundred million, so going for wideness is not entirely necessary. But it's something to look at.

Like deepness, wideness can take you by surprise. The web is getting so damn big, what seem like niche ideas can be very decent businesses. When Ted Rheingold launched Dogster, as a joke, he didn't know there were enough people out there who would be interested in making their dogs web pages to actually build a business. When we launched Blogger, I thought maybe a few thousand people would use it.

Sometimes, you can find a spot that is both deep and wide. This is where multi-billion-dollar businesses are built: Google, Windows, Ebay. It's easy to think these kinds of opportunities aren't laying around anymore—at least not for the little guy. But most people would have said the same before Facebook entered the picture.

Discoverability

Question: How will people learn about your product?

I was going to call this criteria "viralness." However, there's a lot of focus on viralness these days, and—while sometimes amazingly effective—it's not the only way to grow a user-base. And it doesn't make sense in all cases.

Interesting to note: Google web search is not the least bit viral. Nor is Firefox. Nor it Kayak.

It's possible to get the word out without being "viral." One way is organic search traffic. Another is pay-per-click ads (if you can monetize). Another is plain old-fashioned word-of-mouth/blog/press. (Twitter has probably grown more through press and blogs references than any inherent viralness.) There's also distribution deals and partnerships.

Either way, it's something to think about up front, as different ideas lend themselves to different discoverability strategies. And some things are more difficult than others to spread. Dating sites, for instance, have not historically been viral, because people weren't going to invite their friends to—or even talk much about—their personal ads. The sites made up for this by buying lots of ads, which worked because they monetized signups via subscription.

Monetizability

Question: How hard will it be to extract the money?

Far be it for me to say that obvious monetizability is a requirement. I'm generally a believer that if you create value, you can figure out the business. However, all things being equal, an idea with clear buck-making potential is better than one without.

Whether or not something is monetizable is not always clear up-front. It wasn't clear how Google was going to make money early on. Ebay thought it would sell auction software.

In most cases, if you position yourself close to the spending of money, you can extract some. Or if you offer something that clearly saves or makes people money.

Blogger, I believe, makes money for Google, but it's not the most monetizable of products. Twitter, I believe, will be more-so, but that's yet to be seen.

Personally Compelling

Question: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

Last on the list, but probably the first question I ask myself is: How important to me is it that this product exists in the world? If I were evaluating a startup, I'd ask this of the founders. As I wrote in "Ten Rules":

Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires.

In theory, you can get around this with lots of user research. (It's pretty clear neither Slide nor Rockyou's founders are creating widgets based on their own needs and desires.) But you're more likely to get it wrong that way. When I've gone sideways, it's when I wasn't listening to my gut on this issue. Specifically, Blogger and Twitter were personally compelling, while Odeo wasn't.

However, "personally compelling" doesn't have to mean only that you want it as a user yourself. Curing cancer or helping the world be more green may be highly personally compelling for other reasons, which I think is just as good. My favorite products are those I really want as a user, but that I also think have some "greater good."

Charting it Out

To bring it home, here's a table with my estimates on where different products land by these criteria. Obviously, these are subjective measures, and for some of them, it's hard to judge in retrospect. (I didn't inlclude Personally Compelling on the list, because I can't really speak to the founder's motivations in most cases.)

Product	Tractability	Obviousness	Deepness	Wideness	Discoverability	Monetizability
Blogger	Very High	Low	High	High	High	Low
Google (web search)	Very Low	Very High	Very High	Very High	Low	Very High
Facebook	High¹	High	Very High	High	Very High	High²
Twitter	High	Low	High	High	High	Med
Feedburner	Med	High	High	Med	Med	Med³
HotOrNot	Very High	Very High	Med	Med	Med	High⁴
Scrabulous	High	Very High	Low	Low	Very High	Low
Ebay	Med	High	Very High	Very High	High	Very High

¹ I don't actually know what Facebook consisted of in version 1.0. It was actually in what looked like an untractable space (MySpace competitor), but applying the constraint of college-only made the competition non-existent and the usefulness and tractability potentially very high from the start.
² In theory
³ Unsure
⁴ Only in the case of "Meet Me at HotOrNot," the dating side of the site. The original, rating side probably has low monetizability.

What does your city say?

2008-06-02T20:44:00.001-07:00

Another great essay by Paul Graham: "Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder."

Why you should keep trying stuff

2006-10-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) lost his voice to a freaky (and usually permanent) condition for 18 months, and then got it back by rhyming:

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

As he said, "Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn?t mean I can?t be the first."

Awesome story.

2008-04-28T20:34:00.001-07:00

2008-04-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition: "As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit."

Adaptive Path seeks CEO

2008-04-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

If I was qualified for this job, I'd think seriously about it. Good people doing good work.

Tip for cleaning out your closet

2008-04-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

Don't ask, Can I imagine wearing this? Instead ask, Can I imagine this ever being the best possible thing in my closet to wear?

Works for other things too.

My TweetCloud

2008-04-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Delicious Company

2008-04-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Wil Shipley:

"I believe the best software is written by small groups of people who have both passion and vision. Passion is easy to define; you care so deeply about something that it wounds you if it's done poorly. Vision can mean different things, but I mean the ability to not just come up with new ideas, but to actually be able to see how they would integrate with people's lives. Vision without passion gives you a guy who sitting on couch saying, 'Flying cars! Wave of the future! Mark my word, the guy who invents that's going to be rich... pass the chips.' Passion without vision gives you America's current political situation, where we allow huge companies to destroy the world but pass laws to make sure nobody marries a turtle."

Twitter Explained

2008-03-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to explain Twitter for a couple years now. My new answer will be to link to this video the Common Craft guys put together.

Troublemaker

2007-09-06T11:28:00.001-07:00

Troublemaker
Originally uploaded by evhead

This is how you do it

2008-02-22T17:57:00.000-08:00

Hilarious Science Fair Experiments

2008-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Was poking around on my list of blogs and found Ev's MoCamBlog, which is where I used to send pictures from my phone.

Disappointingly, all the images are gone. Sigh. Only a phone company (in this case, Sprint) would delete a customer's content (with no communication about it—at least that I saw) when the customer is still paying >$100/month.