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My Twitter Usage - stats revealed

Philip Wilkinson on May 18, 2008, in Fun, Social Media

I came across a cool tool today that lets you see some interesting stats about your Twitter usage, via: TweetStats

For example, I’m averaging around 26 Tweets a month right now, with Nov being nuts where I posted 73. Mostly I tweet around noon or 4-5pm on wed or thursdays. I was one of the early adopters having used it since Dec 2006! The top people who have often replied to me are @PaulWalsh and @mbites, while the interface I use has been fluctuating with Twhirl probably going to be topping the lot soon:

Now, not stopping there, I wanted to see what the tweet stats of those titans of the Internet UK world @PaulWalsh and @mbites looked like:

As you can see, Paul doesn’t get any work done as he spends his day on Twitter with easily around 700 - 900 tweets / month, spread throughout every day, and even some between 4 and 8am! Dahowlett, aido, and conoro help make up their Irish contingent, and Paul prefers the web interface for twittering.

Now, Mike has a bit of catching up to do, especially as he’s a journalist! An average of only around 255 a month, mostly in the early morning tues-wed. Often just has one-one chats with PaulWalsh and JemimaKiss by the looks of it, and uses Twitterific and the Web to post his tweets.

Ok - must stop now before I get carried away Any Twitter leaderboard anywhere?

V3 Crowdstorm has arrived - UK & US

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

Hurray - we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback - use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also - welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above - this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

Nearly there - Crowdstorm V3

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..

Data Portability & The Shopping Social Graph

Philip Wilkinson on Mar 11, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

There has been a lot of talk about the social graph and the best practice for extending, enhancing, and sharing it. Something which we’re following very closely here at Crowdstorm due to the role this graph can play in improving the product research process. Let’s say you are looking for a new 27″ LCD screen for your bedroom and have no idea where to start - a few recommendations or comments from friends and colleagues you trust will help point you in the right direction, especially if they are actually knowledgeable in that space.

Now to get to this kind of implementation, there needs to be that motivation and incentive to use “the crowd” in this way, but firstly you have to provide an easy way to bring in existing social graph connections without having to force people down the “add this person” route over and over again. So, this has led us to heavily research the space of importing connections from other applications and sites into the Crowdstorm registration process:

In an Mark Zuckerberg interview about data portability on facebook on ReadWriteWeb, he stated that “data portability is an important direction in which the web is moving and that fundamental openess between sites is inevitable, yet Facebook must be strict about privacy controls”. The argument is that other applications should not be allowed to share user data as the user loses control over it, which is actually a load of codswallop.

The fact is that you should give people free choice and enough good information to help them make it - which would include whether or not to to give your data access to a piece of software or application and allow what it can do with it. Zuckerberg knows this but is actually stalling while they try and figure out how a feature like this would stop a competitor replicating their site and making it better, porting all that data across.

In my view, the user controls the data, not the site. The process should go along the lines of:

1. Import the social graph data from any chosen site or service
2. Add value to it by enhancing the data within (such as adding trust between people or contextual shopping knowledge)
3. Utilise that data as part of the service to improve the consumer offering
4. Allow that enhanced social data set to be exported again to any other source

This process continually improves the social graph data set through collaboration and sharing. So, back to steps (1) and (4) here, what are good examples of sites that allow exporting of social graph data?

	Twitter	You can bring back a list of people you follow and those that follow you, and while you can’t invite them into the new network - you can get it to find existing people on it and connect with them.
	Flickr	As per Twitter, you can find existing Flickr contacts on the new network and agree to connect, but can’t invite directly via email.
	Gmail	You can authorise access to the gmail contact list and then manually select which of those contacts to invite into the new network directly or connect to people already in it.
	Yahoo Mail	As per gMail / googlemail.
	Facebook	As far as we can tell, you can import most bits of user data from their API except email addresses which means you could at least match up people on the Crowdstorm network who are also connected on Facebook, but not invite them directly.
	OpenSocial	Google’s api specification allows the importing of people relationships and emails depending on what is allowed by the site that implemented the protocol e.g. Bebo
	hCard	A microformat that can be imported into the network and link to other relevant hCards.
	CSV / VCF	Text based file formats for manually uploading lists of contacts and email addresses - only for tech savvy users.

We’re still looking into the Hotmail and AOL mail side of things as it’s not entirely clear what data services they have available for contact importing. So what have we missed? Anything important?

I’ll follow up with another post on our implementation of this and other good examples from around the web - just as soon as we’ve figured it out ourselves!

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, enhancing, graph, crowd, social

Social Marketers Create Communities to Maintain Influence

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 14, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

A february report from those guys at Jupiter, talking about how social marketers should create and engage communities for their brand - in particular highlighting that “the effect of consumer-created content on consumers’ purchasing habits and brand opinion will greatly increase over the next 12 months”:

Source: JupiterResearch

The question of course is where should the conversation take place - everywhere or just the company’s own site.. I think we all know the answer to that one..

Crowdstorm version 2 - iterate, iterate, iterate!

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 24, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

One thing which has been really interesting over the past 5-6 weeks is that having an actual site live is a very useful thing. We debated for quite a while whether we were going to put the current version live, bearing in mind the list of bugs and elements that didn’t quite seem to work correctly, going through the following points:

• You actually have deployed something which is a great morale booster
• You learn a lot from how people use (or don’t use the site) through asking them, and mainly analysing detailed statistics on usage
• It’s a chance to get out of a development environment and really see what the real world issues that are thrown at you are.
• People stop asking you when you are going to launch!!!
• Users who come to the site think that it is a finished version and may not be patient with the flaws
• You have to keep fixing the bugs in the live environment which takes up valuable development time
• Investors start asking for traffic figures on the site and to see “traction” when you’ve only just launched and know you need to put another 20 things live and perfect them before your plan really kicks in.

Well - what “have” we learnt directly in relation to Crowdstorm then?

1. Not implementing a menu bar sucks in terms of navigation!
2. Developing the site with a graphic design team and then implementing everything in one big chunk is wrong and inefficient (I’ll explain why further down in this post)
3. We shouldn’t let design get in the way of functionality and usability - it may look great but not if people can’t use the thing
4. Use some good quality analytics packages - we have a combination of our own internal tools, Google Analytics, and Clicktale
5. Make sure you get the blend right between people who want to browse and people who want to search and know what they want.
6. Some design elements and layouts on the web have evolved in a certain way for a reason - being adventurous is good but need to pick the right battles
7. Don’t try and gain traffic too quickly so that you can get feedback and improve the proposition before the masses arrive

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

The first version of Crowdstorm was a big step for us in terms of trying to build functionality and a design with no historical work to base it on. We took the concept and vision, built 75% of the functionality, then got a graphic design team in to come up with our look and feel. Once the graphical work was done and we were happy with any changes, we then tried to match the CSS / XHTML up with the technical feature set to create the finished product. There was no real way to go back and tweak things without losing time and money.

Fast forward to Jan 2008 - and Crowdstorm V3. This time we have a great team who have had me drill the words “iterate, measure, deploy” until their ears bleed. In a small team of 5, we’ve got two technical developers, one front end interface designer, a search engine specialist, and a product / commercial guy (that’ll be me then).

We build a basic wireframe of a page, write what we want from it, look through any data from the existing site to back up our ideas for change, then code a designed page up in CSS / XHTML. We look through it, play around with a few elements, then go and simplify it by reducing 20% of what we have on it. Once we’re happy with this first version we get the front-end hooked up to the technical backend and deploy it on our beta site behind the scenes, then move on to the next page.

Even then, we’re constantly going back to the older versions and trying new things with the implemented design and refactoring in the technical implementation. We run the analytics software on the pages and get people to try it out too. The main thing I’ve found is that this works very, very well, but it does rely on having all the team on-board in order to understand that nothing is set in stone and everything they do will change.

It’s what I love about the web - seeing a product as a living, breathing entity that evolves every waking minute of the day!

2008 Prediction - online ad spend continues to grow

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 07, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

With markets “potentially” in down-turn’s or corrections, it’s always interesting to consider that the internet actually benefits from those sorts of times as with money tight, marketing executives will continue to gravitate toward the internet, looking for more measurable ad formats to buttress their positions.

This year alone, the US will hit $27.5 billion in terms of online ad spend:

(Chart courtesy of emarketer)

A Merry Crowdstorm Christmas

Philip Wilkinson on Dec 22, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media

Have a great holiday and we’ll be back in the new year with a whole heap of announcements. Thanks for everyone’s support this year - we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and remember you can always come to Crowdstorm UK or Crowdstorm USA when you’ve got your gifts and want to tell the world how good or bad they are!

Crowdstorm nominated in the Open Web Awards 2007

Philip Wilkinson on Dec 13, 2007, in E-Commerce, Social Media

We’re really pleased to be nominated for the social shopping category in the Open Web Awards run by Mashable. It’s great to be noticed and we’ve got some tough competition, and as of the last count, we’re about 25% behind the leader! So - every vote counts right now and we’d really appreciate it if you could quickly vote for us with just a single button click on their site, via the button below:

I know it’s a PR thing but it’s important for us and we would get to go to San Francisco to the awards ceremony. In fact, if you get us the most votes through your company - I’ll get the whole Crowdstorm team to wear your company t-shirts to the event - how’s that?

Crowdstorm United States Site goes live!

Philip Wilkinson on Dec 05, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

Wow - another milestone and about time too eh About an hour ago, the US site went live at www.crowdstorm.com

Now of course we have to check for bugs, keep bringing in more of our expert review feeds, and tidying up all the loose ends for the next 48hrs. Still - it’s a great feeling to be operating fully in two countries now (UK and US) and evolving our site and platform from there.