If you really love something, you should want to know everything about it, right?
I am currently in an ongoing love affair with the internets. This, mixed with the liberal dispensing of tech-related kool-aid that goes on at MIT, has provided enough of an impetus for me to begin learning how to actually write beautiful code. The hack-job e-commerce sites I had developed and run and SEO-ed like mad before school just will not do. No, this is a completely different undertaking.
And guess what? Writing respectable code is REALLY EFFING HARD.
Genius conclusion, I know. I wanted to write this post though, not to announce to the world that hey-guess-what-coding-is-hard, but rather to analyze why I believe business-y people like myself tend to abandon ship at this point in the learning process.
I do not plan to quit. In fact, I am only *more* determined and believe that over the next 2 years I can learn enough Python to be dangerous. That said, long-term-progress undertakings are really easy to quit.
The reason I’m not quitting is because I’ve been through this before, when I decided in 2005 that I just had to learn Chinese. So I did what any normal/sane person would do and packed my bags and moved to Beijing. I was not leaving until I could speak Chinese. Period.
I wanted to learn Chinese because my ultimate plan was to get a PhD in Chinese-American relations and become a badass diplomat (translation: spy). I really believe that in order to understand something at the most intimate level you need to learn the entire chain – ie, in order for me to understand the inner workings of the Chinese government, I had to be able to understand how the interactions take place in their most basic form. Same thing with computers and the internet. In order to truly understand macro trends, it seems like one needs to be familiar with the most granular aspects of the trade.
I enrolled in a beginner (level 0) Chinese class here and off I went. What I did not realize is that any Chinese class worth a damn will spend at least the first month going over the fundamentals of the language. This means you don’t even learn how to say a single sentence until at least one month in – and keep in mind this is full-timestudying. See the video below. Welcome to my entire life, September 2005. I’ll call this the “bopomofo” period. Day after day it was “bo po mo fo”, again! repeat! You learn sounds and tones and initials and finals and radicals and you leave each day not one bit more prepared to go and order lunch than you were the day before.
I was frustrated, and wanted to quit. Why was I wasting my time learning how to shape my mouth and twist my tounge just right and listen for the difference between first tone and fourth tone? Hello! I had dumplings to order, and fake-North-face vendors to haggle with!
With Chinese, you can’t just take what you know from English or Spanish or German or whatever and apply it. You have to start from scratch and completely re-conceptualize how you think about language and structures and communication fundamentally.
After three months, it started to make sense. If I wanted to actually become good and not just some dummy with a phrase book, I had to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. I couldn’t go straight to learning phrases otherwise I would have to eventually unlearn all of my bad habits. So I sucked it up and went back and really really mastered all those mouth formations. And then I skipped two levels of class and ended my year having an all-in-Chinese throw-down with a military doctor in Tibet. Good times. (Though sadly now I’ve forgotten a good chunk of what I learned).
Seems to be the same in the world of developers. There are probably more than a few who have some knowledge here and there but don’t really have a clue how the entire system works together. These are the people with the phrase books who can say enough to sound impressive but in reality have a really shallow knowledge-base.
I am in the “bopomofo” period of learning to program, which is fine with me only because I know it’s going to be these micro-incremental teeny tiny baby steps for a while. But man, it sucks.
Now I understand why so many business students and other non-technical types who love technology make the attempt to learn how to code and then quit right around now. In non-technical professions there really is no equivalent to this particular type of learning. Spending an entire day to get the “name” field to work on a form for your website is easy to dismiss as a “non-optimal” use of time, especially when there’s someone you can hire who can do it in 5 minutes.
Though I think that is completely missing the point.
Knowing the “bopomofo” of the web world can be extremely helpful for non-technical people when interacting with a technical team. And once you make it through mastering the fundamentals, your ability to learn new concepts improves exponentially.
I believe the J-term (short for January term) might be the best thing to happen to an academic calendar since President’s Day.
I never had one in undergrad (silly quarter system) so I was unable to appreciate that four weeks of “do-a-small-project” at the beginning of the year is a most excellent way to try something new. Almost no downside. It’s not like the “internship” during the summer between the two years of business school – a popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties among MBAs.
When I started business school, I was totally S.O.L.D. on cleantech. Coming from Texas, I had drank the energy kool-aid hard. I was extremely lucky to land an opportunity to work for a clean-tech startup in Beijing over January 2009 and it was through that opportunity that I realized that although I was in love with cleantech conceptually, I needed to have a more direct interaction with consumers. And that I loved the internet too much.
So, as they say here in Silicon Valley (SV from now on), I “pivoted” away from Cleantech and approx one year ago decided that the consumer web and everything that goes along with it was really my jam.
Instead of another international trip this January, I decided instead to pursue a different type of “cultural immersion”: spending the entire month in Silicon Valley. I am curious how I’ll do here – after many failed attempts to ditch my East Coast attitude problem, I have mostly stopped trying (which could potentially conflict with the “hella chill” personality type pervasive here in norcal).
The first few days of January was the MIT Entpreneurship Center’s “Silicon Valley Study Tour” where first-year students visit tech startups (both early and later stage) around Silicon Valley. 93 first-year students plus a few wise second-years stayed at the Stanford Park Hotel (which BTW is totally awesome – one of those places where you really feel “taken care of”) and organized a crazy scheme of rental-car-key-trading to get to lots of different startups over 4 days. Company List included below.
The two companies I visited – Pandora and Digg – were interesting to see because I am a user of both sites. Hearing stories from the execs about the challenges that each company is facing and the underlying shifts in the media industry that both companies are helping to perpetuate left me with a new respect for both companies.
Though the tour is over, I am very excited to be taking a class this January through Stanford/Harvard Law Schools called “Difficult Problems” taught by Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark. The course will wrap up its first week tomorrow and has already provided a fantastic overview of a few very pressing current and future problems in cyberspace. For more on the class, check out the wiki, blog and twitter pages.
Finally, I’m working on a side project of my own in January while living in Palo Alto. Because there’s always a side project.
I’m hoping after this month I’ll come away with something insightful to say about the startup ecosystem here in SV. We’ll see.
To all you crowdsourcing-lovers out there who see the web as a way to subvert impenetrable elite networks and democratize industries and systems, congratulations, you have a new convert. (This girl.)
I was totally fascinated by the DARPA red balloon challenge earlier this month, and obviously pumped to see an MIT team named the winner. It took less than 9 hours for the team to locate the 10 red weather balloons deployed in different cities around the U.S.
If that stat alone doesn’t for the zillionth time reiterate the astounding power of the internet, please return to your cave. K thx.
What was most interesting, though, was not the shockingly short duration of the competition, but the very different strategies used by the MIT and Harvard teams and how each played out during the competition itself. To me, the strategies proved to me that effectively deployed crowdsourcing is an extremely powerful tool.
First, some disclaimers:
-I am currently a student at MIT, though I was not involved at all in the team’s efforts. I didn’t even register on their site. But I’m still biased.
-Everything I know about the Harvard team I got from these two great and thorough blog posts from Rafael Corrales and Caren Kelleher.
So, my thesis. The MIT team’s use of recursive incentives (ahem, cash money) to compel participation indicates to me that:
-Even on the web, greed and personal gain are powerful motivational forces
-Although the Harvard team was able to mobilize and engage their extremely powerful student and alumni network, the MIT team’s more tangible incentives were better suited to encourage widespread participation. Could this be an indicator of the potentially diminishing power of single networks (no matter how powerful)? I think it is.
Here’s why:
Based on the articles I read about the Harvard team, although they ran a Google adwords campaign, had a website, a twitter account (@helpredballoon) and a pledge to donate the entire $40,000 to charity, by far the most useful tool they employed was leveraging the current student and alumni networks. The Harvard network is arguably the most powerful network in the world – a common bond that ties together world leaders, politicians, billionaires, academics, etc. The sheer level of participation and engagement that the group received from this network is notable.
The MIT team, on the other hand, created an incentive structure that encouraged people to not only participate themselves, but get their friends to participate as well.
I think to me that was a key difference – converting participants versus converting them AND compelling them to get their friends involved too (the Facebook application Causes comes to mind here).
I don’t think the tools available on the web even five years ago would have had such success when pitted against a network as powerful as Harvard’s. But web tools are becoming downright easy to make, which I believe will enable this sort of mobilization to take many forms in the next few years and continue to chip away at the relative power of these very elite and deeply entrenched networks (examples: big media + youtube, finance industry + kaching, etc.)
The web/software as a tool of democratization is not a new idea; it has been veryartfullyarticulatedforyears. Though few instances have provided such a clear case for why the process is so game-changing and how the web’s ability to mobilize disparate groups is changing the meaning of elitism.
I am betting aggressively on the coming ubiquity of portable projection devices.
Not just because they’re cool. But because, as our lives become more digital, content will need to get out from the confines of a screen.
First, some background:
I took this class last semester at the MIT Media Lab called “Social TV”. Perhaps it was all those hours I spent as a teenager watching endless hours of television, but the class had a profound effect on the way I think about TV and media in general. I learned the term “three screens” – for television, computer and mobile – and spent a lot of time thinking about how the three-screen experience has changed the way we consume media.
The big question now is how to integrate those three screens in a way that is intuitive and seamless. No easy task. There have been a few attempts, but it seems to me that the timelines won’t align: by the time someone is aggressive enough to do deals with the telcos, MSOs AND the content providers, the technology itself will be so different that it might not matter. Technology moves fast; large “cruise ship” companies like Comcast move slow.
The fundamental problem with three-screen integration attempts is that the television model is, for the most part, still very bankable. People still watch a crapload of television and pay their service providers handsomely, on a monthly basis. So the MSOs have little motivation to indulge new models, and the content providers (especially powerful ones like ESPN, MTV, CNN, etc.) are scared to rock the boat, especially when it’s related to the companies that are writing them enormous checks every month.
As a result, recently I have moved away from thinking about integration. In some ways, I believe that the three screen model isn’t sustainable – maybe the screens are not meant to work in tandem, and instead are in a sort of battle for dominance. Problem is though, all three have very compelling pluses: TV has massive market penetration and usage, computers have the greatest capabilities, and mobile phones are with you 24/7.
Of these three, I think mobile phones will eventually win the battle. Look at laptops – they keep getting smaller and more portable, while mobile phones get smarter and more powerful. A phone most definitely can replace a computer, but a computer will never become a phone. Form factor is a big issue here as well. Perhaps that’s why there is so much excitement about the Apple Tablet – I now think of laptops as huge versions of the clamshell cell-phones of the mid 1990s. They’re bulky and not particularly intuitive, but the use of a laptop has become so ritualized at this point that I don’t think people notice any more.
If you buy the hypothesis that phones will eventually replace computers, which I do, then the real stumbling block is the display. It’s just too small for sharing.
This is the crux of my bet on mobile projection devices. The usages are endless, the technology is there and is awesome, and the battle that I believe mobile phones will eventually win is in full force. Perhaps this is the market opportunity I should pursue – I saw this video of Marc Andreessen on Business Insider talking about how to define the future, and he said you can see what’s coming in the near-term by hanging out at university labs. I am starting to see these devices everywhere. Perhaps this is worth examining further…
I worked at small web companies before business school. This meant that anything I did not know how to do, which was a lot, I made up as I went along. Terms like EBITDA, ROI, and value proposition were all foreign. This is why I came to business school – it’s finishing school for those of us who have never spent time as consultants.
I am fascinated by the term “customer acquisition cost”. Like many other b-school terms, to me it reflects the core narcissism of many businesses. Because it’s not just you, the business, that must “pay” (whether in dollars or otherwise) to acquire me, your customer. I have to pay as well to move over to your product. Maybe it’s not necessarily money, your product could be cheaper than whatever I’m using now. But I need to change my habits to adjust to whatever it is you’re offering. And this cost is MUCH MUCH higher than I think many new businesses realize.
Why?
Because I, the consumer, am lazy and averse to change.
This is the problem that I have with aggregators. You think you’re making life easier by pulling together various “feeds”, but really you’re making it harder by giving me a new interface I have to get used to and yet another account to manage. If there’s no value-add (b-school term in action!) what do I gain from shifting?
Example: weather widgets. Seems like they’re everywhere – on my desktop, taskbar, cell phone and anywhere else you can think of. But I check the weather on weather.com. Every time. Just because it’s habit and it’s reliable. My eyes already know where to find the information on the page and it’s always there. In order to sway someone to change his/her habits whatever you’re offering has to be an order of magnitude better than what’s already out there. And even then it still takes time.
Because there’s been a decent amount of buzz lately around the Mint acquisition, I’ll use that site as an example. I attribute the popularity of Mint not to the fact that it aggregates one’s bank accounts, or because it has a fancy UI, but because it was so, so much better than what already existed and gave so much *new*, valuable information to its customers.
The internet has been around long enough that people have developed habits. This is great – you can afford to be a bit riskier with design simply because you can assume a baseline of familiarity that is much higher than it was even five years ago. But be warned: the cost of disrupting habit is high and not necessarily always welcome. What you’re offering has to be exponentially better than what’s already out there, or completely integrated into existing habits. Otherwise it will be hard to convert people.
I really love the website stackoverflow.com. When I discovered the site about a month ago, I had one of those “wow” moments that I was desperate to share with any willing soul, though it was difficult to find someone interested in freaking out with me over a fancy coding bulletin board. Alas.
Stackoverflow.com is a free question-and-answer site for developers, but yes, so much more. Poking around on this site has inspired me to think about how this model can be used for education on the web. I’m calling the model“lurk and learn”and will explore in this post how to replicate it.
But first, why the site is awesome:
1. Concentration of Expertise – Whatever “secret sauce” they used to attract so many developers worked. Clicking around the site you can tell that this site has a higher concentration of top-developer-talent posting to it than probably any other site on the web. The ability to corral smart people is extremely difficult – just ask any conference organizer. Yet day after day, top minds congregate at stackoverflow.com to ask and answer highly technical questions.
Anyone who doesn’t see the opportunity here is nutso. If you want to see the pulse of the developer world, here it is. Part of any job is learning the syntax of the industry – the way that people talk about what they’re doing, the terms that they use, the “language” of the trade. It’s all here, and nicely grouped into tags for easy browsing.
2. Bite-Sized Bits of Knowledge – The problem with learning from experts is that many incredibly smart and accomplished people are terrible at communicating what they know in a way that’s easy for novices to grasp. StackOverflow combats this problem through the question-and-answer format. Instead of “tell me everything you know about Java”, users will ask very specific questions like “Is there a Java library that performs a message digest on a tree of objects?” This allows beginners to piece together bits of knowledge at their own pace instead of alienating/frustrating them at the beginning with a massive brain-dump of hard-to-grasp programming talk.
Additionally, every company I’ve ever worked at whines about “knowledge transfer”. What’s the best way for the smartest people in the company to teach the new kids? I’m starting to believe more and more that bite-sized little packets might be the answer.
So here I was, thinking about the coolness of StackOverflow when I stumbled on this video – a Google TechTalk from Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of the site:
And then the wheels started turning. Could this work as a model for other industries?
Defining the Educational Model: “Lurk and Learn”
I am a big fan of learning by osmosis. If you surround yourself with smart people and listen to how they talk, what they read, who they listen to, eventually it will penetrate your habits, thoughts and behavior. This is why I love Twitter – it has virtualized osmosis-learning for me. I can fill my stream with people who I think are interesting and accomplished and smart and then maybe a little bit will rub off. Maybe.
What works about StackOverflow is that there is evidence of an entire spectrum of expertise on the site. It’s not just the whiz-kids, there are some dummies too. This is a good thing – it makes the site a lot less intimidating. The newest of wannabe coders can click around as much as they please (“lurk”) without ever having to answer a question, absorbing information like a giant sponge (“learn”).
This socialization process allows new users to develop a relationship with the community. There an article in ReadWriteWeb that discusses the “building blocks of social engineering” that Spolsky discusses in the video. Here’s the key diagram (read the article for an explanation of each block):
When you hear Spolsky talk about the site, it becomes clear that this model is not specific to the coding world.
So can it be replicated? I think it’s a worthy experiment that I would love to work on. In addition to the social engineering road map above, I would suggest three rules:
1. Create sites focused around a single subject/industry but with lots of breadth. LOTS.
This requires lots of users, so there’s high potential for a chicken/egg fail. Providing value immediately is really important.
For a whole range of search terms, Google currently favors a range of well-SEOed but ultimately useless content sites that are filled with ads and just the right keywords. This is especially frustrating when you’re searching for a very specific, somewhat advanced topic.
Having a site focused on a single, highly specific vertical will hopefully attract your key user: the experts. This is the difference between StackOverflow and the other hoards of q+a sites (Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, etc.) – it’s specialized. Attracting experts will be the key to success – if StackOverflow was a bunch of novices like me asking questions and not getting answers the site would be useless. Instead, lure in the experts and treat them well. Let them rule their own small sliver of the internets and fight hard to keep them around.
Additionally, the specific focus and emphasis on breadth will help with Google as well. StackOverflow’s SEO is so good that it now pretty much owns Google for a lot of very specific coding terms (long-tail score!!)
Other sites that follow this model and do it really well:
- HackerNews – uses the reputation model and provides some of the most in-depth and interesting startup-related content on the web.
- ChinesePod – I have been a fan of this site since 2006. I was living in China and trying to learn Chinese (Chinese and now coding. Can you tell I am a masochist?) They have nutured a huge Chinese-studying community using bite-sized podcasts on specific parts of the Chinese language (for example “Calling a Supplier for a Quote“). Their levels range from novice to advanced meaning that the community can also teach/learn from each other. And now they’re so popular that they charge a crapton for their content. (And good for them – $17/month – daaaaaaaaamn).
2. Support discussions (whether through a question + answer format or otherwise) as opposed to definitive and static content
Wikipedia is great, but there’s only a single Wikipedia entry for a given topic. Example – let’s say I’m trying to understand tort law. I can easily go and read the Wikipedia entry, but sometimes it take more than a single explanation to “get it”. This is the difference between going to law school for three years and reading a bunch of wikipedia entries. So what’s in the middle? The place where you go to get a working understanding of highly advanced subjects?
As far as I can tell, there isn’t one. The process of knowledge acquisition is different for different folk, and sometimes a single definitive explanation isn’t as good as multiple explanations of varying quality. Wikipedia is definitive; learning is not.
Another example – take this question: “What does Ruby have that Python doesn’t, and vice versa?” You could answer the question in a few sentences, or read through the twenty-four answers posted on StackOverflow and get a much more comprehensive explanation of the differences between Ruby and Python, sorted according to how useful the community deems each answer.
3. Create a hang-out spot, not just a content site. And make it just as compelling for experts as for beginners.
For me, the best part of learning is the struggle. It’s surveying some seemingly insurmountable subject matter and breaking it down into digestable pieces. But a lot of people are more likely to walk away/give up rather than go through the process of breaking down complicated subjects. Sites like StackOverflow take care of that process for you.
Additionally, the constantly changing content and the social engineerning that Spolsky and Jeff Atwood implemented when they created the site turns it from simply a content site to a hang-out spot. And one that’s interesting for people with varying ranges of expertise. They keep coming back because they keep finding useful stuff.
Where to begin?
Medicine would be a great place to start. Given the recent what-have-yous over healthcare, there is increased public attention on the topic and people are craving change.
Law would also be on my list, though I have a feeling lawyers hate the internets. Finance would be on there too, along with food/recipes/cooking, language learning (like Chinese!), auto repair, chemistry, accounting, real estate, and umm etc. Oh, and SAT and other standardized tests would be cool too. This list goes on.
You could also create a network of sites like these, roll them up and build a massive search engine on top of it. Perhaps that is what Mahalo is trying to do, but because it’s not vertically-focused I have trouble tracking down information there.
The reason why “lurk and learn” is so hard to pull off in the real world is because when you walk into a classroom, you’re noticed. You require a seat and there are a limited number of seats. At the best schools, you have to pay for a seat, and you need to pass through rigorous tests just to be able to pay for a seat. On the internet, though, there are infinite seats. Now we just need to create the classrooms.
Despite the fact that this is more than likely my last “first day of school” EVER (scary thought) I am still dreading the “OMG how was your summer?!” bombarding that one gets at the beginning of the school year. Here’s my summary for your consumption. I’ll try to include more than the required sound byte: “I was in NYC working here, and it was great.” Cause I was, and it was.
So what did I get out of a summer working in VC?
Three main take-aways:
1. A summer is just long enough to figure out that you’ve got a lot to learn
Ten weeks go by, and right at the moment when you feel like you’re starting to “get it” it’s over. I am pumped for the class “Early Stage Capital” this fall where I’ll continue to chip away at the intricacies of term sheet math and excel models. For someone whose finance experience before school was exactly zero, this sort of thing excites me. Perhaps I should not admit to such things in a public forum.
2. New York Startup Forecast: Rosy
If the launch of the First Growth Venture Network wasn’t a huge give-away that there’s a lot of excitement around the NYC startup scene let me say it again: THERE IS.
After starting off the summer at Internet Week, I went to one packed-house event after another all summer until it was beat into my nay-saying little head that yes, people DO want to start companies in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world.
While New York lacks the informal advising/hacking culture of the Valley, it makes up for this through the fact that every other industry has solid representation in NYC. A clothing startup that wants to do deals with designers? You can just trot down to their studios. An art website that wants to feature gallery work? The subway to Chelsea will get you there.
Ultimately, startups need something that will provide momentum. I think – contrary to the popular Valley-centric belief that it’s “here or nowhere” – there are a lot of different ways to create momentum and one is having access to the best + biggest players in many, many different industries. No place better than NYC for that.
3. Early-Stage Investing is about People
What I found so heinously unattractive about finance jobs (for the 2.5 seconds that I was considering working at a bank) is that I saw it as high-class paper pushing. You don’t get to really know people. It’s about excel and ratios and presentations and deals, but not really about people. Early-stage investing is mostly people-focused. It’s about getting to know a team and assessing not only what they’re building but how they will build a successful company.
I believe this is what separates really good VCs from the rest – the ability to not only spot a market-crushing business model or technology but the ability to pick out a winning team.
This is not something one can learn in a summer.
So that was my summer. There were some other key moments, but I need to leave some items for the first-day-of-school excitement. I even got a new haircut.
I thought “Town Holler” was organized by Foursquare. Nope.
The event, the first of its kind as far as I know, was organized by a user and fan of Foursquare and managed to draw 50+ people to come out at 4pm on a Saturday in the middle of summer.
It started at One and One in the East Village, and everyone drank beer and wore name tags with his/her name and the name of the place where he/she was the “mayor”. The event went on into the evening with people coming in and out and the crowd moving to different venues around the East village.
I met some new people – not necessarily “strangers” but definitely new faces. They were friends of friends, in a similar field, had similar interests, etc. Not friends, not strangers. Fr-rangers. Or maybe just other “foursquares”.
It reminded me of Paul Graham’s quote that I love: “Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.” Foursquare is a great example of that quote in action. People care enough about the product to self-organize and show up.
Through events like Town Holler, Foursquare is helping to solve an issue that social networks, dating websites, and location-centered local sites have been trying to solve for a while: meeting new people and finding new places. And Foursquare, so far, does it best. Why? Because it’s built for mobile devices. After all, when’s the best time to meet new people and find new places:
a. while at home surfing the internet
b. when you’re already out and about
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
And then – oh yeah – there are the HUGE potential benefits for local businesses. The biggest challenge for a lot of local businesses is foot traffic. They want bodies in their establishment spending cash money. Foursquare drove a hoard of people to a group of local bars during the dreary afternoon lull – and the establishments were more than happy to provide drink/food specials as a result. Sounds like win/win to me.
If anything, yesterday’s event was Charlie’s post brought to life. I knew it before, but saw it so clearly yesterday: Foursquare will soon be the default engine for connecting people to local businesses and to new and exciting things around them.
If you believe that bit.ly – Twitter’s default domain shortener – is going to re-organize and re-curate the web, there’s got to be an arbitrage opportunity there, right?
I missed the first round of really juicy domain squatting because I was 11 years old when all the good, generic domain names were registered. For you non-internet-lovers: registering a good domain name like travel.com in the mid-1990s and then holding it would likely yield millions if you still owned it today. So I’m keeping my eyes out for round two.
Here is my thinking: There are several reasons why people pay so much for generic domain names, like fund.com, which was the highest domain transaction in 2008 and sold for just under $10m.
One is direct traffic. Yes, there are those people that decide they want some clothes, so they go to their browser and type in clothes.com. I don’t know who those people are, but apparently lots of them exist.
Second, supposedly Google’s search algorithm favors domain names with the searched term in the title, though this is completely unverified.
Finally, there’s credibility. Some people, unfamiliar with the fact that any know-nothing hack can go register a domain name, believe that if you own digitalcamera.com you’re somehow a credible authority on the subject (“on the internet, nobody knows your a dog”).
When you shorten a URL using bit.ly, there used to be the option to pick a “custom name” for your shortened link, a feature they disabled as of Monday July 20 a feature that you must be signed-in to access as of the homepage update from July 20. This custom name can’t be changed, and once the name is used that’s it. I was playing around with this feature quite a bit over the weekend.
The Plan
So I decided to make some bets. This has so far cost me nothing because bit.ly is a free service (remember – in the very early days of the web it was free to register domains as well). I took some generic terms and am having bit.ly forward them to a website I own. The terms I got are:
This, I believe, places me squarely in the category of “know-nothing hack” that I mentioned above. Regardless, I plan to make landing pages with ads and see what happens. To me, this is a long-term bet. If the internet is really going to be re-curated by services like bit.ly, then this is good real estate to squat on, though it will take some time and additional structure like an improved bit.ly search and the introduction of real-time search added to major engines.
I think this could go either way.
Potential for jackpot: As bit.ly links become more ubiquitous, they gain credibility. Now when you see a bit.ly link, you know that it is a human-curated link to something. Throw a keyword in there and it adds extra credibility. http://bit.ly/promdresses? Well gosh! This must be the best site on the web about prom dresses! Additionally, if there is a more robust bit.ly search in our future, throwing a sponsored ad on the side with the keyword in the domain will I bet yield significantly more click-throughs than the typical letters and numbers ending.
Additionally, bit.ly’s got volume. As of June, this was on the order of about 150 million clicks a week (source here). Bit.ly is essentially prime domain real-estate, v 2.0. There’s enough attention around bit.ly links that I believe it’s only a matter of time before the system-gamers pounce. Just ask Digg.
The crux of the argument is this:custom names on some URL shortening services are free, but good keywords are scarce.The supply and the demand aren’t aligned. If you wanted to, you could write a script that would assign ALL good keywords to your ad-filled landing page of choice, just to test the theory.I’m afraid I don’t have that much patience.
Potential for nothing: You don’t own your bit.ly links. Yes, you can assign the keywords, but the company could go back at any time and change where the forwarding links are pointing. Additionally, since there’s currently no search engine that favors such keywords, for now there’s just the potential for direct traffic.
What does this mean for brands and public figures?
Yet another opportunity for “reputation management” by the masses. I figured surely the publicists would be on to this by now. Nope. Instead, the current service functions as a kind of stumble-upon for keywords. What is bit.ly/michaeljackson? A random blog post about a staph infection Jackson had back in February. Bit.ly/generalmotors? An article about the GM bankruptcy.
I see bit.ly as the next-generation of crowd-powered content curation. Personally, I have pointed bit.ly/wellsfargo to Get Satisfaction’s Wells Fargo page, because man their customer service is BAD. And bit.ly/janetjackson goes to Rhythm Nation. Natch.
Because no one except for bit.lyowns the links, it’s likely tough to make changes once the keyword has been assigned. So bit.ly/tomcruise will forever point to his crazy Scientology video. Sorry Tom.
The future of SEO
What does this mean for the future of SEO? Tough to say. Real-time search is coming, that’s for sure. Because of bit.ly’s real-time tracking stats and analytics I have little doubt that it will dominate, at least for a while. There is no indication that using a bit.ly custom keyword will have any effect at all on future real-time search algorithms, but that’s not where I see the potential. I think it’s on the consumer side. Essentially: if the average web user starts noticing bit.ly links everywhere they will be more willing to click on targeted bit.ly links. For example, if I was searching for “headphones” and I saw google.com/headphones would I click on it? ABSOLUTELY. Google is a trusted brand because it is absolutely everywhere. Bit.ly is heading in that direction.
Ownership + Moneymaking for bit.ly
Bit.ly hasn’t stated what their revenue plans are. Do they have a top-secret revenue model? Probably. For what it’s worth, here’s my suggestion:
I see the future of bit.ly as both a search engine and a registrar. They can employ a standard search setup with organic results in the center and sponsored links on the side, except that ALL the results will be bit.ly links, a move that I believe is called “branding genius”. Start charging for the custom keywords – which will create a market where there wasn’t one before. Let brands, public figures, and anyone with a trademark own their bit.ly domain (similar to Twitter’s “verified accounts”). Allow users to put their custom-keyword-sponsored-link on the side of bit.ly search. The problem with that, of course, is that once a keyword is assigned it can’t really ever be changed.I would say a few years into the future the way to solve that problem is to spin-off a second keyword-only shortener that somehow allows for tradability.
Assumptions
This argument rests on several assumptions:
1. Bit.ly will dominate the URL shortener market
This is really a baseless assumption that rests only the fact that I like bit.ly the best, they are the default shortener for Twitter, and bit.ly has approx $2m in the bank.Money = power, no?
2.Ubiquity = Credibility
This is how I first got turned on to Yelp. Every restaurant I searched had a Yelp result that would come up first or second for whatever I was searching. It was seemingly everywhere, so it gained my trust. The fact that I’m seeing bit.ly’s everywhere now is building serious trust in the brand. And I’m sure that’s completely intentional.
3.The number of letter/number combinations for URL shorteners is essentially limitless, the number of keywords is fixed/scarce.
This is true for any URL shortener – there are only so many good keywords to squat on. When you have a free product, you need seemingly limitless resources, otherwise you’ll attract arbitrageurs (and haven’t I always wanted the opportunity to call myself an arbitrageur).
Conclusion
Sure, this entire master scheme rests on the continued growth of Twitter, the move to real-time search, and the continued dominance of bit.ly as the link shortener of choice. But so?
And I know I’m not the only one scheming (check out bit.ly/cocacola)…
