The definition of Being Competitive

Though it doesn't fit in the category of World Wild Web but I could not resist putting it here. Picture quality is not very great because I have taken it with my Razr.




Any Comments ??

Why Networking?

You must have noticed that Networking has become a new trend in this world wild web (that’s what I call it). It all started in 1995 with Classmates.com and then came Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo! 360° and many more. But the success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry including India. And Bigadda, Connexions, Brijj, Techtribe, is just a beginning.

But have you ever wondered, what is the reason the behind overnight growth of these websites and what is adding fuel to all referral models?

I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation”

Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula:
(average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population

With faster & cheaper means of communication this number (42) seems to be too small, especially for the online world. Forget about friends and family, even if you look at your phone book, outlook address book, Orkut friends this number will easily reach to 500.

If there are 32 million internet users in India and very pessimistically, even if we know 75 people around us, the maximum degree of separation for internet users will be just 4 for India and 5 for the entire world.

It isn’t too far when you'll see a sign on all the profiles on Linkedin.

BlogDay2007

What is Emotional Ergonomics?

Emotional ergonomics can be perceived in two ways

1) It is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximize the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. International Ergonomics Association has divided ergonomics broadly into three domains: Physical ergonomics Cognitive Ergonomics and Organizational Ergonomics.

2) It is also perceived as a field concerned with the emotional aspects of peoples’ interactions with products, services or systems.

Being from a Product Management background, I will try to elaborate more on the Product Design aspect of Emotional Ergonomics.

It is said that we respond to an object according to how we feel, not how we think. Often consumers perceive an object to be emotionally better even if your body or society doesn't. Thus it is recognized as the study of perceived comfort or convince. An example is slouching. This is common in everyone's sitting at some part in the day, we know it’s not good for posture yet it’s emotionally satisfying.

We as human before we think anything, we feel it, even if it is an online shopping site. Thus how a product engages with us emotionally is as important as how well it performs mechanically, otherwise all our choices would be based strictly on price and functional efficiency, rather than emotional resonance and visceral appeal.

Product functionality is crucial for product success, the appearance, use of materials; shape and form provide the most immediate product data for the user. But less tangible issues such as emotional bonding of users with products, cultural perceptions and social value systems, provide valuable insights for the product developer to help expand knowledge and understanding of the users' need beyond the functional requirements. Knowledge of emotional ergonomics is important if you want to build customer loyalty and charge premium prices.

Simple methodologies such as watching people use products, organizing focus group sessions, and focusing on the application rather than the delivery method, would ultimately produce objects more relevant to users’ needs.

Is the Alexa Ranking correct?

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach & pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

But is this the correct way to judge or rank a website.

Apart from the biased that it is based on the sample of Alexa tool bar users, it is browser specific and it can be easily manipulated, the formula itself is debatable.

We started off by quoting the number of “Hits” for determining traffic of a website. But eventually, we moved away from the term "hit" because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless. A hit was often counted not just for a page load, but for every element included on the page, as well. So if a site was less graphical and had equal usage would register half the hits.

And then came Reach and Pageviews.

As such, it would not be fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. But measuring reach (number of unique visitors) is important because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people but not just the same people over and over. It also gives an idea of popularity and growth of a website.

Pageviews became the primary metric not because they were more meaningful but because they helped in closing Ads deals since Ads were sold primarily on a CPM basis and its counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage.

Someone has brilliantly analyzed that the part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.

As the way we interact with the web is changing, and technology makes it easier for users to have access to multimedia content on a single web page, are page views still relevant? AJAX, RSS, Feeds, Widgets. Streaming etc. are making things worse.

So what's a better way for comparison? Good question.

As I have mentioned earlier also, it is not fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. The measurement of success also varies from website to website. So it could be registered users, files uploaded/downloaded, posts, hits, searches, revenue, and it may even be pageviews. But internal metrics aren't enough, since we want to compare ourselves to other players in the market. So we also need some apples-to-apples comparison.

If I had to pick one, in addition to unique visitors (reach), I'd say time spent would be much more useful than pageviews.
Time spent interacting with a site is a much better basis on which to compare sites' relative ability to capture attention/value than pageviews is. Especially when it comes to media like audio or video, an increasing percentage of the web consumption, time obviously means a great deal more than a pageview.

However, time is a bit harder to measure.

HTTP doesn't actually have a concept of time spent. So if you read this whole post and then click off to another site, my web server won't know whether you were here for five minutes or five seconds. I don’t even know whether you have been reading this post for last 10 mins or you are having a coffee with this page open in your browser.

Finally, there's a big argument against time as a measure:

People don't spend much time on Google search, because it gives them what they want so fast, and they go away (which is obviously good for them and for users). But the average time spent per visit will be very low.

And just as pageviews can be gamed, you can slow your users down unnecessarily (or accidentally because your servers are too slow) and increase time spent.
In short, there's no easy solution but there's a BIG opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors.

Can you suggest any?

Search: Finding or Understanding

Many of the researches have shown the increasing trend in the usage of web search. Since more and more people are using search to find various web addresses, the expenditure on SEO and SEM has also increased many folds. Even the Non IT Companies are trying hard to make them easily searchable on the popular search engines.

But have we ever thought that does the search engine understand what we want? The answer will be “No” in almost all the cases. Most of the search engines will just simply do a match of your query in their database and will give you all the documents matching your search criteria. But what differentiates a good search engine from an ordinary one, is the ordering of those results. Thus the main expertise (apart from having a big database) lies in how to show the most relevant results first to the user, out of thousands of matching results.

So all the googles in this world started focusing more and more on how can they improve the ordering of the results and came up with various complex algorithms. But still all they can do is “finding” and not “understanding”. For them, what you are looking for are merely “keywords” and nothing more than that. I think I will be able to explain it better by this example.

Let’s say you are in love with your fishes and you are looking for some healthy food for them. Someone suggested “just Google it”. So you wrote healthy food for fish on the magical text box and pressed go, expecting that it will tell the best possible food for your fishes. But you don’t know that “for” can be a stop word in Google and using its world famous page rank algorithm it will search for “healthy”, “food” and “fish”. So you will get nearly 3,230,000 results and but you will be disappointed to see that most of them are of “healthy fish food” and not “healthy food for fish”. And after going through all the URLs, I won’t be surprised if you end up eating all the fishes in you aquarium .

But it’s good to know that some people are working on various concepts like web2.0, web3.0, semantic web and so on, to improve the relevance of their search results. Some of them have started using the user himself to build intelligent algorithms. But still I don’t know when will they be able to “understand” what the user really expects of them?

Death of Emails

I still remember getting my first email id on Hotmail 10 years ago. It was a great feeling, having your own space on web. Suddenly the world was looking much smaller. I was able to stay in touch with my friends and relatives across the globe at virtually zero cost.

And then a time came when people started flaunting their email id on all possible domains and there were few lucky ones who could get their names@domain.com. But those who could not, ended up in name_yearofbirth/age@domain.com. I still feel pride owner of satyajeet.singh@gmail.com :-)

And then came Chat, Yahoo Groups, Social Networking Sites, Blogs and what not. Cheaper mobile prices and tariff have also played a major role in making emails less popular.

Emails are still trying to find a way out for its survival. Those who were planning to charge money for email space have started giving unlimited space for free. Because of stringent spam laws and increasing awareness, the revenue models of these companies are going for a ride. They are not able to create differentiation and the result of which, usability of emails is going down consistently. Chat, SMS, Scraps, Blogs are eating up the making share.

Late entrants like Zapak mail and AOL will face tough time in luring registrations. I don't even remember writing a personal email in last few months and what I receive is mostly chain mails, forwards, mailer, alerts etc. The only thing which makes me maintain my email id is that it has become a compulsion for registering on most websites.

Let’s wait to see how long they can survive without being killed by newer technology. I say 2-3 years.