TasteKid’s Journey

A couple of days ago, an article featuring TasteKid made it up to Digg’s main page. This triggered an “emergency landing” on Delicious’s main page, too. Around the same time, this happen. Then this. Then, others followed.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

About a week ago I’ve started experimenting with Google AdSense and the Amazon Affiliate program. Today the experiment ends, and I have decided to turn off, at least for now, both programs.

TasteKid is an unusual website from Google’s point of view. The AdSense targeting algorithms focus on analyzing the content of the page on which the ads are delivered, but TasteKid’s content is just a list of seemingly random internal links (the suggested items). Despite this, Google has managed to provide related ads in some cases (e.g.: concert tickets for one of the suggested bands), but, unfortunately, many times it fails to come up with relevant ads. This is hardly Google’s fault, as it only tries to match TasteKid’s content with items from its pool of ads, and not so many advertisers set as keywords for their ads band names or movie titles.

The consequence of non-relevant ads being displayed is a very low click through rate, that not only reflects negatively on AdSense earning, but also suggests that users are not interested in these ads. This furthermore has a negative impact on user experience, like any other element on a web page that is displayed despite the fact the user is not interested in it. In conclusion, I have decided that, at least for now, TasteKid is better off AdSense.

As for the Amazon Affiliate program, things are a little bit different. The ads were presented within the tooltip (the one that appears for each resource) and the advertised product was a direct result of the parameters sent to Amazon (i.e. band name or movie title). This meant that, for known resources (and the resources for which the ads triggered were quite popular, because I was displaying them only for resources on which Emmy has a Wikipedia description), the relevancy of the advertised product was pretty good. Even so, few users seemed interested in following these ads. The reason for this is that it’s quite unlikely for somebody to rush and actually buy through Amazon a whole album of a band that they’ve just discovered – they would probably first try to learn more about the band, or listen to more songs performed by that particular band that may be freely available on the web. As for movies, I think this option is actually quite useful, but, despite this, the overall usefulness of this whole Amazon Affiliate program isn’t very clear to me just yet. I have decided to stop this program together with Google AdSense for now.

Nevertheless, this was an interesting experience for me, that I will probably use in the future, when I will be more preoccupied on monetizing TasteKid’s traffic while maintaining a pleasant user experience.

Getting Real is one of the best resources out there for all the people participating in designing, implementing, launching, marketing and pretty much everything related to a new web-based product or service.

The book (which is free to read online and is divided in small, easy to grasp chapters) dates back to 2006, but it is probably more actual now than ever. To give just one quote:

“The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back — and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

These days it doesn’t take much to get rolling. Hardware is cheap and plenty of great infrastructure software is open source and free. And passion doesn’t come with a price tag.”

37signals has become a cult company, and, although some may consider they’ve broken their own rules when they took external funding, many of their advices and philosophies are valuable pieces of Internet business wisdom.

Just a few days ago, YouTube announced it begun streaming full-length TV shows (“Start Trek”, for example) in partnership with CBS. This move is essentially a struggle to increase the monetization performances of the huge traffic YouTube is receiving (the shows are featuring ads). But in the same time, it can also be seen as a milestone towards the end of standard TV broadcasting as we know it today.

Of course, online streaming and Internet TV stations are available for many years, but, up until now, there has been little access to free, legal, well-known TV shows. The limited success of online TV is largely caused by the lack of availability of these shows that people are familiar with, in a known environment. This has changed now, and, as more and more shows (and, why not, movies?) will be easily available on the web, I ask myself if classic television (digital or not) has a real future.

During a conversation with Catalin Francu a couple of years ago, he told me about the way he saw the future of computer user experiences: anybody should be able to log on any machine and have instant access to their own personal working environment. This sounded a little bit far fetched back then, given the fact that this environment is dependent on all the files, the applications and their settings that a person is using.

This conversation came back to me while reading this Bloomberg article about Google’s e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing programs, slowly but steadily biting from Microsoft Office’s market share. This isn’t just a switch from one product to another, it is a much more profound change that is happening: while Microsoft Office is locally installed and is saving files on a local hard drive, Google’s applications are web-based and are storing files on remote machines. This change has a much greater impact on the way we perceive the use of computers than the much debated approaching end of the so-called Web 2.0. era.

I don’t want to be misjudged for considering that computer work reduces to creating and handling Office-like documents, but Office is probably the primary offline suite the non-tech employees are using worldwide.

Getting people used with a new set of applications is no easy task, let alone making them comfortable with saving all their work on remote locations. But it becomes more and more obvious to me that this is, indeed, the future.

While a lot of specialized applications will still be presented in the form of software products that are installed on a particular machine, more and more people will make the transition from logging on their operating systems’ accounts to logging on their web accounts, every time another working day begins.

I have decided to play around with Google AdSense and the Amazon affiliate program. While TasteKid is still too young to gather relevant revenues by using these programs, I think that a little experimentation can prove a valuable experience.

I have placed the Google AdSense text advertisements (that I hope will become more relevant in the next hours) beneath TasteKid’s answers, in a way that I hope interferes the least with a pleasurable user experience. Also, the ads only show when the user searches for something that TasteKid knows about, and is able to provide quality suggestions (they don’t show up on the main page or on pages with few or no recommendations).

The Amazon affiliate program allowed me to place relevant Amazon products (music albums, movie DVDs) inside the tooltip that appears and provides additional information when the user hovers the “?” icon near each resource. The products appear only for bands and movies that have a description, thus allowing the user to pursue such a product only after informing on TasteKid about that particular artist or movie.

If you feel that these new elements affect the quality of your experience with TasteKid, please let me know.

A recent mass-banning action performed by Digg led Mashable to perform an interesting analysis on the evolution of the Digg community. It all started just a few years ago as a democratic environment in which the news were submitted by users and promoted towards the main page by user votes, or diggs.

Nowadays, Digg is struggling to redistribute the editorial power from a handful of so-called “top users” that have managed to gain control on most of Digg’s voting process, back to the majority of its users.

This is a very interesting human behavior case study, the same way StumbleUpon is. We can easily draw a parallel between these two virtual communities and the real world we live in. They all have started as a nice dream of democratic systems in which the power “belongs to the people”, but the power seems to either inevitably concentrate in the hands of a few or loose coherency. Oh well, I guess it’s just human nature, or, depending on how you want to see it, maybe it’s just the natural thing to happen.

I have just submitted my idea to Project 10¹⁰⁰, and I encourage you to do the same with your ideas. Project 10¹⁰⁰ “is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible”, initiated by Google, who is committing $10 million to implement the top five ideas. What do you get if your idea is chosen? Well, as Google puts it, “you get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people” :)

Here is my idea exactly the way I’ve submitted it. I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful, and I am sure something similar will sooner or later emerge. Feel free to use this idea in any constructive way that you may think of.

Your idea’s name (maximum 50 characters)

Online Hospital and Medical Encyclopedia

What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)

Bringing together doctors and patients in an online environment can provide assistance in situations when classic health care is not available.

Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)

The basic functionality of this project is similar to Q&A platforms like Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers, only oriented towards medical questions. Each question, if qualified as relevant (isn’t a hoax, hasn’t been asked before) and properly categorized within a medical specialty, is answered by a professional from the community. The question then becomes a conversation. Additional details and medical test results can be requested by the doctor. Each conversation is available in the public archive, thus the project will become a free online medical encyclopedia of real case studies, written in plain language. This way, many people will find their questions already answered within the system, and both students and practicing doctors can easily access valuable reference resources. Additional features can be implemented, like real-time conversations for more urgent cases.

A hierarchical system with different authority members and supervisors within the community is maintaining the proper quality of the answers (similar to Wikipedia), while the initial triage can be performed by the newer members (maybe students), who can also answer the more simple questions. For each answer, additional notes can be made by other members of the community, while people outside the community can post comments (for example, if they have experienced a similar problem).

The active members are compensated for their effort proportionally with the quantity and quality of their answers, but they are also gaining authority within the community and reputation in real life.

More features can be developed, like regional support, a communication platform for community members, an advanced information center and an interactive diagnosis tool.

What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)

Whether it is unavailability of medical services, inability to move, lack of financial resources, improper health insurance, lack of time, timidity, pride, iatrophobia or fear, there are many reasons a lot of people can’t or won’t go to the doctor when they have a medical problem. Their problem can be health or life threatening, and in many cases they end up to the doctor when it is too late. Even though doctor visits are irreplaceable, an (early) online evaluation and assistance brought by specialists can prove paramount and sometimes make the difference between life and death.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)

The people who would benefit the most are the ones who, for whatever reasons, aren’t able to visit a doctor, are in need of medical evaluation and guidance and do have access to the Internet. Many of them live in developing countries (the Internet has spread much faster than proper health care units and systems), but there are a lot of people living in advanced countries that share the same inability. All these people can benefit by having a professional evaluating their condition and giving them proper advice, depending on the situation.

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)

1. Bringing together a community of doctors (and organizations) willing to participate in this program.
2. Designing and building a web application that best suits the project’s needs.
3. Making the service available to people all over the world.

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)

The desired outcome is to develop a system through which as many people as possible can receive free medical evaluation and guidance in an online environment. This can be achieved either by having conversations with medical professionals or by consulting the growing archive of problems that have been already addressed. A rating system can be implemented in order to determine the degree of usefulness and relevance of each resource, but in the end, it’s hard to determine the value of such an outcome. A good measure would be the number of potential health threatening problems totally or partially solved using the system, a value that can be estimated given the number of questions and answers, user ratings and traffic statistics.

Today, TasteKid won third prize at Webstock Awards 2008, a Romanian Web 2.0 contest, within the “Utility” category. Thank you Cristian Manafu for suggesting me to participate in this contest. It was a pleasent experience :)