That Old Power Law Magic

Just wanted to pick out one detail of the news that Google is buying Aardvark:

86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer.  50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.

You power users are your user base.  Treat them well.

Snowpocalypse '10

Dear New York,

6-10 inches of snowfall over the course of the day?  Please.  Get back to me when you have a day of 6-10 inches an hour.

Love,

The Sierra Nevada Mountains

What I've Been Up To

See updates on the latest features and changes at The Udorse Blog.

As you can see, I've been spending more time on development than on weblog graphic design.  I like to think of our aesthetic as 'charmingly scrappy'.

Unhappy Hipsters

This which adds snarky captions to glossy interior design photos, is the Stuff White People Like for the Twitter age.

Poker Face x4

Poker Face, and three covers of the song, played simultaneously. I think this is the radio edit they play in some of the lower circles of hell:

Via Dinosaur Comics

Udorse at New York Tech Meetup Tomorrow

Friends of the Company should come out to the New York Tech Meetup tomorrow at 7 in Haft Auditorium at FIT to watch us present on the big stage.

We'll also be making a rare after-NYTM-drinks appearance, so stop by and say hi.

Whither Location?

We spend a lot of time at Udorse thinking about location-based services - which direction we think they'll be heading in, and how best to eventually integrate location into Udorse. I was arguing the other day that we already have a pretty good model for how things will shake out between the various competing location-game clients like Foursquare, Gowalla, and BrightKite: instant messaging.


Early on, there were competing IM clients with closed social graphs, so if you used icq and I used AIM, we couldn't talk to each other, and it made sense to talk about competition between IM networks. But the market matured, and those distinctions began to fall away as people wrote multiple-network IM clients. Today the chat client that ships with my computer can find and talk to all my friends on any service over three protocalls. I sign in and have three ways to send Jon an IM.

That interoperability is a broader trend across the industry - I can already update my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn statuses all in one place, and applications can import my social graph from all three.

Location is going the same way, only faster. Already Foursquare has an API that lets developers build new ways to check in, Gowalla is working on one, BrightKite has one in beta, and Loopt has one too. And the raw location data is based on an extremely robust open system. It's only a matter of time, and likely not very much time, until someone makes a cross-service superclient, that will check you in on every location-based service at once, and pick up rewards on all of them.

When that happens, who gets the revenue in location? The check-in services have to duke it out on the biz dev front to offer the most compelling rewards for users. That's a nasty market - it's difficult to scale, innovations are easy to replicate, and there's practically no barriers to entry. The checkin client apps are just a big bundle of API calls - solo developers can throw those together, bidding the app store prices down to nothing. And that's assuming the big services don't just build in cross-service integration themselves. The real margins belong to whoever can find the magic sauce for monetizing all this location information - figuring out what is the most valuable content to push to a user given their location and checkin history. The future could always be different, but we certainly know who's won all these fights before.

Udorse Open Beta

After much toil, our new version is live at Udorse.com. We've made the tagging interface much more free-flowing, added a bunch of new ways for users to add pictures (like from Flikr, MySpace, via direct upload, or snapped with your webcam), and rolled out a new rewards system that will be a lot more fun than trying to scrape affiliate network pennies.