Simplicity Rules

Particle Tree makes a good conclusion in their piece about The 1% Rule, but in the process makes a dangerous inference:

This figure may be frightening to web businesses that rely solely on user generated content or developer interaction. They’re essentially competing for a fraction of the 1% of traffic out there that’s willing to actively contribute anything to any cause.

The actual 1% rule says that if your site has user-created content, only one out of 100 of your users will participate by creating the content. But the total number of people in the world who will contribute to any site is much higher than 1%.

This distinction is important. To chase after some magical group of people and try to get them to join your site is futile. If you’re a social network, follow the rules. No matter what, do good stuff.

Then, identify the one percent of your users who contribute, and be really nice to them.

Thanks to Elliot for pointing me to this article.

There are few people who have benefitted more from online video than David Hasselhoff. For such a mainstream guy, he’s still somehow tailor-made for The Long Tail.

But this is really more a note about a new Google video feature than an ode to a TV star. Move over YouTube, because The Goog lets you link directly to any second in a video without having to download the whole dang thing. Paul Kedrosky has a much better example using a long Charlie Rose interview (redundant!), but I thought I’d stick to David Hasselhoff.

My top three moments in David Hasslehoff’s cover of “Hooked on a Feelin’”

1. Dressed as a polar bear, he catches a fish, puts it in his mouth, and runs away from several versions of himself.
2. He spins a video cube on his finger, Globetrotters-style.
3. Close-up celebratory fist, as if to say, “Yes! I am this good”.

Regardless of whether Hasselhoff is that good, this new Google Video feature is pretty cool. The only thing that would make it better is if it had voice commands: “Kit, take me to the polar bear scene.”

If you want lots of people to buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or just visit your blog, get rid of anything in their way. Unfortunately, I think a lot of accidental obstructions remain in processes because its creators and implementers fail to critically consider each barrier.

Example of the moment: Yahoo! Publisher Network requires tax and payment information before they’ll let you have ad code to put on your site. For me, this meant closing the window. I was ready to publish some of their ads, giving them money and their advertisers traffic.

By contrast, Google’s AdSense product only requires you to put in tax and payment information when they’re ready to pay you. And what a motivator I imagine that is, knowing they’re ready to send you a check. And what’s the worst that can happen if a publisher never fills out the tax and payment information? Google keeps the money.

Since Yahoo! is working on creating a higher-quality network, it is possible that this barrier is intentional. Could it be that by requiring tax information, Yahoo! gets more dedicated publishers? Maybe.

If that is the case, at least the obstacle has been considered and purposely left in place. At least they critically considered the barrier.

Feel free to share your own examples–I don’t require you to register to leave a comment.

Update: Yes, I realize YPN is a beta program. Consider this feedback.

Markus Frind, who runs a successful dating site, is usually pretty contrarian. So, it’s no surprise to see he says most social networks will fail.

I’m not sure I agree with all his data, but I do agree with his sentiment, with a qualifier. If “social network” is defined as a site that exists purely as a collection of friends and contacts. Think MySpace and Friendster, a place where there is nothing to do beyond socialize. Places that break my first rule of social Web sites will have a hard time sticking around.

The market for social sites that do something beyond connect people is virtually unlimited. Give me a reason to go to your site and then let me share the experience with others. We may be seeing the end of social networks, but it’s just the beginning of social Web sites.

Webvisions has come and gone. There were plenty of organization things that could have made the conference better, but I’ll save it for the survey. Overall, I think it was pretty good. One way to tell is that I missed an awesome session by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the Wordpress blogging platform. How did I miss it? I was in another awesome session.

Luckily, Micki Krimmel took some good notes. The session was titled, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users,” but a friend of mine who attended said it wasn’t really about scaling, but making a product for a user. Matt has twelve rules on making a Web product and Micki wrote them all down.

Here are my three favorites:

• Get out 1.0 as fast as humanly possible. This goes hand-in-hand with bootstrapping. Get something done, make it public, and tweak from there.
• Measure your success - you have to have metrics. Everything that is watched improves.
• Know what to do if you are successful — dog chasing a car doesn’t know what to do if he catches it.

I really like Portland coffee shops, with their independent style and community feel. And, of course, I like the Web done right. But both are often done wrong and it’s a shame since it takes so little to do it right.

Noah Kagan says a shop in San Fran does so many things right. Similarly, my old office had a good little spot I called Mike’s, because the owner was that friendly. What’s interesting to me is the things that make a coffee shop successful (after location, perhaps) are really easy. All you have to do is remember that your customers are people.

This approach works on the Web, too. The visitors are people. To create a place where visitors return, you need to give a positive experience. And it probably only takes a little more effort.

It’s a big week in Portland for Web folk. We’ll be exploring the future of the Web at Webvisions, a two-day conference featuring some Web leaders. To kick that off, the Portland Web Innovators will be having a social get-together at The Rose and Raindrop. Here’s the Upcoming.org details.

Out of towners welcome. As Ryan suggested, if you’re coming to Webvisions from out of town, please also consider joining us Wednesday at 7 p.m.

A few from my feed reader, consider yourself personally invited: Mike Davidson, Matt Haughey, Derek Powazek, Jonathan Snook.

The number 6 bus runs every fifteen minutes from right in front of the convention center. I’ll be there at 6:30 and I’ll bring some extra transit tickets. Free ride! (If you catch the #6 alone, get off at SE Oak and walk one block south and another block east).

Looking forward to seeing the PDX Web Innovators, as well as the out-of-town Web Innovators.

Also, an aside/plug for my guide to Portland wireless Internet. Here are the closest hotspots to the convention center.

What an awful term, mothballed. By definition, it means that something is just being put away for a short while. But in reality, it usually means something is dead.

Well, I received a similar email that Valleywag references. It looks like last week’s sale of Wired News was the final straw.

Jeff Veen wrote a nice look back at HotWired, which has met a pretty slow death under Lycos’ watch. And, Jeff also wrote a goodbye to Webmonkey two years ago, the first time it died.

Webmonkey was a fun site to learn from and a great place to write for. I’ll miss it from both perspectives.

There’s a funny Captcha Mashup coming out of MashCamp (via Monkey Bites). CAPTCHA are those annoying, warped images of words that sites like Ticketmaster make you replicate to prove you’re a human. Well, this one has you choose the three “hot” people out of nine.

I was completely convinced that it worked great, as I correctly picked the three (with a greater than 99% chance of being wrong by simply guessing) hot ones each time. Then I switched to guys. I’m one of those people that thinks he can tell if another man is hot. It turns out that I was wrong. For the life of me, I can’t get it right.

Try it out for yourself.

Greg Linden tells it like it is:

Today, the greatest pool of user-generated content ever created, the World Wide Web, is full of crap and spam. Search engines or other applications that seeks to get value from the Web needs to be built with filtering in mind. The Web is a cesspool, but sufficiently powerful tools can pluck gems from the sea of goo.

Linden’s solution is personalization, which he thinks will solve the problem of information overload. His company, Findory, does this by tracking clicks and helping determine what you’re actually interested in. His background is pretty good, having worked at Amazon in the early years.

Bonus Linden link: Combating Web spam with personalization. Imagine how different the Web would be if everybody had different search results.