Foreward

A few months ago I tried to estimate the worth of my Facebook account. The idea was, to see how much money will I need to be offered to delete my Facebook profile and create a new one.

• I will have to reconnect with friends (An hour of work – 30$)
• Lose my status updates and comments (not really important – 10$)
• Retag all my photos taken by other people (big problem – 100$)
• Lose my standings in various games (don’t really care – 0$)

Not that much, ~140$ – The price of many software packages. That is all that would take for me to create a new facebook user or get the (presumably) same functionality somewhere else.

So if you are Facebook, and you plan to become THE social identity for ever and ever (and one day finally roll out a full P2P payment system,  put PayPal out of its misery, allow real micro-payments, p2p loans, slowly become the defacto bank for all our online transactions and finally get a revenue model that will jump you from a 10B$ to a 300B$ company). What would you do ?

The logical thing, you increase the 140$ to 1,400$.

So you introduce.. *drum roll*.. Facebook Connect !

A nifty, useful and harmless (?) feature. No more signup forms, no more poor conversion. An answer to both users and webmasters alike. I have been clicking away at the little blue button non stop, happily waving my password managers goodbye.

So wait.. about the leg

You know how you go out drinking all night and wake up the next morning feeling violated and with your leg hand-cuffed to the radiator ?

[..long story censored..]

I decided to re-evaluate my “cost to leave Facebook” price. And a new item poped up on the list:

• Cost of losing all the information I have added on sites where I have nothing but Facebook connect – 500$ and rising rapidly.

On many sites, once you register with facebook connect, there is no way back. (Poor design? Yes! Lazy? Yes! Fact of life ? Yes!).

With every day that passes, my ties to Facebook rise across multiple sites in parallel. But with the UX failures of OpenID and no real alternative in sight.. I am doomed.

Granted it is not dire yet, not yet a time for leg chewing.. but a good time to ask, “Does anyone have the key ?”.. The radiator is getting hotter…

קופונים במבצע קבוצתי

Many many years ago, a good friend of mine told me a story.
A great story, about how his cousin got a great job out of the blue:

“He was walking down the street, see, and he saw these guys, putting up these huge advertizement posters”.

Me: “Right, right.. ”

“Now, at the time he was looking for a job. So he steps up to one of them and goes ‘Say man, are you looking for workers ?’”

Me: “Yeah, yeah.. ”

“And you know what ?”

/me fainting surprise

“The guy goes ‘Well.. yea, sure. Why not’.  So he gets this great job. 6 hours a day, lots of pay and great old posters to take home”

(Now remember, we were young, that was one great gig !)

“He always has been such a lucky bastard. Things always falling on him out of the sky. Stuff like this, never happes to me !”

Me: “So wait.. you are also looking for a job, no ?”

“Yeah”

Me: “So if it was you walking down the street that day, would you have asked those guys if they were looking for workers ?”

“Nah, I know that if it was me, they would of never had a job like that open”

Me: “I see..  He is a lucky guy”

* Based on real events.

One of us learned an important lesson.

One of us wrote a blog post about it years later.

And yes, his cousin continues to this day, to be ‘very lucky’.

Reaching my 100th Twitter post

And I have decided to take a moment to examine the tool, that only months before, I considered an obvious waste of time.

As an entrepreneurial working from home, I find that my posts (and approach) to Twitter constantly shift between two main goals.

1. Venting. When things go wrong, this is a great medium to vent your frustration.
2. Community building. Linking with a other  people in the business, to forge connections and get information.

Sadly, they do not interlock well. Trying to push professional and interesting content for (2) is a measured and careful step. But, this has already proved to work. As a number of contacts on Twitter have helped me greatly.

Then again, a few days ago: google failing to notify me before a conference call with a senior partner of a local law firm. I admit, I was a bit.. annoyed.  Sadly, there was no co-worker to turn to for some google bashing. It sure didn’t merit a phone call or a “this is so depressing” beer out with friends.
And there came Twitter.

What should I do ?

A small research sugar to finish

“A friend of mine” used the Twitter APIs to create an account which automatically scanned twitter users. It would find users (supposedly) most promising to read his tweets:

• 50+ Twit count (user is active)
• 100- Following (might actually read twits)
• 50- Followers (typical statistic for real users)

It would then follow these accounts. Every day accounts that didn’t re-follow would be deleted. Within a few days the account had ~300 followers.

The experiment

As the next step he published a post with a bit.ly link.
At the same time, the same link was posted on his normal account, with ~30 followers.

Results

13 people have clicked the post from the “real account” (out of ~30)
The fake account of ~300 ?   ZERO. Yes, zero clicks.

My conclusion ?

A large twitter base means nothing. This is doubly true if you automatically follow anyone who follows you.
But it does make you feel and appear more important.
Which brings me back to my first question, what is the best way to use Twitter ? For real or for fun..

I am mad again

More and more websites are coming out these days, trying to solve an age old hiring problem: “How to screen applicants”.

The latest hit on my radar was StackOverflow. A very successful site to allow programmer to ask and answer questions from each other. I have used the site a few times, both to ask and to answer, and the results were amazing. Smart and knowledgeable people, lent me their time and gave me full and accurate answers to my not-so-simple questions.

Fuelling these exchange of ideas is a rather ingenious ranking system. Users may upvote your question and your answers, raising your overall rank on the site. There are different badges being given for reaching arbitary goals (Answering X questions, Logging in for Y days in a row, etc). And while knowing its silly, its hard to resist increasing your rep.

Now comes the money

The owners of the site, in an attempt to capitalize on the user-base, created a spin-off. A hiring site. Here you can post your resume and open positions. The difference from other sites is that applicants can link their StackOverflow profile to their resume. This, in theory, gives an immediate mark to the applicant’s quality (high rank). Which should tell the hirer, that this applicant is both highly professional and respected.

The BUT

A bit of exploring will show an obvious picture: The very basic and common questions like “What is better, C or C++ ?” are always a hub of interest, causing massive upvotes to the posters of both question and answers. The answers obviously, do not solve the age old problems. They simply quote or reference existing debates on the subject.

On the other hand, complex questions and questions that require intimate technical knowlege, are much less relevant to most people. Only few read (and upvote) them and even less are able to provide a good answer.

So we end up with two types of users:

• Good writers and Wiki/Google users. They answer all the popular questions, while requiring almost no technical skill. – High rank
• Excellent engineers: Answer the hard, complex and knowledge requiring questions. - Low rank

See the problem ?

So we are back at the starting line

Until the ranking system is changed, to perhaps give more credit on accepted answers, instead of popular answers. The ranking system appears to be completely useless to hirers. As the information it provides, gives them almost no data of the applicant’s real aptitude (and worse yet, is confusing and inaccurate).

Back to the old: “10 years of Java experience” – What does that tell you about the applicant’s abilities ?