Fun With Flock’s Media Bar
August 27, 2007
I have to admit that even after over a year working at Flock I’m still addicted to the media bar. Our 0.9 version adds a bunch of new functionality but my favorite is being able to save Flickr and YouTube search queries and getting notified when their are updates. Just type in some search terms in the Media bar search I’ve nostalgically starred queries for places I’ve lived in (Allston, MA and Vestal, NY) as well as where I live now.
My two favorite queries at the moment that I’ve got starred are “Ultimate Frisbee” (A sport I played at a fairly competitive level when I live in Boston. At least I thought I was good until I attending an open practice with DOG) on Flickr and “Guitar Instructions” on YouTube (An instrument I’m completely talentless on).
The “Ultimate Frisbee” query has yielded fantastic images almost every day. An awesome layout here:
Game face on here:
Ultimate in India!
If I was only 20 years younger and 20lbs lighter.
There are also a lot of folks willing to share their guitar knowledge on Youtube which is awesome. There is no shortage of how to videos for “Stairway to Heaven”, :-).
Enjoy!
Blogged with Flock
Psychology of New Product Introduction
December 6, 2006
As we continue to think of ways to innovate Flock I reminisce over an email I sent out after my first couple of weeks at the company concerning the Psychology of New Product Introduction. One of the things we biffed in 0.7 was changing how bookmarks work resulting in an end user experience that was different than what other browser provided (specifically the folder concept was removed).
The economic theories this is based on is one of my favorite rumination subjects. Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler blew the doors off conventional economics by not assuming irrational behavior and applying Psychological biases
Hi folks,
There is a reasonably relevant article in this month’s (July ‘06) Harvard Business
Review (I think there is a copy in the lounge area) on the psychology
of New Product Adoption. It basically touches on work done by two
psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky, around why individuals deviate
from rational economic behavior (in reality the price of product is
NEVER exactly where supply and demand intersect).
The article’s thesis is that it is not enough for a new product to
simply be better. People will not necessarily make a rational decision
about a better product because of an irrational behavior concerning
gains and losses where losses greatly outweigh gains. The common
example is that most people will not take the bet of 50% of winning a
$100 and 50% of losing $100. This is known as “Loss Aversion” (and in
today’s pop culture will probably eventually be called “Deal, or No
Deal”).
People have a tendency to look upon adoption of a new product in terms
of gains and losses. Feature improvements are gains and new
shortcomings are losses.
This leads to a couple of biases:
-
Endowment effect. The value of products already possessed
greatly outweigh the ones that aren’t. Another psychologist, Thaler,
sums this up by saying “consumers value what they own, but may have to
give up, much more than they value what they don’t own but could
obtain”. A similar experience is that once you own something, you
don’t want to give it up. Some real world examples
- ebay plays to this effect. If you’re currently the winning
bid for an item that is still open your mind has already wired itself
thinking that it is the owner. If someone bids higher it is hard to
resist not raising your own bid
- “Try before you buy”. This one is awesome. I put some kid
through college because a rug salesman convinced me that I could lay
down some Persian rugs in my house for a week before I decide to buy
them. I bought them.
- Status Quo Bias. People just have a tendency to stick with what they
have even when a better alternative exists.
In typical HBR fashion they boil down a framework into a 2×2 matrix.
low behavior change, low product change => Easy Sell (tweaking angle
of toothbrush).
high behavior change, low product change => Failure (Dvorak keyboard
for example).
high behavior change, high product change => Long Haul. (Cell
Phone, probably satellite radio eventually)
low behavior change, high product change => Hit (google)
Anyways, these are things to keep in mind as we continue to innovate
the flock browser and find ways to market it.
Blogged with Flock
ODBC, Bugzilla and when can we ship the damn thing
November 30, 2006
One of the metrics I like to use to measure the state of a project, particularly when in the QA phase, is the bug find vs bug fix rate. In my experience the curve is always a bell curve (i.e. the bug find rate ramps up to a peak and then ramps back down at about the same rate). If your bug find rate is still climbing it’s not suddenly going to stop unless the QA team goes on a vacation. At Flock, the unit of time is daily (longer projects may want to use weekly). This does lead to some anomolies but in general you’ll still get the same bell curve.
At a couple of companies now I’ve setup excel to read directly from the Bugzilla database to get the pretty graphs (Never could figure out how to do time charts in Bugzilla). First thing I do is create a read only account for the bugs database (no, that isn’t the actual user name I use).
mysql> grant select on bugs.* to ‘abcd’@'%’ identified by ‘efgh’;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)mysql> grant select on bugs.* to abcd identified by ‘efgh’;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
Daryl Houston, anunderstated SQL master (I suck at anything more complicated than anUPDATE statement) with a convenient, at least for me, case ofoccasional insomnia gave me the following bugzilla queries (I editedthem a little bit to let excel do some of the work).
To find bugs that have been fixed on a certain day I use the following query. The hard part is getting the fix date out of the activity table.
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(bug_when, ‘%m/%d/%Y’) fixed, COUNT(*)
FROM bugs b, bugs_activity a
WHERE b.bug_id = a.bug_id AND a.added = ‘FIXED’ AND b.target_milestone = ‘Danphe RC 1′
GROUP BY fixed ORDER BY a.bug_when
The found bugs, i.e. bugs created, has an easier query:
select DATE_FORMAT(b.creation_ts, ‘%m/%d/%Y’) created, COUNT(*)
FROM bugs b
WHERE b.target_milestone = ‘Danphe RC 1′
GROUP BY created ORDER BY b.creation_ts)
Once I have this data I create two graphs. One that shows cumulative bug found and bug fix data. At the end of the project, the two lines should meet. The other graph, as I mentioned about ultimately turns out to be two bell curves of bugs found slightly lagged (hopefully) by number of bugs fixed. At the end of the current project I’m working on at Flock I’ll post some examples.
Blogged with Flock
How NOT to blog a de-feature announcement
November 25, 2006
Last week I got to relearn the valuable lesson of the importance of giving context to a decision that can affect how people work. Alot of Flock users had been posting that they were having issues using Flock with Shadow’s favorites sharing service. At one point their site was down for several days and we had heard rumours that they were de-emphasizing the service. After several attempts at contacting Shadows at all levels we basically got radio silence.
In the interest of our users we wanted to get the message out that we could not support a service that was this unreliable. After discussing with Geoffrey on what to say, to be fair to Shadows we decided not to comment on the site’s reliability, or lack there of, before we had a chance to talk to them but we also wanted to ge the message out to the community. Late in the evening I posted a terse entry to Flock’s general blog …and got creamed over the next couple of days.
Naturally, the day after I made the post Geoffrey got a call from the Pluck Corporation that owns Shadows with the information we expected to be true, that they have decided to de-emphasize Shadows. That evening Geoffrey was able formally announce what we had suspected, but with every good intention, decided not to mention in the initial announcement that I had made.
Here are the take aways and silver linings from this little experience:
1. Try to provide as much information as possible when ever possible. If that can’t be done, be prepared for the backlash.
2. While myself coming off as dictorial and uncaring towards the Flock community (100% untrue I assure you), I gave Geoffrey the opportunity to save the day. Maybe he’ll stop throwing the 10 pound medicine ball at me in the office while shouting “Think Fast!” — OK. He doesn’t do that but now that I’ve mentioned it….
3. I even got mentioned in TechCrunch.
Blogged with Flock
