Sexy Widget

The Dirty and Sneaky "My Questions" App from Slide

I was just browsing my own Facebook profile to dig up the 419 scam link for my previous post, that somebody had shared with me on my Super Wall.

I came across the My Questions App module (built by Slide), which I had added a while back in order to read a friend's question, and found it displaying the following:

Lawrence Asks: Which Part of Your Body Do You Love to Show Off?

I didn't ask this question, and I feel kind of stupid that it's been sitting on my profile for weeks.

Is this any better than hacking into my email account and sending out spam from me?

Come on Slide, you guys are supposed to be a legit company.  This sort of stuff should be below you. 

I've deleted the My Questions App.

Interesting Turn of Events at HotorNot

In June, James Hong wrote what I found to be a very compelling post about his efforts to reinvent the venerable picture rating / dating site HotOrNot.com.  One of the pillars of the reinvention of the company was to transition from a subscription model to a free, advertising supported model.  Here's an excerpt:

But what happens when an advertising model DOES provide an adequate amount of revenue, even if just for 2 or 3 people? That means it is now possible to offer the same scale of services and still be profitable, entirely on an ad model… and from the customer’s standpoint, if they can do something for free versus the same thing for charge, which do you think s/he is going to pick? This has enabled free sites like Myspace, Facebook, and PlentyofFish.com to pop up, and it is a real long-term threat to most subscription sites.

There is no doubt in my mind that HOTorNOT’s traffic started to drop around 2004 due to free alternatives, primarily social networking sites. It’s not that these services made HOTorNOT worthless to users, it’s just that they had alternatives occupying their time.

Yesterday, James posted that they were going back to a subscription model, primarily due to sophisticated scammers that were using IMs gleaned off of HotorNot for scams:

The level of sophistication of some of these outfits is astounding. It is not a few amateurs here and there doing it as individuals, they are organized outfits that operate like call centers. We found that there were people whose job it is specifically to get IM addresses out of people, at which point the target is passed along (like a call center escalation) to someone who speaks better english to work on chatting the person up and eventually extracting money. In a nutshell, they train specialists on each step of the scam! Because these are actual human beings doing it, they can pretty much get around automated detection systems, and they usually do the dirty work once they are off our system and on IM (where we can't model them anymore).

Personally, I'm surprised to see them jump right back to the paid model after just three months,  as opposed to experimenting  with things like banning IP addresses from certain countries (419 anybody?).

My two cents for what it's worth: I wouldn't be surprised if building Facebook Apps is becoming the true passion of HotorNot.  Under this scenario, the cash cow that is a paid HotOrNot could be used to fund the further development of this model.  Just speculation.   

LinkedIn Adding Photos Tomorrow

Here's the piece on CNN.

It's about time, right?  It has nothing to do with vanity or about the professionalism of the site - it's about how seeing a face can help you remember who the heck the person is.

I'm sitting next to the author of "Widgets Suck"

So I work a lot out of a sort of obscure coffee shop, that's not too far from the Web 2.0 hell that is Ritual Roasters, but is still sort of under the radar.  I won't share the name of the place.

Well, Leah Culver, founder of Pownce, and the author of the somewhat infamous Widgets Suck post is sitting next me as I write this, talking through some Pownce stuff.

I'm tempted to ask her if she's come around with widgets at all, but I think I'm going to pass.

If you spend any time working out of a San Francisco coffee shop, you never know who might be sitting next to you.

Interesting Phenomenon with Squidoo

An interesting thing that I've noticed recently via site submissions to RateItAll's various directories is an increase in folks submitting Squidoo lenses.

So Squidoo users are doing linkdev for Squidoo.

While there are pluses and minuses associated with building a service that appeals to the SEO crowd, the fact that your users are out seeking links for your site would definitely fall into the "plus" side.

Blog Directory Learnings

Here are some things that I've learned from administering a fairly large blog directory:

• Just about every Blogger blog submitted is spam
• Just about every TypePad or Wordpress blog submitted is real
• There are far more spam blogs than real blogs
• High paying verticals like debt and diets are completely overrun with spam
• A lot of people misallocate their time towards promoting their blog, as opposed to writing it
• Widgets add legitimacy - or at least create the illusion of legitimacy.  Very few spam blogs have widgets!

Widgetbox Facebook Tool

Widgetbox has launched a “roll your own” Facebook App builder.

I took it for a spin, and it’s cool.

Basically, it’s an easy way for non-developers to push their Widgetbox hosted widgets to Facebook as real Facebook Apps, with full access to the viral distribution enabled by Facebook’s social networks.

So far, this should be sounding pretty similar to what Clearspring recently announced, as well as the tool offered by Ning.

But here’s where Widgetbox is just a little bit easier.  Because Widgetbox had already built this cool Blidget tool which converts RSS feeds to Widgetbox hosted, Flash Widgets, they provide that much more outreach to non-developers.

So, using Widgetbox’s Blidget functionality, plus Widgetbox’s roll your own Facebook tool, I can push any RSS feed live into the Facebook distribution machine.  For developers, this won’t be a big deal.  For people like me, it’s a big deal.

Ning is also pretty friendly to non developers, but the last time I checked, you could only push photos, video, or music out to Facebook.  Not RSS feeds.

I had no problem pushing a Clearspring widget onto Facebook as an app, but I did have a problem loading up a widget with multiple parameters into Clearspring.  And to date, they don’t have an RSS to Flash conversion tool open to the public.

So we’re talking about three cool offerings from three formidable companies – at this point, I’d have to say that Widgetbox’s offering provides me with the most flexibility with the kinds of content that I can convert to a Facebook App.

Of course, an RSS powered Facebook App is going to do little more than act as a display widget.  But that’s OK.  It’s something we didn’t have before.

Here an app that I built of top rated Flight of the Conchords videos using RateItAll’s RSS feed on the subject.

I had two little issues with the process.  The first is that your profile page doesn’t display the entire app – it forces you to click through to the canvas page to see it.  Widgetbox said that this was due to a desire to make people hit the canvas page, so that the apps would do better in the app directory in terms of engagement.  Based on feedback, it sounds like they’re going to rethink this.

The second issue may very well have been a user issue, but I had a bit of a problem getting to the app preferences page that let me select where exactly the app would show up in my Facebook experience.  I have since removed and re-added the app without any problems.

The widget platform space is innovating very quickly.  Next, I hope to play around with Musestorm’s new stuff.

Passion and User Generated Content

I've been involved in administering user generated content for a long time - my friends and I came up for the idea for RateItAll in early 1999, making us one of the first commercial, 100% UGC sites on the web.

One of the things that never fails to astound me is the passion with which people apply themselves to these sorts of communities.

It takes a special sort of person to be one of the small percentage of "creators" - folks that are contributing hours of their time towards creating content and building relationships in an online community.  It takes passion.  And when something goes wrong, that passion can very quickly turn to anger.

If you're interested in seeing a taste of what this passion looks like, take a look at this thread from the RateItAll blog.  Our community is going through a bit of a crisis - four very prominent, very respected members of the site have decided to exercise their rights as RateItAll Reviewers and permanently delete their accounts.

While the number would seem to be tiny (versus 1.1M visitors last month), the impact is huge.  Between the four of them, they accounted for about 20,000 pages of (high quality) content, not to mention they were people's friends, mentors, and co-collaborators.

It's hard to see these folks go, especially with in some cases, a lot of anger.  But I've been cheered up by the fifty or so messages of support that I've received from other members, telling me to "stay the course."

I'm oddly flattered by the drama.  As they say, love and hate are pretty close together - it's the indifference that's the killer.

So what are the practical implications of this?  It means that everything that isn't core to the community (Facebook Apps, Widgets, etc.) needs to take an immediate backseat to addressing the concerns of our superusers.  If you don't have the community, you become just another hollow web app.  And without the people, what fun is it?

DexKnows.com Adds Consumer Reviews

DexKnows.com, the local search portal owned by RH Donnelley, has just added the ability to post consumer reviews of their local business listings.

The two big players in this space or Yelp and Yahoo! Local, but the landscape is littered with changed and/or failed attempts by companies such as Judy's Book, Insider Pages, and Intuit's effort Zipingo.

What makes DexKnows a bit different from these other plays is that 1) they own the local business listing data; 2) they have feet on the street in the form of a formidable sales force; and 3) they have the might of RH Donnelly behind them. 

I think this could be a formidable player in the local business review space, should they find the right recipe for online community.

How about active networks on Ning?

Everyone's reporting on Ning hitting 100K networks.  Yet nobody seems to be reporting that their traffic would seem to be pretty light.  How many of those networks are active?

Here are a handful of content generation type sites that would seem to be doing more traffic than Ning: Squidoo, Hubpages, Wikia, Fanpop, and yes, RateItAll.

According to Quantcast, Porntube.Ning.com is generating about 15% of their visits.  It's since been taken down.

Don't get me wrong, I get why people are betting on Ning.  A great idea, a $44M round of funding, and a rockstar founder can set some pretty high expectations.

It doesn't mean we have to crown them just yet, though.