The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘charts’

MySpace, once the King of the Internet, lost its second CEO yesterday in less than a year. The response from press has, rightfully, been bleak.

Owen Van Natta, who was celebrated as the savior of MySpace when he was hired, was apparently fired over something as simple as trying to control his executive team. His Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn has been telling friends for months that he’d soon be leaving MySpace. We wrote that he was on his way out last week. Hirschhorn’s comment the next day to us was “I was sleeping and just woke up to see [TechCrunch] unfortunately in the middle of someone’s game.”

Apparently Hirschhorn was right. There was a game going on, and he won. Or at least he half won. He’s now co-president with Mike Jones, previously MySpace’s COO. And both of these guys report directly to News Corp. Digital Chief Jon Miller.

But all that’s old news now. Today is a new day. Let’s take stock of the current MySpace situation (page view and unique visitor stats are Comscore worldwide), compared to nine months ago when all of the guys mentioned above started their jobs:

• Unique visitors nine months ago: 125 million
• Unique visitors today: 122 million (-3%)
• Facebook unique visitor growth in same period: 48%, to 469 million
• Page views nine months ago: 35 billion
• Page views today: 20 billion (-44%)
• Facebook page view growth in same period: 118%, to 193 billion

MySpace also failed to launch a single new product of note. Which was apparently Van Natta’s chief complaint about Hirschhorn, who was the Chief Product Officer before being promoted yesterday.

MySpace now effectively has three CEOs – Hirschhorn, Jones and Miller. And none of them can likely get anything drastic done, even in the unlikely event that they were to agree on what that drastic thing is.

A company that is hemorrhaging users this badly, and soon to lose their biggest source of revenue, can’t afford to have leadership by committee which is then subject to veto by the corporate parent.

A further concern is the fact that MySpace can’t offer lucrative stock options to employees, since they are a subsidiary of a public company. The best engineers won’t go anywhere near MySpace.

MySpace’s only hope, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here, is to be spun off from News Corp. into an independent entity. They need an intelligent management structure (no co-presidents) filled with enthusiastic executives (who don’t trash the company in public) and they need a radical product plan. And they need to be private so they can give employees stock options.

MySpace is just an afterthought for News Corp. An unwanted step child. MySpace, once the King of the Internet, deserves better.

Below are some charts showing How MySpace has been crushed by Facebook during Van Natta’s reign across all metrics: visitors, pageviews, and time spent. Note that the charts below measure the U.S. only, as opposed to the worldwide numbers above, but the trends are the same:

After yesterday’s news, no one is giving MySpace the benefit of the doubt any more. Stick a fork in it, this turkey is done.

Most press releases are extremely boring. They all say the same things. Not this one.

Today, my inbox was graced by pitch that can only be described as stimulating. It made me laugh, it made me question if it was real, and it made me a little creeped out — all in one. But it is actually relevant to something I’m particularly interested in right now: Location. It’s for a service called FapMapper, a location-based service that allows you to show where you masturbate and/or where you have public sex. Yep.

There are plenty of tagged places in San Francisco already. For example, here’s one that reads, “jerked it watching my neighbor water plants. Hot” — and yes, it includes the address where that took place. Here’s another, “post lunch office bathroom.” At least it was post-lunch, I suppose.

Generally, it’s very poor form to just copy and paste a press release into a post, but this one is just too good for everyone to miss. And honestly, anything I say can’t do this service (which works on the web and through the web interfaces of the iPhone, Droid, Pre and other phones) more justice than how they lay it out. I mean, “mastur-beta” and ““fap” is a euphemism for masturbation that is increasingly popular among young, tech-savvy Web users.” Brilliant stuff. Read the whole thing below:

There’s a Fap for That: Masturbation Mapping Utility FapMapper.com Launches

VAN NUYS, Calif. – At long last, proud masturbators and public sex act aficionados have a fully functional utility with which to document their sexual exploits; FapMapper.com (www.fapmapper.com) is out of ‘mastur-beta’ and ready for primetime.

Compatible with desktop computers, as well as the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre and other web-capable mobile devices, FapMapper quickly picked up a relatively small but dedicated member base after its beta launch in September.

“We’ve had hundreds of users putting the FapMapper through its paces and submitting suggestions for a couple months now, and we’re finally ready to unveil the official web app,” said Kim Kysar, brand and product manager for Pink Visual, the porn studio behind FapMapper.com. “It’s very gratifying to see this important tool for sexual self-expression ready for widespread use at last.”

While the name FapMapper is a reference to masturbation (“fap” is a euphemism for masturbation that is increasingly popular among young, tech-savvy Web users), Kysar said there’s more going on within the map grids of FapMapper than self-pleasuring alone.

“We’ve got couples posting about having sex on camping trips, people just marking places where they spotted a particularly beautiful woman walking down the street, even things that have nothing whatsoever to do with sex or masturbation,” Kysar said. “That’s just the nature of any social networking tool; once you release it out into the world, the community develops on its own, and decides for itself what to do with the utility you have provided.”

In addition to comments from users, FapMapper now offers revealing statistical data, like the top fapping cities, states and individual users. The map also features icons identifying adult stores where FapMapper users will find Pink Visual titles stocked on the shelves.

“Just in case FapMapper users are in need of extra inspiration for their fapping, we thought we’d throw them a bone, so to speak, and let them know where they can find the latest and greatest Pink Visual titles,” Kysar said. “It’s a great value-add for our retail partners, too, as they are being advertised to a population of truly dedicated masturbators and porn fans without spending a dime for the exposure.”

At the moment, a user named “Bigbwoy” from Toronto owns the top spot on the Frequent Fapper charts, while California is the top state, and San Antonio, Texas is the city with the most “Fap Pins” placed thus far. Kysar said it’s still too early to declare any individual, city or state the “perversion champion” based on FapMapper’s data, however.

“I have to believe that once this thing really gets rolling, you’ll see San Francisco climb the charts from its current position as the fourth place fapping city,” Kysar said. “We clearly don’t have the penetration we need in the southern Atlantic coastal states, either; how can Florida, the ancestral home of Spring Break festivities, not even be in the top 10 Fap States? That’s just downright shameful.”

For more information, visit www.fapmapper.com. Warning: you may learn more about your neighbor’s masturbation habits than you ever wanted to know.

Not sure this beats the best man who rigged his friends’ bed to tweet during sex, but it’s close.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

During my time at TechCrunch I’ve seen thousands of startups and written about hundreds of them. I sure as hell don’t know all the secrets to building a successful company, but there a few things I’ve seen that seem like surefire ways to ever-so-slightly grease the path to success. Here’s an easy one: make a video demo and prominently promote it somewhere where new visitors can find it. One that shows off the core function of your product without making people think they’re watching an ad or a pitch. And answer, as throughly as possible in 2-3 minutes, what it is that you’re bringing to the table.

Here’s a sad truth: a lot of reporters really are quite lazy. Not in the sense that they don’t want to find and cover a cool new company (in which case they should consider a new career path), but in that they don’t like to spend time wading through marketing material trying to figure out what your company actually does. After all, we’ve got inboxes stuffed with pitches from companies vying for coverage. If it takes more than a minute or two to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve, we’re probably more likely to simply skip to the next message than to try to make sense of your feature set.

Consumers are even lazier. If you don’t have some kind of bite-sized hook that introduces them to your product, there’s a good chance they’ll stare quizzically at the screen, shrug their shoulders, and head back to Google to find something else that fixes their problem. Walls of descriptive text definitely are not the answer. Images can help, but they can also become overwhelming. Video, especially in an age when people are so used to consuming it online, is often a good solution.

But just making a video isn’t enough – you need to make sure that the video actually conveys what the hell you actually do. This is apparently much harder than it sounds, because I’ve seen plenty of video demos loaded with screenshots, walkthroughs, and pretty graphics but still leave me scratching my head. The truth is, you don’t need a single screenshot to make an effective video. You just need to show how people will actually use what you’ve built, not a sales pitch.

Take Dropbox for example. I use the service every day and love it, but every time I try to describe it in a sentence I’m left with something that makes me retch a bit — “intuitive and deeply integrated file synchronization service” just doesn’t come close to capturing just how damn cool Dropbox really is. Apparently the Dropbox team didn’t have much luck describing themselves in text either, so they’ve gone another route: visit their homepage, and you’ll see a polished, easy-to-follow video demo front and center that perfectly describes what the service actually does.

Dropbox has made one mistake though: they don’t offer a way to embed their great demo video anywhere else (someone else did upload it to YouTube though, so I’ve embedded it below). Some bloggers, including myself, are more than happy to embed a video walkthrough in posts, provided it isn’t overly self promotional.

There are plenty of other examples of companies using video demos to great effect. Head over to Apple’s iPhone site and you’ll notice that they offer video walkthroughs for basically everything the phone can do. Google now regularly uses video walkthroughs to introduce many of their new products and features, through they don’t always do a great job — this video demo created by a third party did a better job explaining Wave than anything Google has made.

Of course, a video demo isn’t absolutely essential to your site’s success. Just look at Mint, which was just acquired for $170 million by Intuit. There’s nary a video in sight, and — at the risking of sounding like a complete fool given its huge acquisition price — I find Mint’s 20+ pages outlining its feature set and why people should use the service to be positively daunting. Twitter’s page doesn’t include a video (though I think it badly needs one). And Facebook just says that it’s a service that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life”, which would set my bullshit meter off the charts if it appeared in any startup pitch.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

As Twitter grows, with an estimated 50 million+ live accounts, it is increasingly becoming an important source of traffic for many Websites. But getting a handle on how much traffic it is actually delivering, where it is coming from, and the viral nature of that traffic is a real challenge. Today, “social media experts” everywhere can rejoice because Tweetmeme is launching Tweetmeme Analytics, which offers a full dashboard showing how many times a link has been tweeted, retweeted, and clicked on by which Twitter users, in what cities, and from which referring sites and URL shorteners.

Tweetmeme already tracks a lot of this data for the most retweeted links, which is what it uses to determine the hottest stories on Twitter. It also gets a lot of data from its retweet buttons, which are popular on blogs like ours (see above, and click it!).

The Analytics service will be part of a new My Tweetmeme tab on the main site. (In the future, users will be able to create their own channels on Tweetmeme on this tab as well). When you click on Analytics, you enter the Website URL you want to analyze. It then shows the most recent posts or articles for that site. You have to pick a link to build a report around it, which takes a few minutes, but the reports are kind of useless unless they contain the most up to the minute data. Still, if you want to create a lot of reports, you have to schedule them, which is a bit of a drawback.

Once the report is created, you can dive down into data about tweets, retweets, clicks, domians, users, and locations. I’ve created a few reports for TechCrunch links and the charts are a real real eye-opener because no matter what the link, there is always a spike and then it trails off real fast. If you want to keep something alive on Twitter, you have to keep tweeting it out repeatedly. Of course, that will annoy your followers and you may lose them.

So maybe you might want to target your most influential followers instead, which Tweetmeme helps you figure out as well. For every link, it lists the most influential users who posted the link, along with the number of resulting retweets from that user. You can even drill down to see each user’s retweet tree.

Social media experts are going to love this because it will give them something to do and maybe charge their clients extra for, which is why Tweetmeme is charging for access to the Analytics. After a one-month free trial, Analytics will cost $50 per month per domain or $500 per month for an unlimited number of domains. Thus, Tweetmeme joins startups like bit.ly in the belief that there is money to be made in all of this Twitter data.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Great story from iPhone ad network provider AdWhirl. Apparently the developer of one of the most popular applications for the platform ever wasn’t generating any ad revenue from it for several days, missing out on up to $2000 a day according to the company’s co-founder Sam Yam.

Here’s the gist of what happened: Inner Four, the developer behind the insanely popular (and inane) iPhone / iPod Touch application Mirror Free (iTunes link) - a gratis tool that turns your device’s screen into a mirror - was using a sample key instead of the key provided by AdWhirl that was supposed to power real display advertising units in the app interface.

The ad network enabler found out that the developer was missing out on revenue from the app, which has consistently been topping the charts across the entire App Store, when someone from the team downloaded it to their iPhone and noticed test ad units were being run that were attached to the sample AdWhirl application key. As the company was still able to see what kind of traffic the application was getting, the developer was losing out on an estimated $2000 a day, although that number is evidently hard to verify.

Update: here’s the evidence from AdWhirl. Yam explains:

AdWhirl allows you to set percentages for the ad networks you run. On our sample app, we had only a quarter of the inventory dedicated to AdMob, with the remaining 3/4 (maybe even more, b/c of our rollover feature, but I won’t get into all the nitty gritty) of the inventory used to demo how our custom ads work (custom ads don’t pay the developer any money when run, but allow them to cross-promote their other apps or promote a website, for example). Thus 3/4 of the ads weren’t generating money, and the quarter of ads that were generating money exceeded $500/day (and growing even more quickly on the most recent day) - doing the 4X multiplier on revenue generated gets to the $2000/day figure (you’ll notice the early days didn’t generate any revenue - this app rose to #1 VERY quickly).

AdWhirl contacted the unknowing developer and dynamically pushed out new keys on the platform from their side, claiming that otherwise the developer would have been forced to submit an updated application to the App Store that could take days or even weeks to get cleared.

Most iPhone app developers will never see their app(s) top the charts, let alone be able to effectively monetize them. That’s why it’s so baffling to see the developer of such a top ranked application - out of 65,000 free and paid apps in total - stumble over such a minor coding tweak.

In software, it’s impossible to over-test anything.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Socialseek has released a desktop application that lets you search for a topic, item, brand or company across news sites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and events. You can also track mentions of a particular search query by city and receive charts that show trends on popularity of a topic across websites, or Twitter.

The ability to crawl social media sites and websites for a brand can be valuable, but what I find useful about Socialseek is the ability to track an item over image sites like Flickr and even event sites. And it’s also interesting to be able to limit chatter over the web about a particular topic to a geographical region or city.

Socialseek could be popular in the enterprise space, especially as Twitter has become an essential marketing tool for brands and companies. The app runs on Adobe Air, which I find to have some strange UI quirks and bugs and ends up using good amount of resources on computers. Competitors to Socialseek include Viralheat and Peoplebrowsr, which both help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand on social media sites and web sites.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.

Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).

Distimo also breaks down pricing by category (see charts below). Medical apps command the highest prices by far (on average, about $8), followed by business, navigation, productivity, and reference (all averaging around $4). The category which benefited the most from the new OS was navigation, thanks to the turn-by-turn directions feature. On June 17, the average price among the top 100 navigation apps spiked by about $1. So it looks like navigation apps have gained some pricing power thanks to a the new OS.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.

Customers will also get access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.

For the integration, Sears teamed up with Viewpoints Network, a social technology and media company that recently integrated JanRain’s RPX solution into their online community and identification platform.

The question is: is Sears - despite its claims of driving innovation in online retailing, which seems a bit over the top - merely a late adopter looking to try something new or is this a sign of OpenID maturing to a point where it can finally reach that tipping point where it really starts taking off with a mainstream audience?

In my recent interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina, he expressed the hope that integrations outside the technology industry - such as the U.S. government - would at some point occur more often, but he also acknowledged that the initiative struggles with branding and getting the word out there.

It’s integrations like these that could really help OpenID gain more traction, but the main question will always be if OpenID is just a solution looking for a problem, or if there’s a genuine need for a decentralized, universal login standard.

Despite the flood of criticism from technology pundits, the jury’s still out on that.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

I’m not a svelte man anymore, I’ll admit. Two kids - I ate them both - and lots of beer have force my metabolism to run, cowering, resulting in size changes that would swallow the average man. This is what I need.

The rest is here: 
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