June 2009 Archives

Picture this: today could be last day you ever have to stop at the store for toilet paper on your way home from work. That's because the ecommerce website Alice.com has launched in open beta -- the latest direct sales site with the potential to make online entrepreneurs kick themselves and wonder why they didn't do it first. Think of it like Amazon, only for pesky household essentials.

While the notion of buying everything online, especially mundane consumer goods, still carries a faint whiff of pre-bubble burst 1999, there's reason to believe that this time could be different. For one thing, Alice.com delivers with no shipping costs, right to your door (provided you buy at least six items). Another big plus: they already have a staggering variety of products available (over 6,000) ranging from shampoo and soap to coffee and laundry detergent to pet food, even condoms -- and the prices are about the same as you'd find at the local big-box retailer. And here's where the name comes in (for all you youngsters, Alice refers to the sassy live-in housekeeper on The Brady Bunch): once you sign up and create a household profile, the site will keep track of your purchases and send email reminders when you're running low.

Which brings up the big hooks for the packaged goods manufacturers: that household profile you create could be very valuable when the company that makes your detergent is marketing a new product. They also have the advantage of saving money by selling directly to consumers and avoiding the markup of retailers stores like Wal-Mart -- many of whom have been gaining ground with their own store brands of the same products.

The only question left is how the site will actually make money, a question that doesn't seem as cut-and-dry. Founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire (who sold startup Jellyfish.com to Microsoft in 2007) say they've already got commitments from five of the top ten consumer product companies, and plan to float the site by selling advertising, electronic coupon services, and, presumably, all that spending data.

Sounds like a pretty good plan. Ultimately, though, Alice.com's success will depend on changing the way we shop for toilet paper, which is no small feat. It's not the kind of thing people can wait for UPS to deliver if they run out. Then again, ten years ago nobody thought Netflix could change the way we rent movies. But when was the last time you went to the neighborhood Blockbuster?

When a brand becomes a verb, you know you've got a killer product. When a brand becomes so comfortable, so familiar, why go anywhere else?

Chris Dannan at Fast Company outlines some reasons why you might want to consider straying from the familiar. Google still is, by most measures, the "best" search engine, but depending on what you want to do there are better options.

I've continued to toy with Bing, and when it comes to image or video search, I'm even more supportive of it now than I was when I posted about it two weeks ago. For those specific purposes, I think it truly is better than Google.

In the case of Bing, they have the opposite problem of Google. Where Google is the "best", comfortable and familiar, Bing is associated with "evil" Microsoft, their past search failures, and the product is still new and unknown. But if you push all that aside and look at it from a feature perspective alone, it's actually got some really good features.

Other notable newcomers are Wolfram | Alpha, which rather than searching information, computes it. It's a fundamentally different concept, which has led to some derision out on the web (i.e. people joking about awkward "search" results, when that's not really what its designed to do), but despite that it can do some impressive things. It'll be one to watch as it develops.

Chris @ FastCompany also profiles Worio, an engine that uses your past behavior to help guide you to new things related to your searches, but that don't necessarily have any direct keyword connection to the query you entered. Translation: it helps you find things you're looking for, without you having to find the magic mix of keywords to enter into the search box to surface it. It's in some sense an outgrowth of cluster search, but with the additional layer of behavioral shaping of the results.

Privacy folks may not like that, but it's a step in the right direction in many ways. As a longtime search guy, it becomes pretty clear that what Google puts on the first page of any given search result is essentially law...entrenched players over time can effectively own those pages, ultimately rendering certain search queries somewhat useless since you're all but guaranteed the same results over and over.

So don't be afraid to try new things and pull yourself away from habitually Googling, when you could be Binging, Worioing, or Wolframming.

//Google image via Tyler Jordan, eVisibility
//Wolframming image via Superboy #92, October, 1961

"Twittering" is sung at appx. 1:08 into the clip...found via my colleague Sarrah! Can you find an earlier one?

A friend of mine works at one of the largest online ad networks, and thus has a pretty keen eye into how money moves around the web when it comes to monetizing content creation. Some interesting thoughts on the Twitter hype:

I definitely agree with the "why bother" statement because most updates can be useless to most people, but there are also a lot of benefits of sharing information.

Especially for these companies who can get insight into their consumers without hiring market research companies to survey people. Or for publishers/bloggers to find news to share or share news with their readers...Twitter can be a great tool to stay connected. It's a great tool for celebrities to stay in touch with fans, etc...

I think that everyone jumps on the bandwagon when something is new. Eventually most people with drop out and the ones left will refine the tool to perfect it. The same thing happened when blog technology first came out. It was cool to have a personal blog, but these days it's more refined. Bloggers are full fledged editorial sites that are creating content with a loyal readership reading their material, and they have figured out a way to monetize it.

So that's both good news, and in some ways bad news, for Twitter.

The good - it's not going anywhere, despite what detractors might say.

The bad - if Twitter isn't really destined to become the future of human communication, will it have enough uptake to support itself long term? Especially when it doesn't have the benefit of pageviews to support advertising, or the universality of something like Skype to justify a subscriber model?

Perhaps if it can replace SMS there is hope, but that's a big "if". If they could pull it off, they would be to SMS what Skype is to voice.

With microblogging platform Twitter taking the world by storm in the past year (give or take) and reaching an almost obscene level of media presence in the past few months, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that tweeting was somehow going to change the world, one-hundred and forty characters at a time. In fact, Time Magazine said as much in their cover story on Twitter this month.

Not so fast, Twitter boosters. A few recent studies claim to have crunched the numbers, and the results ain't pretty: the big headline from a Harvard study out this week is that only 10% of Twitter users produce more than 90% of tweets, meaning that the vast majority of the site's estimated ten million-plus users almost never use the service. Compare this to the typical online social network where the top 10% of users account for 30% of content, and the so-called "explosive" growth of Twitter starts to sound like what many have suspected all along: kinda-sorta but not entirely true.The Harvard study found that over half of all Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. The numbers speak for themselves.

Another study by HubSpot paints an even more vivid snapshot:

• 55.5% of users are not following anyone

• 54.9% have never tweeted

• 52.7% have no followers

These reports will probably raise (or bring back) the question that seems to have been lost in the hype; the question that a lot of people ask when first encountering Twitter: what's the point? Why bother? In an age when there are more demands on our time than ever before, it's a question worth asking.

That said, however, as it has settled into popular culture, Twitter has found a handful of surprisingly useful niches in business. Journalists have found it to be a powerful tool for digging up sources (CNN has been a particularly glaring advocate); it's come in handy for discount airlines such as JetBlue and Southwest who use Twitter to track customer comments and offer deals; similarly retailers have found success using the service to both monitor potential complaints about products and to hawk sales and discounts (Dell claims to have racked up $1 million in sales last year based on their Twitterstream); most recently and unexpectedly a new crop of mobile street food vendors have been using Twitter to keep hungry customers informed on their whereabouts. And there will surely be more of these pockets of usefulness as time goes on, but for now perhaps it's due time for cold, hard numbers to cut through some of the hype.

It's easy to hate Microsoft. It's especially easy to laugh off their latest foray into the search world considering their wasted billions to date. But, their latest effort is actually kind of good...in some ways better than Google.

To start, image search. As you scroll down, new results auto-load, essentially giving one an infinite page of results rather than a page-by-page list. This is a great feature, as its often easier to scroll down a page for 30 seconds and eyeball a couple hundred images rather than page through numerous pages of results (which, after a few pages, most users give up on and try a new search).

As a pro-blogger who spends an inordinate amount of time hunting down obscure images of hipster-happy obscure bands and such, this is something I'm looking forward to using quite a bit.

Video search is another nice one. Mousing over a result will trigger the playback of excerpts from the video in full motion, with sound. This tops the functionality of YouTube itself. It also beats the shoddy animated GIF frame previews seen on some *Tube clone sites.

This can be really useful when hunting down videos...I'm actually pretty impressed by this feature.

Other than that it is, like most search engines, a somewhat commoditized property. The web results, news, etc seem at least on par with the other major search engines, but being "good enough" won't be sufficient to break the emotional bonds many people have formed with the Google brand.

Will the new image and video features do the trick? Or the nine-figure advertising deal with JWT? Hard to say...competing with a brand that has evolved into a verb is tough. Many users so instinctively go to Google that MSFT will need to pull off a sustained assault over time to remind people over and over and over again that there are other, possibly better, options out there.