Craigslist - are you really going to move?

Let me say one thing from the start. I have an apartment. I know where I am going to live, and I do not plan on moving any time soon. Even so, I have seen just about every apartment listed for Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, Friendship and Bloomfield under Pittsburgh’s Craigslist page. I don’t know why, but it is addicting. I can’t help but visit again. Craigslist has such an intuitive user interface you can’t help but get exactly what you want. It is so simple that it seem like you are just chatting with neighbors about renting an apartment, or buying a couch, and not conducting some business transaction. This casual feel of the site adds a great deal to its attractiveness. Even if I don’t end up taking that cool 3rd floor on the busline with a balcony, I promise you I will always know it is out there.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Craig’s List “Community”

In reading articles, over and over again I would come to this word: Community. The purpose of Craig’s list is to create an online community for swapping items, ideas, job opportunities, etc.. In the mid 90s, founder Craig Newmark would give talks about the internet, saying that “this is how we should do business someday.” Perhaps someday was sooner than he thought and perhaps he was also made more of a contribution to that reality than he would have expected. It started as a small email chain that grew more and more with demands. He believes that “What [he does] is give people a voice and that’s powerful.” I believe it also started with just a focus on techie jobs and opportunities out of the San Francisco Bay Area. The current business model is $25 for job ads ($75 in San Francisco) and everything else is free. So from a profit stand point, he makes money off of job listings but by having everything else he drives an incredible amount of traffic to the site. He intends to “humanize and democratize the internet” by connecting people in an easier and more efficient way. It has grown to be worth $80 million in 2008 revenue and to be worth $5 billion overall. Not bad for starting out as a small contact list.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Craigslist - find a roomate, a date, and a free couch

I tend to find myself scavenging craigslist, during my favorite classes.  Humanities classes for instance, or perhaps even business management, where the one time my facial expression changes is when I find that breakthrough deal.   I’ve bought Red Sox playoff tickets, washing machines, bikes, and even week long stays in resorts on islands.  Craigslist is the ultimate online meeting place.  Where fees are unheard of, and users browse, and Web 2.0 is something that’s gone by unnoticed.

Craigslist’s ability to stay relevant has been a testament to its loyal user base.  Valuation of the company is often difficult to pinpoint, and despite requests to sell out, its original owners maintain control.  Unlike ebay, where fees strip profit margins, Craigslist, does an excellent job of organizing by region and bringing buyers and sellers together.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Loose your focus, Loose your shirt??

Craigslist is an innovative and centralized network of online communities designed for help online users in a variety of ways. Craigslist gives users all over the world a  place to sell unwanted junk, find a roommate, post their job resume, search for singles, even sell their house. When does this variety become too vast? As business students, we’ve heard the “loose your focus, loose your shirt” strategy for years.

Ironically, Craigslist has chosen to focus on being general. With 10 billion pages viewed per month at 450 craigslist sites in all 50 states and over 50 countries, it is safe to say the site is extremely successful in spite of its seeming lack of focus and dull web design. This level of exposure is the key to Craigslist’s success.

My personal experience with Craigslist has been one of mixed feelings. I was faced with task of hiring and intern last summer, and my boss instructed me to post an ad on Craigslist. The site was very clear and simple to navigate. Within a week, I had about 20 responses. The problem was the applicants were terrible. While I think that Craigslist is a good place to post a resume, I am skeptical of the perceived level of quality taken on by job seekers. And, this perception can transfers to any of the offered services on Craigslist.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Is Linked In all it’s linked up to be?

Linked In has three times the number of registered users than any other professional networking site on the Internet. But do these numbers automatically mean that Linked In provides a better service than the next networking site? I have read several reviews on the value of the website. And surprisingly, its praises are not being sung throughout the web as I would have expected. The general consensus claims an invasion of privacy. Linked In works with Outlook to install various features to your system, including collecting contacts from your received mail, uploading your current contacts list. These are innovative and interesting features, however problems can arise when contacts are collected from junk mail or your contact lists would rather not be bothered. Simply put, Linked In attempts to extract as much information from you as they can. All the while proclaiming they are protecting your privacy. But the key data which drives the business is your connectivity to others. Even if you give them every ounce of information you have, how realistic is it that you will respond to a request from someone four degrees away?

Basically, if you are not desperately searching to find a new job, hire staff or consultants, or sell products to specific industries, Linked In is a waste of your time. And, how many people professionally network just for fun? That being said, the most successful businessmen are not going to be looking to hire from the site. They seek a level of quality that cannot be conveyed through a website. I don’t care how popular it is. There just doesn’t appear to be enough economic value in the relationships facilitated by the social networking websites.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Corporate America, join the conversation or you lose.

Recently, I wrote two posts, one on FriendFeed the other on PicLens. Just for kicks I decided to let the companies know that I liked their product/service (…proservductice?) and I had written a post about them. I wasn’t expecting a shoutout on their blog or being added to some list, I just wanted to let them know I liked what they do enough to write a post raving about them.

Instead, what I got were two great examples of how companies should interact with bloggers. Here are their responses…

Great. Thanks, Blake.

Feel free to add your trackback and link to our new blog at blog.cooliris.com.

Kind regards,
#### & The PicLens Team

——————————-

Hi Blake,

Thanks for the email, and for taking the time to write a post about us!

- ### (FriendFeed)

——————————-

This is exactly what companies need to do. Engage and participate in the conversation. How easy is it for a company to give a simple thanks to a blogger who liked their prod/serv. enough to spend time writing a post about them?

Honest, impartial and critical, are what makes the posts we do here so much more trustworthy than a sponsored review. They can be much more valuable to a company than something they hired someone to write. The company essentially gets free advertising and legit promotion. It is the least they can do to give a simple thanks, yet most companies are so removed they miss out on some great opportunities to encourage discussion of their offering.

Recently Megan wrote a great post on PageOnce. Shortly after, someone from the company posted thanking her for writing the post and gave a link to access the private beta test.

A while ago I wrote a post on a great online storage solution, Humyo. I told the company about the post and they asked if they could forward it to their PR department and said they would hook me up with premium features to test. For a while, I was on page 1 of Google for “Humyo” and almost first for “Humyo Online Storage”. If I had written about how bad the service was, that could have had a serious impact on their company. If one of the first few results on Google for you is negative you’ve got a problem! Yah think?

Now it may be easy and necessary for these solely internet based companies to keep tabs on what is being said about them on the net, but what about companies primarily offline? I think that they too need to join the conversation or risk losing a significant opportunity. It is not hard to setup a Google alert for your name and see what people are saying (good and more importantly bad) about your company (or you).

Two lessons here:

1. Bloggers (words) have power both to build a companies reputation and destroy it.
   
2. Companies need to participate in the conversation online and not be silent.

What examples (good and bad) have you seen of companies joining/ignoring the conversation?

Update: Shortly after I posted this, PageOnce visited again (evidenced in the MyBlogLog widget in the sidebar) it shows what a close watch they keep on what is being said about their company. Props guys!

Popularity: 19% [?]

Random Ramblings

<Start Rant>

Apple iPhone 3G

It would be helpful to have some actual information “from the source” rather than a bunch of analysts telling us it will be here in June. For that matter, now the rumor mill has a specific date - June 9. Come on guys quit reporting rumors and stick to reporting what is actually known. And Apple, it would be nice if you would make some sort of comments on your new products.

Mario Kart Wii

Same old graphics, same old characters, new and revised levels and vehicles, worse controls… I’ll stick with Double Dash for now thanks. Then again it took me about a week to get accustomed to the Double Dash controls when it came out to, so what are first impressions worth anyway?

Twitter

Twitter, here is what I think about you: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/. WARNING: link contains offensive language, but an appropriate Twitter comic.

</End Rant>

Popularity: 4% [?]

YouTube? …no, actually a Tube created by you. StartYourTube

This comes by way of a great feed I’m subscribed to: TechCrunch.

StartYourTube is a new site that allows you to start your own “tube” or video site. It allows you to  have a full powered video site on your own domain. You are also entitled to 60% of the ad revenue.

Rather than me tell you what it’s all about, go to this great post on TechCrunch.

This is a great example of a low-cost/no-cost service or API that new startups can take advantage of. Internet entrepreneurs can now do just about everything for free using open source code or APIs being rolled out by the big players: Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, digg.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Twitter - At a Glance

I’m taking a look today at Twitter, a popular online service similar to the “status box” implemented by Facebook. Twitter gives users the opportunity to post small updates on their life via a personal RSS feed.

Here’s the basics. Once you’ve signed up for a twitter account you’ve got your own personal little twitter feed. Anytime you want you can go to your twitter home page and type in a little blurb, 140 characters or less. Whatever you’ve entered will then show up in your feed for people to read.

There’s a few different ways folks can read your twitter updates, popularly called “tweets.” For one, they can go to your profile on the twitter website. This will display your last several tweets and give them an option to scroll through older ones. Also, if they have an account with twitter themselves they will also be able to subscribe to your twitter feed through the website. Referred to as “following” your tweets will now show up on their homepage when they log into twitter. You can also directly subscribe to the RSS feed of anyone’s tweets using any standard reader. Twitter is also easy to integrate with your personal website so that you can display your feed anywhere you like.

Created as a simple status updating service, twitter is rapidly evolving to encompass more uses. For one thing, it’s being used by many as a chat system, something akin to the “shoutbox” you’ll see on the occasional forum only a little more personal. If you’re following someone and they make a comment that you have some sort of response to, you can post a little reply in your twitter feed. If they’re following you as well, they’re going to see it. In fact, this way to chat got popular enough that twitter caught on and made adjustments to accomodate it. The standard way to let somone know that you’re responding to something they said is to start you response with the symbol ‘@’ and the person’s username on twitter. Once they picked up on this, twitter changed the coding on their site so that the ‘@’ symbol would automatically cause the following username to show up as a link to that users profile page.

So why should we care about twitter from a business perspective? I mean it’s neat, people have this great little tool they can use to communicate with their friends and even form a sort of community, but what does that mean for me? Can I find a profitable use for this tool? I ran into alot of questions about the possibility of twitter for business use while I was checking the service out, and I came across one viable idea that’s worth taking a look at.

I’m gonna segway for a minute to one of my personal favourite websites. It’s a webcomic called MegaTokyo that’s been around for quite some time now. The site has seen enormous amounts of success even to the point of several published collections of the comic being released and available in almost any large bookstore. Now there’s one thing that the author of the comic does that has caught my attention several times. He has a spot for his own personal twitter feed on the site, but also includes a second twitter feed that relates specifically to the comic. You’ll see updates there on the status of the next strip. Things like “drawings done, working on inking,” or “almost finished, should be up by 3:00.”

This is an excellent move in my opinion. Using a twitter feed this way is giving the site two advantages. First off, it’s a way for readers to feel a little more connected with the project. They feel more intimately involved in the process of the comic if they know what’s going on every step of the way. It’s that sort of connection that converts casual visitors to fans.

Secondly, it adds yet another little bit of dynamic content to the site. Most content-based websites require fresh new content to arrive periodically in order to be successful. Megatokyo, on a regular basis, updates with a new comic strip every monday wednesday and friday. However, it’s not always possible for the artist to keep to that schedule. People have lives and sometimes they get in the way of writing and drawing a comic strip. When a fan of the comic visits the site and sees no knew content, they’re dissapointed. With the addition of the Megatokyo twitter feed, however, they are at least able to check out what the progress is on the strip, how soon it will be up, why it got delayed, etc. Along with fostering a greater feeling of connection to the project, it provides something ‘new’ for the reader to be checking up on, one more little reason to come back to the site… and that goes a long way.

Twitter is more than a trendy little service. It’s an excellent business and networking tool the potential of which has yet to be tapped. Anyone with an interest in social networking, blogging, online communities, internet entreprenuership or even just a desire to keep their finger on the pulse of the web needs to get in on this.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Piclens - Picture slideshow in 3D

I’m writing this post because, frankly, I’m a sucker for technology and I needed to share this brilliant tool for viewing photos online.

PicLens is what’s know as an “Immersive slideshow”. It allows you to experience photos in a very multi-dimensional way.

It is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online images. The plugin is available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

At present, the software is compatible with Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask.com Images, deviantART, Flickr, Facebook, Live image search, Photobucket, SmugMug, Fotki and any web site that implements mediaRSS <link> tags in their HTML pages. [from Wikipedia]

Even our Internet Entrepreneurship blog has PicLens enabled! So, if we were ever to post a bunch of pictures they would be viewable with PicLens.

Most recently they added support for YouTube videos. This seemed a little buggy but worked alright. Another feature they are going to add, is the ability to click and save an image in the slideshow.

See a 2 minute demonstration of how it works in this video below…

Admittedly this may not be the most practical tool, even though it looks amazing. But will these types of online 3D experiences become mainstream? This is cutting edge technology internet entrepreneurs must think hard about and implement this technology in useful ways.

Already, there are search engines using this type of environment. SpaceTime ( a 3D browser) and 3b rooms which is a 3D city with website storefronts. The newest is viewzi which acts a bit like PicLens but for visual searching. (viewzi is still in private beta but you can request access)

Try it out! Comment and let me know what you think and is there a future for this technology?

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Popularity: 10% [?]