Paul Lomax - Two Point Oh

For many of us, the thought of not having to create new usernames and passwords evokes images of the heavens parting and angels trumpeting.

One of the major talking points at last week’s Future of Web Apps Conference was OpenID - in fact Kevin Rose of digg.com announced at the conference that they are planning to adopt it.  Microsoft and AOL have both already announced their support.

I was going to do a write up to explain why OpenID gaining traction could herald the next semi-revolution, but over at the AOL developer network they’ve written an excellent article called OpenID and the Value of Connected Identity. In summary:

• OpenID allows you to securely log in to a website without having to create a new username or password.
• You can keep your identity information in the place you choose without trusting the next random start-up with your password - you can even run your own server.
• There’s no need to worry about your preferred login name not being available - it’s a URL so it is always uniquely your identity - eg http://claimID.com/paullomax.

And just to prove it’s going to go mainstream, The Times Online also has a write-up - although their strap includes a word that is almost the antithesis of OpenID [my emphasis] :

Companies are competing to introduce a single, secure login that would work for all bank accounts, shopping sites and other web activities.

I think OpenID really does have a future, particularly once it goes to 2.0 which promises to solve a few of the potential issues such as phishing and generally making the whole system a bit easier from a user perspective.

Building Online Communities

Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

Common themes and approaches in successful online communities

Common themes and approaches in successful online communities

• Keeping the dialogue going
• Personal use – eat your own dog food
• Involved personally in customer support (see craigslist)
  • Flickr greeted each new user

if you don’t know anybody at a party then you leave.” - Christine.net

• Experimental approach
  • ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if…’
  • Flickr started as a game, with the photo sharing as a side product
• The Power of Word of Mouth
  • Build-in ways to share – blog, rss, cut and paste URLs
  • Participants are media creators – blog, irc, wiki etc [threadless.com]
  • Instead of adding more features, add more ‘on-ramps’
  • Sms, email, jabber, web-based
  • Involve community in decisions
• Listen and be flexible
  • Let them create content
  • Put the audience in charge [see barcamp.com]
• Simple platforms to build on
  • Google maps vs Yahoo maps (55% of mashups on programmableweb vs 5%)
  • Create building blocks – tools, resources, techniques
  • Extendable – eg wordpresso
  • API – eg flickro
  • One function – twitter
• Community rewards
  • Flickr: free pro accounts, anniversary parties, schwag
  • Twitter: featured members, blogging
  • Threadless: share the revenue
  • Barcamp: give more privileges to the leaders

Setting fertile ground for your own community

Motivation [John Coate quote] - “A benefit that makes a difference to their lives”

Create a sense of community:

1. Feeling of membership
   • Creation of boundaries
   • Emotional safety
   • Eg Personal profile pages, ‘friending’, defining groups, invites
   • Personal and group self expression
   • [Seeing a lot of audience verticals eg mayasmom.com]
   • Greet new members, like flickr
2. Feeling of influence
   • Voice heard
   • Learning
   • Feedback responsiveness
   • Rule enforcement
   • Forum, chat, comments, blogging, email
   • Platform for expression
3. Integration and fulfilment of needs
   • Support from others
   • Status, expertise
   • Shared values
   • Feeling of competence
4. Hierarchy of needs (Maslow)
   • Physiological
   • Security / safety
   • Social
   • Self-esteem / ego
   • Self-actualisation
   • Eg Karma points, featured members, status rewards

• Users should form a shared emotional connection
  • Discrete / shared events / history / crisis
  • Offline needs

Above all else when building a community you need patience

The Changing Face of Online Communities and Communication

Edwin Aoki (AOL)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

• Email and IM becoming biggest online (web-based) app
  • See AOL IM on People.com
• Community based
  • Obvious: Blogging, boards, social networking
  • But also non-obvious: Reference (wikipedia), auction (ebay), commerce (threadless)
  • It’s not that new – webrings are old school
• ‘Disaggregation’ and syndication
  • Portal / destination site is dead.. [interesting point given AOL’s new position as a destination content site?]
  • People visit highly tailored and focused sites (long tail)
• The opportunity is to make things embeddable and mashable

Mention: pitch.mobi – social networking for mobile

Second life – “people are spending a lot of time online”

We have shared responsibilities

• Safe, effective
  • Most people don’t care about security, privacy, spam, social effect
• Decentralisation disrupts trust model
• Accessibility
  • Visually, audibly or motion impaired
  • Older generation
  • Different socio-economic groups
• Balance, between:
  • Power and ease of use
  • Social benefit and commercial interests
  • On and offline interaction

The Future of Start-ups and Web Companies

Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

Key factors of success for start-ups

1. Have a good idea
   • Invent a market (digg)
   • Destroy a market (eg craigslist)
   • Remove friction (eg youtube, skype) – eg cost, tech
2. Have a business plan
   • (But be prepared to throw it out…)
3. Have a revenue model
   • Youtube was burning $1m a month on bandwidth…
   • Myspace was making $25m a month before google deal
4. Build it cheap, test the water
   • Research is bad? [Maybe if you have an early adopter audience...]
5. Avoid high burn rates
   • Stay hungry!

AIME.ST – digg for music, price varies by popularity, defined by downloads

• Solve a real problem
• You must (as founders, devs, etc) blog
• Create buzz – and if you can’t, then rethink your product (not your marketing)

Opportunities in 2007

1. Offline / Online
   • Adobe Apollo lets you create offline apps using html, ajax, etc
   • Firefox 3.0 is rumoured to include offline capabilities
   • Websites that access the filesystem
2. DRM for music/tv/movies
   • Anybody who can crack this has it made
   • Joost is working on it
3. Data and service portability
   • Teqlo, Ning, Pipes
4. Mobile
   • Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect at AOL and Chris(?) Wiles, Product Manager at Google agree

The Media Guardian reports that the Internet casts shadow over glossy trade, with comments from IPC’s CEO, Sylvia Auton; Neil Robinson, digital development director; and Eric Fuller, managing director of IPC Ignite.

If you build it, will they come? If you have a great product, then perhaps - but that’s no reason not to have a traffic acquisition strategy in place.

In this week’s Media Week, Richard Eyre suggests that

The mood of the web now is that if it’s good enough, people will find it and share it.

Eyre also points out that:

The perfectly logical argument goes that old media owners have the competitive advantage of cross-promotion from old media to new. But each of the brands above [Yahoo!, Google,YouTube, Skype, Craigslist, eBay] has acheived its fame with no such rich uncle to get it started.

Ironically enough, Eyre himself made that very argument - that traditional media have a competitive advantage from cross-promotion - in his column about a year ago. Perhaps things have changed - or perhaps you do still need a strategy for traffic acquisition.

Over at Scoreboard Media, they have compiled a list of 8 Simple Steps to Build Traffic For Your Internet Start-up. Of their points, my favourite is Understand the Cost of Traffic. I’m always harping on about this - but my comments are often mistaken for a dislike of paid-search. It’s not that I don’t like paid-search - I’m just not sure why you’d want to drive traffic that you won’t retain and that that costs more you’re monitising it for.  I’ll leave the full rant for another day, so here’s what Scoreboard says:

4. Understand the Cost of TrafficThis is especially important for media and E-commerce sites. You should do everything in the early days to create a large traffic data sample. You need to know what it costs to generate specific types of organic search, paid search, email, offline, direct navigation, social media, etc., traffic. It’s impossible to create an intelligent monetization or brand strategy until you know what is coming down the funnel. Then you let the math dictate how you fill the funnel. As much as I love Search, sometimes renting an email list or running a TV spot yields a better converting audience cheaper. Math will prevent you from drowning in your own Kool Aid.

Following the external annoucement last week, a few trade websites have covered my recent appointment as digital publisher:

• IPC Connect appoints digital expert - mad.co.uk
• IPC Connect appoints Paul Lomax as digital publisher - New Media Age
• IPC appoints Lomax to digital role at women’s titles - Brand Republic
• InStyle to launch in travel size - Media Week
• And last but not least: IPC Connect appoints Paul Lomax as digital publisher - FloridaBoating.com (!?)

Both New Media Age and Brand Republic appear to have mixed me up with Sarah Summers in this paragraph, which you will note did not appear in the press release:

Lomax will oversee “general strategy” across Pick Me Up, Chat, Now, Women’s Own and the newly launched Look, among others. Lomax’s first responsibility will be to oversee the roll out of Look’s website, which is still at soft launch stage.

I’m not overseeing “general strategy” nor is it my first responsibility to roll out Look’s website…

Oh, and the mad.co.uk report (which you can only see if you subscribe) gets the Look URL wrong - it’s Look.co.uk, not .com.