Pinyadda's Blog

Social Network Content and the Lincoln MKS

2009-11-09T08:24:00.002-05:00

As I was working on the whitepaper I am writing about the four "value components" of social networking sites (SNS) last night, I came across a situation while perusing Facebook that I had to write about now rather than wait to discuss it in the paper. The topic is regarding the content that SNS play host to that serves as the "real estate" upon which marketers pay to place their advertisements on and around. As you will see from the two pictures below, one a screen shot of an ad for the Lincoln MKS on Facebook and the other a screen shot of a Google search results page for the Lincoln MKS, the "real estate" is quite different.

As you will see, I have edited out the lewd gesture in the screen shot from Facebook, however if you have any imagination at all you should be able to guess what the picture shows. While in most circumstances this certainly is not content that would have a place on our corporate blog, I decided to go ahead and post the picture for learning purposes to prove a point and because if you speak with anyone from my generation they will tell you this kind of content isn't far off from being par for the course on Facebook. In fact, this was one of several pictures along the lines of this kind of content that I came across in the same visit I considered using for this post.

Now just about anyone can see why the real estate on the Google search page might be more desirable than the real estate on the Facebook page for Lincoln as an advertiser here. For one thing, when advertising on Google you aren't trying to sell a four-door sedan with Weir leather trimmed seats and an EcoBoost V6 engine to someone who is trying to figure out why this girl hasn't untagged herself from this photo yet, let alone posted it in the first place. On the Google page however, the real estate is all high quality search results with matching information to the advertisements.

I like to think of content as the mechanism by which web properties channel and drive certain user behaviors. For example, Amazon wouldn't be great at selling books if the content on their site did not contain information about books, such as reviews, pricing, vendor information, reading recommendations, etc. So after seeing the Lincoln MKS ad, I decided to go through Facebook and mark down all the page types with ads that I could find. Below is my preliminary list, please add pages I may have forgotten in the comments.

Profiles (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, and any other application tabs)
Groups
Pages
Applications (Including Facebook's core apps such as links and notes)
Friend/People lists
News Feed
Search results pages

What I would be interested in seeing is the data on which page types have the highest click through rates on advertisements. My guess is the third party apps with specific information types driving a particular user behavior have the highest click throughs. Evidence of this could be the fact that Zynga, the second biggest advertiser on Facebook behind AT&T, spends approximately $2.5 million a month on Facebook advertising. Since users actively play Zynga games or other gaming apps while on Facebook, an ad for a new application would align with the content on those pages more directly than most other ads and pages found on Facebook. Again, I cannot say this for sure as this is simply a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess).

I believe moving forward allowing advertisers to have more control over what types of content their ads are paired with will be a good thing for social networking sites, specifically Facebook, in terms of developing better targeting for reaching users. What are your thoughts? What pages would you think are the best for reaching users through ads? Or do you think I am entirely off on this? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Indexing All for you

2009-11-06T15:44:00.003-05:00

Well this week's post will be short and to the point. We have recently finished a major milestone in general content indexing across the United States top news sites by circulation. The current growth focus is targeted at diving deep into specific industry verticals (ie. venture captial, advertising, healthcare...) and guess who gets to do most of the work...YOU. Well not really, but we definitely need the voice of our users telling us what they read everyday. I will rely heavily on our elite beta users and even the new guys to drive what content Pinyadda will index. This is your chance to personally receive exactly what you are looking for on the internet. Perhaps you just have a suggestion for a new tag or even a genre of content, we'll make it happen. Please post a comment or send me an email (greg at pinyadda dot com) and I will respond and get what you want indexed live right away.

New sites this week (all from users):
zerohedge.com, chrisdixon.org, paidcontent.org, moconews.org, contentsutra.org, paidcontent:uk.org, npr.org, designsponge.com, smittenkitchen.com, csmonitor.com, weekly standard.com, and commentarymagazine.com

Until next week,

sligs

ps. pinyadda is currently averaging 30,000 trusted content items a day

New Look and a Look at What's New

2009-11-05T10:37:00.009-05:00

We unveiled a couple of new features last week and though I mentioned them briefly in my last post I thought I'd take a minute to dig a little deeper. What follows is description of each feature and a little insight into the though process that went into them.

1) Universal Search. While search is a no-brainer for almost any website, it was a little different for us because we have so much content in our system and so many different content types. Page specific search functions will remain in some places, but we placed the new search bar in the header so that it's always available. You can now search all content types at once or specify a content type using the dropdown. Small feature, big usability improvement.

2) Email Notifications and '@' Replies. Instead of sending emails to users bugging them to come back to the site, we wanted to figure out how to give them something valuable that made them want to come back. You can now mention other Pinyadda users in your comments on any news item using the '@username' convention, and they'll receive an email with a link to the article and your comments. You can also choose to receive email updates when another user replies to a comment you've made. Our internal experimentation with this feature went great (we really liked it) and we've already noticed a big jump in user engagement since bringing it live.

The core idea for Pinyadda came in part from the need for a better way to manage group email lists where lots of great content in the form of both links and commentary were being shared. These features solve a big part of that problem that's something we're really happy about.

3) While it's not exactly a new feature, we've completely overhauled the Initial User Experience, including a brand-new Getting Started guide, a handful of prompts to help new users understand our core functionality, and host of interactive help icons all around the site. Making new users feel at home and letting them know that we're here to listen and help is huge priority for us and we'll continue to work hard to make each user's experience the best it can be. (If you're a user, feel free to email or call me at any time. I mean it!)

4) Again, not really a feature, per se, but we made a host of UI Changes and Language Adjustments to make things more clear around the site. We continue to abide by a "simpler is better" mantra when it comes to UI design and while we're not all the way there the latest changes are a big step in the right direction. We've included more visual cues, simplified navigation, and improved aesthetic consistency. If you noticed the changes, let us know what you think!

In the coming weeks you can expect to see even more improvements, including all new pages for adding People, Sites, and Tags, the ability to email items to friends outside of Pinyadda, and number of integrations with existing social networks. Suggestions and feature requests are always welcome. You can send them here.

If you're already a user, thank you. If you're not yet a user, head over to the site and sign up for an account. We can't wait to hear what you think.

Indexing Speed & Real Time Content

2009-11-02T11:52:00.012-05:00

First of all, I should mention that I'm a few days late in my post. Halloween is our favorite holiday here at Pinyadda, and I was entirely too busy playing tricks rather than treating you to Friday morning with Sliggity. So here's my blog post for Oct 30.

As you know, the hype about the interweb nowadays is this thing dubbed "real time." In context, I guess it makes sense - real time, meaning right now or when something really happened. But what if that thing never really happened and someone simply made up a rumor or published bogus content. My biggest qualm with this term is services like Twitter and oneriot utilizing it so heavily. Yes, when someone tweets about something it shows up right away on Twitter and with a slight delay on oneriot. However, I am more concerned with actual 'real' time 'content', meaning that it has value and can be verified. We'll come back to this topic shortly.

Next item; indexing speed. I am running a test (as we speak) in order to measure Google's content indexing speed and the time lapse until I receive a Google Alert. I will clock the time from the moment a content item is posted from this blog until it appears in Google search results and I receive my 'Pinyadda" Google Alert. While I am doing this, you can entertain yourself with some side reading. Here is a post by Charles Heflin back in 2008 about clocking the speed of content indexing (I like how he touches upon page rank influence). To touch upon Alltop, an RSS-powered aggregator that (in their words) allows you to answer the question "what's happening?" Well what's happening when? Yesterday? 5 minutes ago? Right now? Well their answer is once every hour...boring.

Now take Pinyadda's backend, which I like to call a 'real' time 'content' indexing service. I like it because you have to focus on real time, we are indexing new content within minutes of when the item is published, and then focus on real content, which is trusted and valuable to you.

Long enough here are the answers you have been waiting for:

2 minutes for search*
still waiting on google alert. UPDATE 2:52pm, what is the reason for the delay here?
not a controlled test b/c google owns blogger, will try again next week.

New sites this week:
The Blade, Tulsa World, Dayton Daily News, Press-Register, Akron Beacon Journal, Syracuse.com, Kentucky.com, Delaware.com, The News Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Oakland Tribune, The Morning Call, Philly.com, The Advocate, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, The State, The Post & Courier, The Journal News. Phew that wraps up the top 100 News Publications by circulation.

What's next? Tune in on Friday morning, Pinheads.

Cheers,
Sligs

A Response, New Features, and the Vision Arriving

2009-11-02T11:24:00.006-05:00

Last week, Andrew Davis of Tipping Point Labs wrote a post called "Start Up Overexposed: Too Early, Too Far, Too Fast" that used Pinyadda as its primary example. I encourage everyone to go and read the original post, but in lieu of that commitment, here is Andrew's main point:

"...something I noticed early in my interaction on the new platform highlights one of the major concerns I have with early-phase new media channels: the integration of features that increase reach too fast, too early."

Before responding to this comment I'd like to thank Andrew for his honest critique of our product. One of the best features of new media and the social web movement is the ability to post honest reviews and the ability of small firms like ours to respond. Andrew's keen eye and expertise in the field is something that can only make our company better, and it's feedback like his that is the single most valuable metric of user engagement and satisfaction we have.

Andrew's main critique stemmed from our (now-obselete) set-up guide that asked him to import his contacts before becoming acquainted with the site. If I understand his points correctly, he argues that this sort of 'exposure' has the potential to taint the experience of the initial core user base by extending the product's reach ahead of its development - the internet equivalent of letting too many people taste the secret recipe before it's been perfected.

It's a great point and one that we've wrestled with for a while now as we decide when to push the product, what features are ready for implementation, and what the consequences of each of these actions may be. On one hand, it's very important not to poison the well, so to speak, by inviting people to an experience that's not fully formed. On the other hand, there is simply no substitute for having outside users tell you what works and what doesn't. In our business, particularly from a product standpoint, the work is never done. There will always be cleanups and feature enhancements and new functionality to experiment with, and there is at least as much art as science in the timing of these releases and updates. It is, as Andrew points out, a delicate balance "between inviting constant and sustainable new user adoption without risking too great an exposure to an audience that is not ready to adopt your new concept."

It's something we think about every day, and I'm happy to announce a couple of new features and other product improvements that we think greatly enhance the user experience on Pinyadda and will allow us to open our doors to more people. For the record, we've been in closed Alpha phase for several months now, and access to Pinyadda has been restricted to those we've manually approved on a user-by-user basis. While Andrew's point are well-taken, we have been pretty diligent to avoid over-exposure in this early phase of the product. Andrew was personally invited because we value his expertise in the field and knew that he would provide constructive feedback.

The set-up process is something I've written about before on this blog, and was where Andrew found his main rub with the user experience. I'm happy to say that we've completely overhauled the process, including a repositioning of the invite/import process he talks about. Coupled with a new landing page, the design focuses on providing simpler calls to action, giving users more information about the actions they're performing, and presenting the value of the product to the user, not the other way around.

We've also introduced a universal search function that allows users to find what they're looking for quickly and intuitively, whether they're looking for content, people, sites, or tags. It's the beginning of a series of changes designed to make navigating the system simpler and faster. Also new are several email integration features including the ability to send links and comments via email using a simple "@" operator, and the option to be notified when someone responds to a comment you've made. Both of these features have already begun to influence the way users are behaving by increasing engagement around high-quality content. Discussions are becoming more robust, comments more insightful, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

This kind of interaction is the real beauty of the Pinyadda product - the ability to engage in real discussion around content that makes people think. Seeing people begin to use the product to facilitate these discussions is an incredible experience, and one that makes the vision stronger and the will to execute that much more intense.

Once again, thank you to Andrew and all of our other testers who continue to help us make this product and this company a positive influence in the world and in their lives. Information is the currency of the knowledge economy, and we're thrilled to be playing a role in that economy that helps people stay informed, express their opinions, and enrich their world view.

If you've got any critiques or comments you'd like to share, or if you'd like to be a test user, please let us know in the comments! We've also enable Disqus commenting on this blog so that you can sign in with one of your existing accounts and track your comments from across the web.

Expanded Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook; Value and Trust

2009-10-28T17:45:00.011-04:00

The other day as I was searching to find the end of the Internet (no luck yet but I am still convinced it is flat), I came across a post on Danah Boyd's (@zephoria for you Twitter-heads) blog titled Some Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates. Clearly many other people saw this article as it has over 5,000 clicks tracked by bit.ly and from reading the comments it was apparent that the post resonated with many duel Twitter/Facebook users, as there was a litany of interesting comments about people's personal use cases. Most of the conversation was focused around the types of crowds people interact with on the different networks, with my favorite description coming from Ian Kennedy who quoted Marry Hodder, "While Facebook is like having a dinner conversation with friends, Twitter was like getting up on stage at a nightclub on open mike night." This is a great analogy and I think most people who use both networks would agree with the comparison.

What I find to be interesting about this Facebook vs. Twitter issue has less to do with who people are interacting with on the networks and what information they are sharing, but rather which types of relationship people find to be more valuable and more trustworthy. Now I know this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges since the two networks are used for sharing different information types (for the most part) with different networks of users, but let's forget about these two issues and simply analyze this based on the two different graph designs of the networks.

It is commonly known amongst SNA geeks and many people who study social sciences that the most famous SNA paper published to date is The Strength of Weak Ties written by Mark Granovetter in 1973. Granovetter found that weak ties, basically more distant friends in his study, were positioned to be sources of new information more so than close friends. This idea comes down to the fact that you generally know about the same things as the people you spend a lot of time interacting with, and that new information typically disseminates through your weak ties (technically bridges), people who interact mainly with people outside of your network, who would be sharing different information.

Now considering the two social networking site's (SNS) graph designs from a high level without getting into the different ways different people use the sites, let's agree for arguments sake that one typically uses Twitter to connect with weak ties and one uses Facebook to connect more with strong ties (even though we all have "friends" on Facebook that we aren't really friends with, but I will save the argument that a perfect SNS would have an infinite amount of relationship types for another day). So Twitter = weak ties, Facebook = strong ties. Immediately, the discovery of new and valuable information is more likely on Twitter, making it more valuable right? Well not so fast Ghostrider, some not so recent data (2008) for the real-time world that we live in found that far and away the most trusted source of information was "an email from someone you know", with 77% of people validating this referral type. On the other hand, only 43% of people actually trust the social network profiles of people they know, making me wonder how much they would say they trust the information they receive from people they don't technically know on a social networking sites (SNS) - i.e. a weak tie.

When Granovetter explored the topic in 1973, he considered only symmetric relationships as to not complicate his formal math experiments for his thesis (if you want to get into that go read the paper). Considering the expanded opportunity of developing new relationships on the Internet, it doesn't really make sense to define a weak tie on a SNS the way Granovetter defined them in '73 based on 1) amount of time 2) emotional intensity 3) intimacy (which he defined as mutual confiding) and 4) the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. Anyone who uses Twitter follows people with whom they are not intimate (based on Granovetter's mutually confiding restriction) and by nature and purpose the services aren't reciprocal, but the amount of time and emotional intensity for the follower could still be high, so how weak or strong really are the ties on these networks - sigh, the grey area expands.

This can all be boiled down to this: do you typically value a referral of some sort of information more from a symmetric "strong tie" on Facebook or from an asymmetric "weak tie" on Twitter? (Hold the information type constant in each situation). And secondly, do you trust a referral more from one tie more than the other? And without getting into semantics, yes the two are different (I did just kind of get into semantics huh?). Obviously there is no right answer considering it is somewhat of a subjective measure and a more complete argument would have to take into consideration different information types being shared, but I invite you all to share your own sentiments on the matter.

It is without a doubt in my mind that as we move forward and SNS's evolve we will begin to make sense of some pretty amazing structural, "macro-level" patterns that happen in our society because of the data we will be able to extract from the microscopic relationships within social networks. I have said it before and I will say it again, we are only at the tip of the iceberg on this stuff.

Value Components of a Social Network

2009-10-25T12:56:00.001-04:00

Let me start by following Sir Sliggity's lead and introducing myself. My name is Chase Garbarino and I am a one of the Co-founders here at Pinyadda. I will be blogging frequently about a number of topics including news about Pinyadda's progress, our company culture, the social media industry, and a series of posts focusing on social network analysis (SNA).

As many friends of Pinyadda know - I am really into social network analysis. Some of you have been unfortunate enough to run into me at a bar and get locked into a conversation about measuring edge values of relationships on different social networks (social networking sites actually). Let me apologize right up front to those of you who have found yourself in this conversation at the Beer Garden on a weekend night - I often forget my passion for SNA is not the most exciting drinking fodder for others. As I have so astutely realized that most people who are interested in SNA with regards to online properties such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinyadda are not usually the people I am watching the Pats, Sox, B's and Celts with, I am going to channel these discussions through our blog here at Pinyadda.

I have recently been reading a lot of blog posts speculating over the valuation of Twitter, most notably Robert Scoble's post that pegs Twitter's valuation to be between $5-$10 billion. Scoble certainly generated a lot of buzz, with more of the comments and reactions seeming to suggest that most people think he is over shooting the valuation a bit at this time. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has taken a stab at valuing a large SNS and stirred strong debate (see TechCrunch's SNS valuation formula here, and an old post from Om Malik about Facebook here that will make you chuckle), this particular post pushed me to share some of my thoughts on the valuation of SNS's that I am writing a whitepaper about in the coming weeks. I personally believe that the more exploration, discussion and debate we can stir up around this topic, the better. While social media has reached critical mass with 83% of Internet users now using social media, we are merely at the tip of the iceberg on what we know about social media use and effective social media measurements will evolve an incredible amount in the coming years.

In an effort to help us develop a better understanding of SNS's and better ways to measure different forms of value on SNS's I would like to start a conversation about what I call the "Value components" of SNS's. Value components are simply the different components that every SNS has that combine to make up the overall value of of a SNS. After several months of on and off research, I have come up with four value components - they are:

User Behavior
Content
Microscopic network design - the design and types of relationships of a SNS
Macroscopic network design - the overall design, structural activity and use of a SNS

The focus of my upcoming paper outlines in more detail these value components and the next set of measurements I believe we should start exploring in order to have a better understanding of where and how value is generated within SNS's. While this will be an ever evolving project, I would greatly encourage and appreciate the contributions of others as I share my thoughts and findings on this blog.

What are your thoughts on the recent valutations of Twitter and the history of valuations of SNS's to date?

Welcome to IA

2009-10-23T12:52:00.008-04:00

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don't use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We're constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor's Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs

The Social News Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.

2009-10-16T14:20:00.006-04:00

There's a post on Mashable today titled "5 Ways Social Media is Changing Our Lives." The whole post is worth reading, but there's one section in particular that I want to focus on, called "Where We Get Our News." In that section, author Soren Gordhammer says:

"Friends on social media are increasingly becoming people’s trusted sources of information, even more than search engines."

Earlier in the post, he makes this astute observation:

"After all, you didn’t choose the editors at newspapers and other publications, but you did choose the people and groups that you follow on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks."

I speak for the rest of the Pinyadda team when I say that we couldn't agree more. There are no better sources of information than the people we know and trust. Long before social media people were talking to their neighbors, their coworkers, and their friends and family members about the latest news. They went to socials and coffeehouses and barbershops to talk about events and ideas. In large part, they derived their opinions and viewpoints based on these social interactions.

The rise of social web has had a profound impact on the way this behavior is being carried forward in the twentieth century. First, these social interactions are no longer limited by geography. This allows people to connect along common lines of interest from all over the world, turning what were once diffuse and segmented conversations into robust dialogues. Second, the friction of sharing information and ideas is getting lower and lower. What used to require the purchase of a newspaper, the clipping of an article, and the US Postal Service now requires a copy, paste and send or post. But it's amazing how fast even that simple action becomes outdated. I've lost count of the times I saw an article I thought was worth sharing, but the act of copying the link and emailing it or posting to a social network was too high a barrier - either because the physical act was a distraction from my workflow or because I wasn't sure the article carried enough value for my recipients/friends/followers.

Social media is a great way to share information, but it still requires us to go and get that information somewhere else like a destination page or an RSS reader. Information sharing and information seeking remain distinct, and somewhat disconnected, activities. Combining these behaviors in a platform that allows users to customize how and what information they consume and who they share it with is the next step in using social media to share information. Twitter wasn't ever designed as a news distribution system, and while it's helped us see the value of people as news sources, it's a makeshift solution at best. (It does, however, work real nice when you're looking for quick-fire reactions to breaking news and are less concerned with validation). The real revolution in social news is a system that was designed from the ground up for information gathering and sharing, and we're building it. Come by 110 Chauncy sometime and check out - we'd love to know what you think.

How do you get your news? What would your ideal social news application look like? Let us know in the comments.

Usability vs. Ease of Use

2009-10-07T17:07:00.004-04:00

In a Web 2.0 world, we want everything to be customized. We want our web applications to know who we are, where we are, what we like, even what we're doing right now. There are a few techniques that designers and engineers can use to get this information without asking us - IP targeting, for instance - but they remain rather blunt instruments, and often leave us feeling violated, as if an evil internet spy was lurking just beyond our gaze.

The solution is to put the customization in the hands of users, allowing them complete control of what information they share, giving them oodles of preferences and settings, and making sure they can change everything at a moment's notice. Seems simple enough, right?

The problem is that most users won't ever find all those switches and dials, let alone know what to do with them or what mix of this setting and that toggle will result in Goldilocks-style contentment ("a this privacy setting is just right..."). There are a few us who enjoy this kind of masochistic settings torture, but we're not average (or stable). For everyone else, there's the dreaded user set-up guide, a ubiquitous necessity that's found its way into every website you've ever signed up for.

At Pinyadda, we're all about customization. It's our bread and butter. But we're also committed first and foremost to making our user experience completely painless. The place where these two goals conflict most intensely is in the set-up process, and it's where almost all of our product attention has been directed lately.

The most difficult part of designing any component is finding the ability to put yourself in other users' shoes, to imagine what it's like to be anyone but yourself. This is multiplied almost tenfold in the setup process, and the consequences of getting it wrong are similarly heightened. If you can't set it up, you can't use it. Imagine how much business Ikea would lose if they made you put the furniture together before you bought it. That's the kind of thing we're dealing with.

So how do we bridge this gap between usefulness and ease of use? Between customization and speed of adoption? It's a tough nut to crack, and something that probably takes a few failures to get right. A few basic principles we've learned (sometimes the hard way):

- Make as few assumptions about the user as possible. When you work on something every day, it can be hard to make yourself think like a brand new user. It can almost never hurt to make things twice as simple. Then make them twice as simple again.

- There's no substitute for user feedback. It's tempting to stay inside the bubble and iterate on your own designs, but the only real metric you have for usability is users. Seems so simple, but it's always harder than you think to put your designs out there for critique. Try to remember the adage to "have strong opinions, that are weakly held."

- Speed is good, but quality is better. Brevity is important in a setup guide, but quality of user experience shouldn't be sacrificed to achieve it. Would you rather get to mediocre experience fast, or get to a great experience a little slower?

- Structure makes people comfortable. Telling users where they are and giving them a clear understanding of what's next is important. Showing the steps up front and giving clear feedback when each one is completed goes a long way toward helping people feel comfortable and relaxed instead of anxious and annoyed.

There are probably a lot more, but we'll stop there. What do you think? Can you think of a great setup guide and why you liked it? Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to setting up a new service, or any tips for how to make it great? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Press Release - Pinyadda wins DEMOgod Award

2009-09-24T14:50:00.005-04:00

PRESS RELEASE

Pinyadda selected as one of seven DEMOgod Award Recipients at DEMOfall09

SAN DIEGO, California (September 23, 2009) - Boston-based startup Pinyadda was selected as one of seven DEMOgod Award winners at the DEMOfall09 technology conference. Seventy total companies from a pool of over 1,000 applicants were invited to present at the gathering, dubbed "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology."

Pinyadda (www.pinyadda.com) is a personalized and social content aggregation system that allows users to customize and aggregate content from multiple sites and blogs and then uses a system of social referral to help highlight and share relevant articles.

DEMOgod Award winners are selected based on their “outstanding potential to succeed in the market while motivating and exciting the DEMO audience...DEMOgods have a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off it's most compelling features, and differentiate it from other products.”

Pinyadda is currently in private beta. The company has been financed to date by a private angel investor and is seeking another capital infusion to help propel its development of revenue products. The company sees a number of potential monetization opportunities, ranging from advertising to premium accounts to micropayments. Says Garbarino, "We're excited to have the product in the market and we are getting great feedback from our users. People are suggesting new use-cases for Pinyadda every day. We have had content publishers, advertisers, academics, businesses - pretty much anyone who has to manage large amounts of information - show interst in putting Pinyadda's technology to work. At our core we're about helping people organize and filter the information that's important to them."

Pinyadda was founded by Garbarino and Kevin McCarthy, fellow Hamilton College graduates who previously ran The Campus Word, a national collegiate media outlet that staffed over 100 of the top collegiate journalists from over 60 colleges and universities. Austin Gardner-Smith (Head of product), Greg Gomer (Head of Operations) round out the Pinyadda team.

Contact:

Austin Gardner-Smith

austin@pinyadda.com

508.289.1616

###

Pinyadda, a Personalized and Social News Aggregator, Launches in Private Beta at DEMOfall09

2009-09-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

Here is the link.

Pinyadda, a Personalized and Social News Aggregator, Launches in Private Beta at DEMOfall09

PRNewswire
SAN DIEGO

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Boston-based startup Pinyadda announced the private beta release of its product, described as a personalized and social news aggregator, today at DEMOfall09.

Pinyadda leverages a user's social graph to help deliver a personalized stream of content that uses social referrals to help the most relevant content rise to the top. Chase Garbarino, the company's CEO, says Pinyadda's technology represents "the next step in a natural evolution" in the way people get their internet content. "The emergence of the social web has taught us that our friends and colleagues are the best discovery engine ever conceived. Pinyadda just brings the content and the people together in a simple, easy-to-use product."

"There are big opportunities for companies like Pinyadda that are re-purposing the social web into other verticals, in this case news aggregation," said DEMO Conference Executive Producer Matt Marshall. "Pinyadda uses the social graph to go a step further, delivering an incredibly personalized content experience."

Garbarino and co-founder Kevin McCarthy founded The Campus Word, a national collegiate media outlet, in 2006 while juniors at Hamilton College. The impetus for Pinyadda came out of their Campus Word experience and what they saw as "an extreme information overload problem." The Pinyadda team consists of the two co-founders as well as Greg Gomer, a 2007 graduate of Babson College and Austin Gardner-Smith, a 2008 graduate of Boston College.

About DEMO:

Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.

SOURCE Pinyadda

SOURCE: Pinyadda

Web site: http://www.pinyadda.com/

What's New for DEMOfall09

2009-09-20T11:30:00.005-04:00

Finally. After a summer filled with long hours, two complete user interface overhauls, plenty of backend headaches, and a lot of soul-searching about how best to explain what we are and what we do - we're ready.

This post comes to you from sunny San Diego as we prepare for DEMOfall09. We couldn't be more excited to meet some of the best new companies in the world and see what they're doing. But we'd be lying if we said the most exciting part of all this is having a product that works and telling everyone we can find about it.

While this is certainly not anywhere near the end of our development, it does mark a big milestone for the company and gives us a great base from which to figure out where we fit in the market, how we can best serve our customers, and where we need to focus our efforts going forward. Whether people love us or hate us, we know that all of the feedback we'll get over the next couple days is invaluable. Whether you're going to the conference or not, we'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email, tweet us, or leave a comment here.

Here's a few of the notable changes we've made:

1) New user interface.
We stripped it, toned it down, and stripped it again. Pinyadda is about providing quality web content to our users, not about giving them a visual feast every time they log in, and this new look give the content you want without any distractions.

2)New homepage.
The new homepage features a module that allows anyone to get a glimpse at the content that's being shared on Pinyadda without logging in. This is the first step in a number of changes we'll be rolling out that opens up the content experience to everyone.

3)Real-time indexing.
We were close before, but now we're there. Content is coming in hot, and we like it that way.

Yesterday was the first chance we all had to really play with the finished product as end users, and I have to say the experience was great (Finished, of course, is a relative term...). Lots of great content, easy navigation, and conversations flowing. We're a little partial, but it's truly amazing to see how far the site has come over the last couple of months. Anyone who saw the original prototype can attest to that.

We flew out yesterday, went for a swim in the Pacific, and grabbed a room at the nicest HoJo we've ever seen to get our internet on and grill each other on the pitch. Today we're headed to the Longboard Bar & Grill to watch the Patriots game (at least one of us will have a close eye on the race at Louden, too) and then it's back to the laptops for all the last minute tweaking and de-bugging we can handle. We'll be posting at the end of each day of the conference to talk about our favorite presenters and give general updates.

A big thanks to all of our team members, advisers, friends, parents, and users. We couldn't have come this far without you. You can follow the conference on twitter using the hastag #demo09. If you're going to be in attendance, you can find us at booth 65.

Defining Quality Content

2009-09-02T13:26:00.008-04:00

As the media landscape continues to change and we move away from traditional forms of content like daily newspapers and monthly magazines, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish quality content from the barrage of information that's available everyday.

At Pinyadda, we've made a commitment to present our users with content that's "high-quality" - but like many others, we continue to find it incredibly difficult to define a set of standards for internet content. Before we try to answer that question, let's go back to the beginning:

Used to be there were newspapers - big newspapers. At least one in every city. What they printed was considered fact; it could be reasonably asserted that leads had been followed, investigations had been performed, sources checked, editors consulted. With relatively few exceptions, these papers represented the definitive source of information for businesspeople, laymen, and housewives alike. They print it, you read it. Simple game.

Over time we saw the reach of radio and television extend, but the mechanics remained the same. It took lots of money and smarts to run a station or a channel, and the barriers to entry remained high: formal training, infrastructure, and approval from the media cohort. One could still reasonably assume that these sources met at least some minimum standards of professionalism and journalistic integrity - otherwise they wouldn't be on the air.

Yet once the internet gave everyone the ability to become a publisher, these assurances vanished altogether. Certain old media stalwarts (and some new ones, ProPublica and Politico come to mind) have successfully established brands that serve the purpose of validating the quality of their content. So create a powerful brand, problem solved. Instant legitimacy.

But what about the other 10,000 sites that are producing quality content on a daily basis? The small-to-medium blogs with a couple of writers who focus on local and niche issues, and probably do it better than the big brands - what about them? Here's where it gets tricky.

From our standpoint, there's a very fine line between providing readers with the information they want and maintaining high standards of quality. So we have to establish some benchmarks - a job much easier said than done. There are a few basic metrics:

Traffic:
Unique visitors over time.
Pros: Gives an accurate approximation of how many people read and/or trust a given web property.
Cons: Quantity doesn't necessarily denote quality.

Staff:
Does the source have professional (paid) content staff?
Pros: Professional staff indicates a seriousness of purpose that definitely increases the likelihood of quality content.
Cons: Tough benchmark for many sites to meet.

Frequency of Publication:
How often does the source publish?
Pros: Acknowledges and recognizes obligation to an audience (or perceived audience).
Cons: Publishing poor content every day doesn't make it good content.

None of these are decisive metrics, and none can be used in isolation. Furthermore, each of them ignores the most subjective aspect of the debate: quality is, in many ways, in the eyes of the beholder. Who's to say that the NYTimes is of any higher quality than TMZ? Both have lots of readers, both publish oodles of content, both have full-time staff. And for some readers, TMZ's content might be far more interesting.

We tend to say something along these lines: "Nonsense. The NYTimes is a much higher quality source than TMZ. It's all fact-checked and very serious. TMZ is nothing but unfounded gossip." But is it really true? What about the Op-Ed section? The blogs? Suddenly the two sites seem closer than we thought. The example is a bit of a stretch, but the concept holds.

And what about a well-reasoned, thoughtfully-prepared, and oft-published blog that has little traffic? It might well be the most "quality" source available on a given niche topic, but if no one reads it, who cares? It a blog post falls in the internet forest, does it make a sound? More importantly, should it?

These are hard questions, and ones that have vast implications for the future of media on the internet. Without a way to define legitimacy, the big boys will continue to feel the air sucked out of their advertising revenues, as more and more traffic defects to the little guys. But it's our hope that finding a way to create a set of standards for quality content will raise the bar a little for everyone, creating a media ecosystem where everyone is encouraged to do more with less, not more of less. In other words, finding a way to grant legitimacy to sources who deserve it can both improve margins for those that meet expectations, and encourage others who might be capable of high quality content production to step up to the plate a little sooner.

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

2009-08-10T11:24:00.006-04:00

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.

The State of Information Architecture

2009-07-22T11:18:00.005-04:00

A large part of what we're doing at Pinyadda revolves around information architecture - the way content is organized on any given website. In many ways, the internet resembles the largest library ever created, harboring a collection of books, articles, photos, songs and videos in unfathomable quantity. Yet unlike the modern library, where every item is classified and sorted in a universal manner, the internet library is made up of millions of walled repositories, each with its own unique method of classifying content.

Classification is one of the most important parts of granting identity to any person or object - if I don't know what you are, it's nearly impossible for me to determine who you are. We classify things in our everyday life in a subconscious manner; it's how we make sense of the world around us. But if you've ever tried unsuccessfully to find a certain article on a certain webpage, you've experienced firsthand the limitations of the way things are classified on the internet. Was that article in the Culture section, or the Arts section? Maybe it was Entertainment? Or was it Local?

We have a few solutions to this problem, the first and most obvious being search, and most of the time it does the trick. You know what you're looking for, you type it in the box, and viola, up pops the article. Sometimes. Other times it's there, but it's buried 30 items deep in the results, and still other times it's not there at all. And most importantly, search requires that you knew what you were looking for in the first place.

What we're moving towards is a system of tags, like the ones at the bottom of this post, that allow us to label items instead of classifying them. This approach gives us a far more flexible way to categorize information while allowing it to remain organized and findable. By creating semantic relationships between tags, we can begin to infer implicit hierarchy instead of explicitly stating it. If all items tagged with "internet" are also tagged with "technology," but not all items tagged "technology" are also tagged "internet," we can begin to infer that the internet is commonly thought of as a subcategory of the Technology. But unlike defining a strict hierarchy that asserts Internet to be a subcategory of Technology and nothing else, inferring this relationship allows us to make reasonable assumptions without ruling anything out. Tags let us keep our options open.

But there's a catch. In order to infer useful relationships between tags, we need to place certain limits on their scope. A thousand tags loosely related to each other is far less useful than ten tags strongly related to one or two others. In the same way, a few tags used many times is far more useful than many tags used a few times. In order for us to identify patterns that make it easier for us to find information, we need to define the scope of our available tags. In short, too few tags limit different users' ability to find information, but too many render the system nearly useless . It's a balancing act, and a delicate one.

At Pinyadda, we feel strongly about creating a system that makes as few assumptions about individual users as possible. Everyone is different, and everyone's information consumption preferences are different. It's our job to make sure that we do as much to help you find the stuff you're looking for without getting in the way. The current state of information architecture on the web inhibits everyone's ability to get the most out of it, and it's a shame. The content you want is out there, somewhere. We hope we can bring a little method to the madness of finding it.

A New Perspective

2009-07-08T14:39:00.003-04:00

After a great meeting last night and an even better whiteboard session this morning, we've made a couple significant changes in the way we're going to be positioned going forward, and I think all of them are great decisions that were made for the right reasons.

The product itself and our development roadmap has changed very little, but we realized that we had a different animal on our hands than we initially thought. The good news is that this characterization solves a more palpable problem, creates more value for both users and publishers, gets us to revenue and profitability faster, and is a much more sustainable business plan. All very good things.

In the meantime, it allows us to work smarter while we work harder by focusing on more specific tasks, and helps us get a product in users' hands a lot sooner. With a clearer vision of what our product is and does, we're even more determined to go all out for the next couple of sprints and push this thing out the door.

We've reorganized our information architecture, made the site much easier for users to navigate and build their Pin, and changed our attitude about content to focus more on quality and organization and less on flat out quantity. Our new mission is simple, intuitive, and clear: to connect people in meaningful ways around the world's most valuable content. We hope that Pinyadda can become the way content and consumers connect in the age of the social web.

Execution and the Thrill of Self-Reliance

2009-07-06T14:39:00.004-04:00

When you have a great idea on your hands, it's really easy to keep pushing the boundaries of what might be possible. In a startup, it's one of the most important things you can do - more than a few companies have gotten their big break because they kept pushing forward, innovating, thinking up crazy schemes about how to their product could take over this or that market, be tweaked to fit this or that need. And often those other implementations turned out to be the real gold - PayPal and Twitter are the first examples that pop into my head. Pie in the sky sometimes works out great.

But what makes the entrepreneur different from all the other crazies with great ideas is one simple thing: execution. In business, just like in sports, execution is the simple key to success. You've to have a good gameplan, a good team, and be well prepared, but in the end it comes down to how well you play when all the marbles are on the line.

For us, it's time to take a little break from dreamworld and get right down to it. Now that we have a working product with almost all of our core functionality intact, we're concentrating on making it work exactly the way we want it to, with no exceptions. Until now, we've been able to get away with saying "of course, we'll obviously fix that before release." Not anymore.

And to a certain extent, that's a really gratifying feeling, because we're all invested in the product and want to make it great. Unlike a hulking corporation, we can see a problem and fix it with our own two hands. There is a direct correlation between how hard we work and what kind of results we see, and it has nothing at all to do with financial compensation. It's about taking pride in your workmanship and owning the success or failure that comes along with it. That's the real point of addiction in startups, and it's why successful entrepreneurs go back and do it again even after they've struck it rich. It's the thrill of self-reliance and the unqualified gratification of knowing you've built something wicked cool that actually works.

And on that note, it's time to get back to work.

Information Agriculture

2009-07-03T11:44:00.006-04:00

Users are the bread and butter of any type of social network. They are a network's component pieces: its publishers, owners, critics, advocates, and consumers. And every one of them is a real person with distinct needs, interests, and habits. For a network to be useful, it must cater to the needs of an incredibly diverse community and provide value for a host of different user types.

For the information addicted web-worker, Pinyadda's value is almost immediately apparent. It takes the work out of using your RSS reader. Anyone who uses an RSS reader regularly can understand that. But the RSS reader remains a tool of the few, and not the many. So how do we provide value to the other 90% of potential users?

The answer is simple: we provide access to relevant content they were previously ignorant of. We like to think of the Web as an egalitarian paradise where any piece of information is available to any user, but the reality is that getting more than cursory value from the Web requires a skill set and technological understanding that represents a pretty high barrier to entry. Most users visit search engines to find information, email to communicate with friends and colleagues, and social networks to establish connections with others. But beyond these relatively simple uses, the value of the web is lost on the average user. Massive amounts of data that could help users make sense of the world around them exists, but it's diffuse; scattered across thousands of websites and blogs, buried in directories and hierarchies and archives.

If you know exactly the type of information you're looking for, search works great. If I want to find the address of a business, the name of public figure, or a bus schedule, you can't beat static web search. But if I want to use the web as a news portal to find out what's happening the world around me, search is complete failure. It's a static resource in a dynamic world.

We can do better. There is a way to break down the walls of knowledge and training that keep most users from getting the most out of the web, and we're building it. While Pinyadda's appeal to the uber-user is important to us, it's the ability to harvest data on the web and deliver it to the average user that will make Pinyadda both successful and profitable.

Think of it like information agriculture. We're your new farmers.

Walking the (Bottom) Line

2009-07-02T11:30:00.004-04:00

Yesterday's Alpha release coincides with a big week of business for us when we return from Saturday's festivities, and it got me thinking about the need to balance the internal and external aspects of our company. One of the hardest things we have to do as a small team is find the right balance between product and production, by which I mean spending the right amount of time on product design and development and the right amount on networking, marketing, positioning, and pitching. It's a tough line to walk but one that I think we're doing pretty well with.

As a team, we're in agreement that we should spend as much of our time and energy developing the best product we can. Without that focus, we're nothing more than words on a page. But the need to raise capital isn't going away, and as a group we understand the importance of keeping our eyes wide open when it comes to the market opportunity and the way we position our business. Yes, we think Pinyadda is the coolest thing in the world, but it's first and foremost a business venture that demands our constant scrutiny and focus.

The great thing about our team is that everyone clearly understands both sides of this equation. Each product innovation represents a new business opportunity, which in turn leads to more product improvements. When done right, the interaction between business strategy and product strategy creates a positive feedback loop that drives both innovation and ROI.

As much as preparing for meetings with investors may seem like a chore to some entrepreneurs, it's an amazingly useful exercise. Considering an outside perspective is crucial to avoiding the groupthink trap, and formulating our value proposition forces us to constantly evaluate our long-term vision and make sure our short-term actions are directly related to achieving those goals.

As entrepreneurs who are absurdly obsessed with our idea, our initial urge is to think of raising capital as a necessary evil that will allow us to get back to work on the product. But in reality raising capital is great a way to always be asking ourselves the question "is this idea worth the work we're putting into it?" As long as the answer remains a resounding yes, it's more likely that both users and investors will find value in our product. If not, it's a sign we're doing something wrong and need to re-evaluate the direction we're heading in.

At XSITE last week, Tilman Genross, the CEO of Adimab, kept hammering away at an idea that I think is often overlooked by startups. The first thing to do, he said, is to figure out exactly what the problem is, and then ask yourself if there is real value in finding the solution. The short answer is always "of course, why else would I be working on this?" But being honest with yourself and regularly holding your own feet to the fire is enormously important.

We happen to think that the disjointed and scattered nature of the huge amount of content on the internet is a real problem, and we see enormous value in creating a system for people to get that content in a manner that is relevant and entertaining. And we hope we can pass that value along to our users.

Alpha Rising

2009-07-01T09:48:00.009-04:00

After months of product development and testing, our Alpha is being loaded to the live site right now, and it's really exciting. We've come a long way from that first spark of imagination, and we still have a long way to go. But it's the little pieces of gratification along the way that make the startup ride worth taking. And today is one of those days.

This update includes a whole host of stuff that is just plain cool. All the functionalities of our core product are here, along with a bunch bug fixes and UI updates that make using Pinyadda a truly enjoyable experience. The difference between this version and our prototype seems infinite, and the product is really starting to come into its own.

A new, way more intuitive Build page, better Pintax navigation, and host of back-end improvements are all up and in working order, and we're pumped. When we look at the big picture these seem like small changes, but when we put on our user hats and try it out we realize that these improvements make a big difference. It's an encouraging and exciting milestone, and as we start to refine the product, the tech, and the business model, the amount new opportunities and ideas seems to be multiplying almost daily.

With all this comes an ever-expanding to-do list which has required us to begin developing and implement some key workflows and processes that are already helping us to stay better organized and be more productive with our time. Scheduling our time better, setting and achieving measurable small goals, and using collaboration technologies have been a key focus over the last several weeks as we begin to think about growth phase. While we're still really small and everyone is definitely wearing multiple hats, we're very aware that streamlining our processes and workflows and documenting our systems will be a key component of how fast we can ramp things up and how much we can squeeze from each dollar of investment. Two of our key organizational philosophies are agility and resourcefulness, and making sure that we can get new people up to speed quickly and adapt to changing conditions are tasks that affect every aspect of the business.

As we ramp up this summer we're making it a point to share our experiences on this blog, and we're always interested in hearing what you have to say. Post a comment, drop us a note, tweet us, whatever. We're also going to schedule a couple of external work sessions where anyone can drop by and shoot the breeze about tech, Boston, Pinyadda, or pretty much anything else. We'll post those times and locations up here and tweet them as well. Hopefully we'll get to meet a bunch of new folks who are down with what we're doing and love the internet in the same freakish way we do.

Today's a great day for Pinyadda and for us, but we're already logging bugs, testing features, and thinking about ways to make it better. With every milestone reached comes a new starting point and a new opportunity for improvement, and we can't wait to get moving on the next round of stuff as we head toward Beta. It's part insanity, part geekiness, and whole lot of obsession with our product and our vision.

A Better Way to Get Your Information

2009-05-13T21:54:00.010-04:00

Good news - by the end of the week/early next week we hope to have Pinyadda up and running for a select few people to check out. For those of you who don't eat, sleep and breathe all things Pinyadda, let me give you a quick update on what it is we're doing here...

A while back, Kevin and I (along with our pal Greg Rogan, now of Expat Teaching Recruitment, a kick-ass recruitment agency focusing on the placement of qualified teachers and trainers with top international companies) were transitioning from our last startup, CampusWord, when we began speaking about the potential for a smarter, more efficient way to find and consume the information we want and need everyday. As we discussed the possibilities for our relatively vague "smart system" (enter our other partner Greg Gomer), we came up with a few ideas of what this system should be able to do:

Search for information for us even if we're not looking.

As Google announced earlier in the year, they have identified over a trillion unique URLs online and the number is climbing quickly. With so much valuable information available, we could sit around searching all day and still not find every piece of content or information out there that would be valuable to us... so we need a system to do it for us.

Deliver information without having to be asked.

Brad Feld, Co-founder and Managing Director of the Foundry Group, explained this best in a recent blog post, "In 20 years, I expect we will snicker at the idea of having to go search for information...typing the same stuff into little boxes over and over again." Basically, no one can possibly know what to search for all the time and we believe that to receive information, a user shouldn't have to continually ask the system for it... it should just be there for us whenever we want.

Understands the unique nature of every person's information needs and adapts as these needs change over time.

Why should you and I see the same search results when we enter the same keyword phrase? Why should any two people see the same results ever? Why should you even see the same search results today for the same term you searched yesterday? You shouldn't! Because after all, information is absolutely unique and infinitely dynamic. Think about it... absolutely unique - meaning no person "computes" any piece of information exactly the same as another person. Infinitely dynamic - meaning at no point in time will your information needs be exactly the same as they were a moment ago (or at any other time for that matter), nor will you "compute" a piece of information exactly the same as you did at another time, nor will your information needs be exactly the same at any time... follow my drift? In brief, the system needs to know each unique individual user and grow with them.

I think I have gone deep enough for our first blog post here. Our team will continue to describe different parts of our vision for Pinyadda here and we look forward to receiving your feedback! Till next time...