Looking at FriendFeed’s today, envisioning a better future

July 23, 2009 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

The debate on the success and future of FriendFeed has recently heated up on the tech blogger community. The debate concentrates on 3 main questions: “What are the problems of FriendFeed?”, “Can FriendFeed hit the mainstream like Facebook or twitter?”, and “Does FriendFeed have superior features to other social media platforms?”. Before addressing these, I first want to focus on a more basic question:

What is FriendFeed?

I totally agree on this view that, in its core, “FriendFeed is a social bulletin board service… At the most basic level, FriendFeed is a forum”… However, FriendFeed’s strength lies at facilitating REAL TIME conversation around content. It’s a great tool to “listen” what’s happening around the world of social media. FriendFeed’s design enables content to go highly viral in no time.

Actually, feature-wise, FriendFeed is a lot like an “evolved” version of 4chan, which is a highly popular bulletin board used by the geeky internet subcultures. Just like FriendFeed, 4chan is mostly composed of picture memes & topic bumps (posts popping to the top of the page as people comment). Also like FriendFeed, 4chan is a highly viral environment: its community was responsible of many successful real-time coordinated attacks against other websites. Now, coming to other 3 questions…

What are the problems of FriendFeed?

Robert Scoble has a quite length post about this question, I mostly agree on his points, but I will discuss ones that matter most for me:

• Noise & quality: Comments that don’t add value sometimes dominate FriendFeed, and result in noise. Noise easily gets amplified, and gets out of control. User feeds and conversations may be dominated by few people.
• Usability & control: The GUI is cluttered, and full of usability problems. Few features exist to control the user experience, and they require a lot of effort . You can’t display the front page with comments hidden, for instance.

Actually, FriendFeed has another major problem, which is much, much more essential than these two, but I want discuss this in the context of next question:

Can FriendFeed hit the mainstream like twitter?

My short answer is that, in its current form and direction, no. It will surely get more popular, but unless management realizes a new strategy, it will never get to the extent of Facebook or Twitter. Why?

Friendfeed can’t hit the mainstream because, it simply lacks a “twist” – a powerful brand essence; and the current User Experience hinders its social value for masses. Let me clarify,  by taking a look at the popularization of 3 major social media platforms of the day:

• Initially, MySpace successfully captivated alternative music bands as a place “to create identity and have a place to point fans to“. Young fans followed, marked MySpace as “cool“, and created their own online identities.
• Facebook, successfully captivated the college students as a place to create identity, and gossip on each other asynchronously. The social value offered was relevant for everyone, and the student-only membership rule made it “charming“. So when they opened up the platform, it spread like a virus.
• Twitter, successfully captivated mega-celebrities where they’ve seen it as a place to have a relationship and dialogue with their fans. Asthon Kucher and Oprah made twitter “trendy“, so masses followed, and since the barrier to participate was little (140-characters) they realized that it’s a good tool to casually chat with acquaintances, and to meet new people.

On the other hand, which evengalist community FriendFeed captured? Tech early-adopters, bloggers, and geeks. It’s good to have these people on board, however, the problem is that the social value they get from FriendFeed isn’t replicating to masses.

Noise & usability problems identified earlier perhaps don’t bother tech early-adopters, but it does most others. Furthermore, people usually perceive FriendFeed as an aggregator that is mostly useful for heavy social media users, so its potential user base becomes more narrow than most channels feeding into it.

And finally, FriendFeed lacks a “twist” in its brand ID – what made MySpace “cool” to the young, Facebook “charming” to the masses. FriendFeed is not attractive to celebs either, since they can’t yet brand & customize their pages. So is FriendFeed crap? The answer lies at the following question:

Does FriendFeed have superior features to other social media platforms?

There are many things that FriendFeed does very well. It invented an absolutely magnificent way for listening to all the Internet’s social content in real-time. However, the problems I highlighted hinders FriendFeed’s growth, and giants like Facebook and Google easily mimick its functionality.

So where to go from here? FriendFeed needs  a two-folds strategy in order to have a better future.

1. FriendFeed needs a serious User Experience re-design: Time to get professional UX Consulting, and create a much simpler and smarter GUI. While keeping the virality of the platform, the UX re-design must create mechanisms to effortlessly keep the monitered conversations in control. So I’m talking about the noise and spam, which will become more serious issues everyday. Also, serious brainstorming  must be made with regards to how to add the desperately needed “twist” into the FriendFeed’s brand.

2. FriendFeed needs to also focus on the Business user by launching parallel services: In addition to tech early-adopters, I find that marketers increasingly use FriendFeed to keep the pulse of consumers and gather trends in real time. Furthermore, as the “Social CRM” concept gets more popular, businesses are increasingly willing to keep tabs on multiple social media channels.

There’s a great opportunity for FriendFeed to be an invaluable tool for marketers and corporate social media staff to monitor (and publish to) various social media channels. I’m directly quoting this “Also, as companies develop more metrics to measure social media success, FriendFeed could offer premium services with comprehensive analytics and reporting”.

Final Words…

Today FriendFeed is a “niche” product, and with the current strategy, it’s destined to stay that way. It could be OK to be niche, however I’m not sure if FriendFeed could generate adaquate revenues that way. I’ve outlined my and others thoughts with regards to how it may have a better future.

Am I optimistic that the change is coming? Not quite, since one of the founders recently claimed that “There is no doubt Friendfeed is the most advanced app on the Internet right now“. FriendFeed could be a quite advanced application for today. However, to make the transition from good to great one needs to be very open-minded and sceptic, rather than arrogant…

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Top 5 applications to "crowdsource" personal & small business innovations

July 21, 2009 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

Once upon a time, a creative mind came up with an idea. It was such a great idea that, it could have driven a  positive change for many people, businesses, and governments… Although he was proud of his idea, the creative mind never shared or acted on it. Eventually, the idea was forgotten, forever…

If this story was taking place prior to web2.0 era, this creative mind could be regarded as “unfortunate”. But today, he’s more likely to be regarded as “foolish”, because now the Internet gives us all the tools to turn our ideas into real innovations, small or big.

Do you have a business, a product feature, or a political reform idea? Even if you don’t want to develop it, share it with relevant people and spark a change. Or don’t stop there… Gather the needed resources yourself (funds, engineers, publicity..), and realize the dream. So, here are the tools:

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• Just like Zafer from Turkey, who imagines better city planning in Istanbul or Zac who wants to create superior web comics, you can use Borgger –the collaborative thought engine– to “shout” your ideas to all the world. Borgger community gives feedback to your ideas, thus help you to revise and make them even better. Perhaps, some like-minded ones will approach you  using the networking feature, and they will join the effort to make the dream a reality.

• coFundOS, on the other hand, let’s you realize ideas relating to a more specific domain: software applications. So do you have a project idea stemming from personal needs? Then post it on coFundOS, just like this user who needs an extension for the Thunderbird web browser. Then the crowdsourcing process starts. First, you collaborate with community to refine the idea and project requirements. Then, the project must be funded, by you and others who have the similar needs. Finally, specialists who can realize the project come in. They only get paid if the funders agree that requirements have been met. A promising concept, yet a big limitation is that the resulting software may only have an open source license.

• Wridea, created by Turkish entrepreneur Cem Hurturk, is a very simple tool that lets you document and organize your ideas,  as well as discuss them with friends that you invite. There’s also an interesting feature called “idea rain” which allows further brainstorming on your ideas. Plans are underway to make a major update to Wridea, which will add key functionality such as idea tagging, voting, and others.

• IdeaScale, is promoted as a business tool to turn customer feedback into business innovations, however, it can practically be used as a tool to discuss and refine ideas of any group or community. It allows voting, commenting, categorizing, and tagging the ideas, as well as marking them “under review” (i.e. can be used for bugs in software), “in progress”, and “completed”. Not all the functionality is free however, most require a monthly fee ranging between $15 to $100 per month. IdeaScale claims that their application is being used by Microsoft, US government, Mozilla Foundation, and others.

• Kluster brands itself as “a group decision-making platform that helps bubble up new ideas and see which ones fly”. It offers quite similar functionality to IdeaScale, however it’s not customer facing (because only users you invite can participate), and you can rate ideas in multiple criteria (i.e. rate a prototype with respect to “Layout”, “Color”, “Readability”). It also offers extensive analysis with regards to “how much support an idea has from who” and “whose support you’re really going to need to make the idea happen”.

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A major problem with most of these applications is that they’re either too new (so they lack some important features), or they lack a sizable community to make them useful crowdsourcing platforms. I could see similar applications that will be developed as a plug-in for existing networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, which could boost the participation.

Another shortcoming, is their ability to integrate into existing project management solutions, such as basecamp or activecollab. It would have been cool, if small businesses could use these tools within their existing project management solutions.

Now, I also want to give a few advice for the users of these applications.  Please don’t forget that, even the Internet makes innovation resources accessible for everyone, the chances that someone will simply adopt your idea and realize them are slim. You are the one responsible from your dreams and passions… Furthermore, don’t forget that tools are just tools. Often, software features mean very little, the biggest challenge is educating and motivating users to drive intended results.

If you’re in need of a more sophisticated crowdsourcing platform, wait for my article “Top 5 applications to  crowdsource enterprise innovations” where I will explore  Chaordix, InnovationSpigit, HiveLive, Kindling, and MindManager. These actually may have great personal & small business uses as well, however they are quite pricey, too!

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Turkish Internet Industry: A Market Research Primer

July 12, 2009 at 6:42 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

Recently, one of the clients that I’m consulting for asked whether I can provide any detailed market research reports about Turkish Internet Industry. Not only that there were no such reports available (even for purchase), most of available online information was not structured and distributed across tons of websites. Thus, I decided to write-up a basic market research report that combines all the meaningful information I was able to find online.

However, rather than only sharing it with my client, I decided to make it available online. Why? Because Turkish Internet Industry has a huge growth potential and is a very attractive for foreign investors. However, the scarcity of public market knowledge may deter Turkey to realize its full potential. I hope, this research I’ve gathered will facilitate further awareness and decision making.

1. High Level Facts on Turkey
2. Internet Penetration and Engagement
3. Total & Internet Ad-Spend
4. E-Commerce Industry
5. Social Media Trends
6. Business & Entrepreneurial Context
7. Top 10 Internet Properties & Top 20 Websites
8. Buzzed Turkish Start-ups and Success Stories
9. List of Resources

1. High Level Facts on Republic of Turkey:

• Turkey is an Eurasian country of 74 Million people, about 50% of which below the age of 25.
• It’s a member of G-20 major economies group, with a GDP growth rate larger than 5% since 2002 (USD 10,436 per capita in 2008).
• It’s also an EU member candidate country, having formal accession negotiations since 2005.
• Europe’s most populous city is located in Turkey, and it’s the beautiful mega-city of Istanbul.

2. Internet Penetration and Engagement

• The Internet audience in Turkey was the seventh largest in Europe with 17.8 million visitors (excluding traffic from public computers and mobile), making it the second largest country in Eastern Europe behind Russia (31.3 million visitors).
• When all the Internet users are counted in, Turkey’s Internet users add up to almost 27 million, making it the #11 worldwide.
• The Internet penetration rate was only about 37% in 2007, as compared to the European average of 59%, which makes it very promising for future growth.
• There were 7.5M broadband subscribers in 2007, which grew at a CAGR of more than 65% during 2005-2007.
• There were 66 million registered mobile subscribers in 2008, which consitutes a 7.3% increase from 2008.
• Turkish Internet population is young. 77% of users are between 16 and 34 years old.
• An avarege active user have spent 7.3 hours per week on the Internet during may 2009.

3. Total & Internet Ad-Spend

• Advertisers spent a total of USD 2.5bn in 2007 (for all media types), which is expected to grow to an estimated $4bn in 2012 or 2013.
• The share of Internet advertising in total ad-spend has soared to 5,5% in 2008 – a 33% increase from previous year.
• By 2010, Internet is expected to be third largest advertising area (7%), after TV (49%) and newspaper (31%)
• Also, total Internet ad-spend is expected to hit USD 250M by 2010.
• Google and Dogan Group capture a significant amount of advertising dollars by owning 4 sites each from top 25 websites. They’re followed by Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo in an order.
• Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Turkey chapter was founded on 2007, and it’s expected to start full traffic and behavioral monitoring of its member sites during 2009. This is expected to strongly boost advertising confidence and facilitate more precise targeting.

4. E-Commerce Industry

• Turks are behaviorally adjusting to buying online, total e-Commerce spend grew 90% on average each year during 2006-2008 (in local currency, Turkish Lira).
• Total e-Commerce spend is expected to hit USD 9 BN in 2009.
• Number of issued credit cards were 44 M in 2008.
• Top 3 e-commerce and marketplace sites, in an order of their total transaction volume are Gittigidiyor.com, sahibinden.com, and hepsiburada.com.
• Sina Afra, a senior eBay executive in Europe predicts the near future of the industry as follows:

• Strong entrepreneurship is expected along with market fragmentation, especially in the long tail.
• Turkish stand alone companies and brands can survive as independents, but are more likely to be aggressively pursued by larger companies.
• Some companies are expected to successfully pursue a multi-global strategy, perhaps using partnerships and acquisitions.

5. Social Media Trends

• Turkish people are#4 on active Facebook user country rankings list, after USA, UK, and Canda.
• Turkish social networking audience is reported to have spent 3.7 hours and view 427 pages on social networks in May 2009 on average.
• About 66% of active internet users  have indicated that they created a profile on at least 1 social website , and 40% indicated they have created at least 1 blog.
• Also, about 50% of active internet users indicated that they sometimes share their photos online, and 40% share videos.
• Most popular social networks in Turkey (in approximate order): Facebook, Mynet (eksenim), Netlog, Yonja, Sevenload, and Zurna. Blogcu and Blogger are the most popular blogging platforms.
• Forum-like community environments, such as Eksisozluk, FRMTR, and online worlds, such as Travian are extremely popular.

6. Business & Entrepreneurial Context

• Political and economic environment in Turkey is relatively stable since early 2000′s, due to single-party ruled government,  ongoing EU accession negotiations, and successful structural reforms.
• Lately inflation rate is low, and currency exchange rates are relatively stable. All these positive indicators made Turkey the 15th most attractive destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world in 2008.
• Government provides strong incentives for Technology companies and those who engage in R&D activities. Also, EU provides significant funding for technology projects that present socio-economic development prospects.
• Venture Capital scene in Turkey is fairly young, and quite unestablished. Prominent VC funds are Leventure, LabX, Ilab, and Golden Horn Ventures.
• “Angel” investors are very scarce in Turkish Internet Industry. Thus, events such as e-Tohum (e-Seed), constitute the only chance to provide young Turkish entrepreneurs with seed investment and mentorship.

7. Top 10 Internet Properties  in Turkey, Comscore / April 2009
(Ranked by unique users aged 15+ who accessed the Internet from non-public locations)

1. Google sites, 16M
2.  Microsoft sites, 15.5M
3. Facebook.com, 12M
4. Dogan Online sites, 10M
5. Milliyet.com.tr, 8.5M
6. Blogcu, 8.2M
7. Mynet, 7.8M
8. AOL sites, 7.5M
9. Hurriyet.com.tr, 6.8M
10. Yahoo sites, 6.5M

Top 20 trafficked websites, Alexa March 2009

1- Google Search Turkey, Search
2- Facebook, Social Network
3- Google sites, Search & Portal
4- Windows Live, Portal
5- Hurriyet, News
6- YouTube, Video Sharing
7- Milliyet, News
8- Mynet, Portal
9- Blogger, Blog
10- RapidShare, File Sharing
11- Yahoo, Search & Portal
12- Microsoft Network (MSN), Search & Portal
13- ekolay.net, Portal
14- sahibinden.com, e-Commerce
15- Wikipedia, Information
16- Travian, Online World
17- ImageShack, Image Sharing
18- R10.Net, Forum
19- Eksi Sözlük, Information
20- GittiGidiyor.com, e-Commerce

8. Buzzed Turkish Internet Start-ups and Success stories

• Yonja, once the most popular Turkish social network, attracted a lot of buzz by selling 50% of its shares to Mynet and TigerGlobal (a hedge fund) for a total of USD 15M. Yonja was founded by Kerim Baran, a Turkish Harvard MBA graduate.
• XING, Europe’s leading business networking platform acquired Cember.net for €4.36 M. Founder Caglar Erol has now become a serial entrepreneur, founding DoktorSitesi together with Kerim Baran, and Eumedia.
• San Francisco based Grou.ps, founded by Emre Sokullu, concluded 2 small VC rounds, and recently made its way to alexa top 5000. Grou.ps is basically a Ning competitor.
• Chicago based waves.tv (now defunct) attracted angel investment and lots of buzz  (such as CNET, Lifehacker, Killerstartups, bigumigu) with their photobooth and live reality shows. When webcam penetration rates stalled, so did VC’s, making waves.tv a history. Onur Kabadayi was one of the founders (that’s me).
• Turkish start-ups that recently started getting more traction and buzz include Knowband – an e-learning social network, Mekanist – an Istanbul city guide, yogurt – an upcoming virual world, messengerFX – an integrated web messenger.

9. Resource List

These were the resources that I relied on most while compiling this research:

1. Telecommunications Sector in Turkey,  by Turk Telekom
2. Turkey Internet Sector Overview, June 2009 (short), May 2008, by Sina Afra (also see this interview / Turkish)
3. Comscore Turkey review May 2009, Comscore Russia review July 2009
4. Ipsos Turkey review June 2009 (see the Engligh translation here)
4. McCann Social Media Tracker, March 2008
5. Invest in Turkey website

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How not to manage customer relationships – 1: Biletix

July 3, 2009 at 5:44 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

Few weeks ago, Istanbul hosted One Love Music Festival, featuring some artists that I love such as Royksopp and Tricky. Just in case the tickets may run out, I decided to buy them in advance. It turns out that I have do this through Biletix, a ticketmaster company which handles ticketing for almost all prominent Turkish entertainment events.

After spending 2 hours at the Biletix box office and on the phone with their call center, I came home without any tickets. It turns out that “the smart ones” who designed the CRM systems of Biletix made it so that one can’t buy a ticket using a credit card that lacks a “smart-chip”!?!?

Biletix call center claims that all credit cards must have these smart-chips – they claim there’s a Turkish legislation about it. I explained that I recently moved back to Turkey from US, and there is no such legislation in USA — perhaps in many other countries, too. Being a company that controls ticket sales for all prominent events in Istanbul, do you have the luxury to deny selling tickets to foreigners?

Everyone makes mistakes. No system can be perfect. Thus, when you’re building a system, you build convenient feedback mechanisms for users, so that you can continually improve the system. Furthermore, you encourage users to provide feedback (i.e. Tell us about your experience to win X). But it seems that those who created the systems of Biletix left no room for feedback.

You cannot talk to a “supervisor” on the call center. Agents claim that there is no supervisor. Also, the only way to file a complaint is writing an email to them. Bottom line —why should I bother to write a lenghty email when doing so will do me no good??

During my calls to Biletix, I experienced 3 dropped calls. Researching the company online, I found out that this is very common, in addition to frequent downtimes on their website. On eksisozluk and sikayetvar, two popular websites where Turks commonly talk about their negative customer experiences, I found hundreths of pages of complaints about Biletix: Agents hanging up on customers, uninformed customers about changed event times, not returning fees for the cancelled events… You name it!

Especially, sikayetvar.com is a formal venue to file product complaints and it lets companies to publicly respond to and address the complaints. Being a company that highly (!) values the feedback and satisfaction of their customers, Biletix customer service seemed to either ignore the complaints, or respond with a standard message that states the “customer has been informed with a letter”. I hope those letters included the good news of the complaint resolution!

So, how not to manage customer relationships? While designing your CRM software, come up with stupid requirements (i.e. smart-chips needed to process CC). Disregard peak-times while determining your hardware capacity. Create no means of feedback at the call center. When the customers reach out to you with feedback, don’t listen. Good job Biletix, apperently you have everything in action! (Ah, by the way, eventually a friend had bought the tickets for me! )

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Hello World!

June 30, 2009 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Blog ·  Print This Post

Hi everyone! After a 3-year break to blogging, I’m back

When I was authoring my old blog – neomarketing, I was initially a masters student at the Northwestern Univeristy, and  usually talked about the new marketing concepts and trends…

With the web2.0 boom (2006) and the rise of the new-generation start-ups, I enthusiastically started auditioning myself to the Bay-area start-ups. So I also started writing about the events I participated, start-ups that I like, their business models, and so on…

Later on, I found myself starting a startup with a bunch of CS grads, and, oh well — no more time for blogging, so I killed my neomarketing blog. I’ll admit that I didn’t much enjoy the way that the word “marketing” frames and limits my blogging practice, so who knows, maybe this was something good.

Years passed, much changed in my life (i.e. now I’m living in Istanbul), and finally I have some spare time to start a new blog. This one, I promise, will be more colorful, and will have a more “personal flavor” Here, I’m planning to share my random musings, and various thoughts on new-media, user experience, entrepreneurship, and yea, marketing, too. Eventually, I will also add my Professional Portfolio, a section on music and DJ’ing (yes, I love to play with my turntables) and some other personal stuff.

I encourage you to keep up with the updates: please check the widget on top-right and subscribe via RSS, emails, or Twitter. If you have any feedback about this site, I’d love to hear your comments. Finally, feel free to take a look at the About Section to learn more about me and what I stand for…

Cheers,

-Onur

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