Went on sunny holiday and had a think. Main conclusion I came to was that there is a popular application still to be made out of ‘search-on-search’. Other conclusions were:
- Look2Look was for…everybody. Everybody actually means nobody. This new application will be for my friends. If they like it, others will too.
- Look2Look needed everybody to know about it before it could work (i.e. big critical mass). The groups application must need just a few users (e.g. my friends) for it to work.
- There is no point investing in advertising, fancy styling, logos or adaption to Facebook or mobile until the application is being used and talked about by my friends.
- Any effort to ‘look good’ must not be at the expense of accessibility or usability. People care more about whether it works on their old computer, slow connection, tiny screen or Braille display than ‘prettiness’.
Had some more thoughts on the ‘groups application’ . Here they are:
- Its primary purpose is to bring groups of people together based upon common expressions of interest (i.e. searches).
- It’s different from Look2Look in that, for any given search (keyword set), it brings more than two people together.
- It is different from other group applications insofar as it doesn’t really distinguish between creating a ’search’ and creating a ‘group’. This should reduce the barrier to creating a group.
- It has occured to me that the groups application can do the job of the dating application which makes the latter redundant.
- Have often struggled to find a name for ’saved searches’ with comments attached. Have tried ’searches’, ‘groups’ and ‘moots’. New contender is ’search-groups’.
I have asked Matt to start building the ‘groups application’. In order to encourage him, I am taking a more ‘hands-off’ approach:
- minimising interference
- instead of change requests, provide feedback from the user’s perspective
- establish a weekly checkpoint meeting
I attempted learning MySQL and PHP myself but lost heart when, after 7 days of trying, I failed to fix one simple bug in Look2Look.
Look2Look is still online but is, effectively, shelved. I have asked Matt to fix the bugs and put it on Facebook but it is lower priority than building the ‘groups application’.
Some general tips about domain names:
- Names are important. Facebook paid $200,000 to change from theFacebook to Facebook.
- It’s the most important thing about you application that gets passed from person to person.
- You can change your name without upsetting your business because it is easy to forward people from your old URL to the new URL. This means you can go live with a name you’re unhappy with and improve it once you’ve acquired a better one.
- It’s nice to have .com but not essential. Most people find websites via Google rather than typing in the URL.
- Don’t change a name unless a new name comes along that ‘blows it out of the water’.
Some rules that I have tried to follow when searching for a good domain name:
- The domain name is available (.com)
- Is a made up word (we want to give it our own meaning) or does exactly ‘what it says on the tin’
- Doesn’t mean something bad in another language or slang (e.g. Hungarian for ‘fuck off’)
- Short (two syllables or less)
- Memorable
- Likeable (people not embarrassed to pass the name on; worth noting that I had trouble remembering Google when I first heard it)
- Trips off the tongue (French have trouble with ‘th’)
- Phonetic (no silent letters – ghost/gost, plough/plow)
- Is a verb (‘to google’ versus ‘to amazon(?)’)
- Incorruptible (‘halfkin’ corrupts to ‘foreskin’)
- Unique (will quickly rise to top of search results)
- No numbers acting as words because it sounds cheap (e.g. Furniture4less, Phones4U)
Currently, the name for the ‘groups application’ is Mootka. It’s the best I can do for the moment. Some feedback that I have received for Mootka:
“It’s shit” (Jason)
“It’s brilliant” (Matt, Andrew, Nick)
“Sounds like a new thing that come on the internet thatyou might want to look into” (Shanks)
Pull a face (Mum, Alex, Joe)
“Sounds like Russian vodka” (Ashworth)
“Still like ‘mootka’ more than other options. I am too used to feel this word ugly now, but it still sounds extraordinary. Like the term ‘reciprocal search’ too.” (Tomoko)
“It’s OK” (Ashan)
“Sounds more interesting than others” (Cathy)
“Interesting. Sounds ‘tribal’. Uniqueness is a good thing – easy to find.” Mal (added 03 Feb 090)
Some feedback for Look2Look:
“I like it” (Jason H-R, Alex H-J, Mum, Mohammed)
“Numbers in name sound cheap” (Alex M)
“Dating agency” (Tomoko,Patsy)
“No good” (Victoria)
“Doesn’t register” (Ben)
“Sounds like optician” (Cathy)
Read a fascinating article about Craigslist, a very successful web application. Here are the key facts:
- in business for 13 years
- 10 billion page views with 400 million using the site each month
- worth $5bn
- 567 cities, 50 countries, 6 languages
- 25 staff
Below, Oliver Lindberg interviews Jim Buckmaster, CE of Craigslist, in .Net magazine, August edition 2008.
.Net comments:
Online classified advertising site Craigslist is run more as a public service than for profit.
Maximising revenue has never been part of the company’s motivation and it’s how it survived the dotcom bust.
Craiglist only charges for recruitment ads in the San Francisco Bay area and 10 US cities, and brokered apartment rentals in NY City.
Craiglist doesn’t even have a logo, but instead uses the peace sign as a favicon.
Jim Buckmaster comments:
“It’s important for us to be a profitable concern because we don’t want to borrow money. We don’t want to have to sell shares.”
“Everything we do and every decision is made from the perspective of the users of the site.”
“We don’t consider [text ads or banner ads] because users aren’t asking for [them].”
“We’re not fans of unnecessary complexity.”
“Our design criteria really only includes things lke usability and accessibility.”
“Any time you add a newer user interface technology, you tend to exclude some small percentage of people from using your site [...]. Another design criterion is page load performance.”
“Design, from a user perspective, does little more than distract and obstruct them from what they’re trying to do.”
“There are thousands or tens of thousands of businesses that offer classifieds, maybe hundreds of thousands. Looking at what other companies are doing is mostly time wasted. Our time is best spent concentrating on what our users are asking for and trying to do the best we can for them.”
Screenshot of Craigslist:
Screenshot of upgraded Craigslist upgrade:
