I Am Very Tall

I like OpenTable a lot. I am frequently surprised by the number of people that don't know what it is, so I will explain. OpenTable is a site that allows you to make dinner reservations online, that simple. Particularly in New York, it's awesome.

OpenTable has an excellent property. Beyond having a model with wide applicability, it's collecting a set of data that almost no one else can collect, i.e. where and when people eat. I say almost, because the payments companies could probably do something like that.

OpenTable is now using that information to do something. Hopefully it's not the last thing that they do with it. This according to Grub Street:

The temptation to give their own places sky-high ratings has proven irresistible to many a restaurant owner — it’s like asking a portly, middle-aged man not to describe himself as "37" and "athletic" in an Internet personal ad. But according to tech blog Techcrunch, OpenTable's new Diners' Choice lists incorporate ratings only from people who actually made resies and showed up. The lists aren’t touted on the site yet, but being Internet geniuses, we found the beta version and the top five NYC picks: Per Se, Le Bernardin, Gilt, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, and Eleven Madison Park. It does say something that people who actually plunked down cash at these places had good things to say about them afterwards.

This is a good start. Let's hope they keep running with it.

Fred Wilson's take on why to use Disqus (the commenting system that I happen to be using):

1) Threaded discussions - When you want to leave a comment that is actually a reply to someone else's comment, you click on the reply link and the comment/reply is indented right under the original comment. On any comment thread/discussion with a lot of action, this is absolutely necessary to make sense of the discussion. I am shocked that a popular blog like Techcrunch doesn't have this feature in its comments. Certainly it's possible for commenters to use an @sign to signify a comment that is actually a reply, but threaded discussion is so much better.

2a) Email Replies - Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

2b) Email Replies for Commenters - It works the same way for commenters. If you leave a comment in Disqus and have given Disqus your email address, you will get an email when anyone replies to your comment. You can reply to that just like the blogger can. This is also a big deal and leads to much more active commenting and replying - ie discussion.

3) Shared profiles. As more and more blogs add Disqus (over 10,000 at this point), the profiles that commenters create in Disqus are shared across blogs. This is an important network effect that benefits the blogger and his/her community. For example, if you have a blog that is read by a similar audience as my blog, and you add Disqus to your blog, most of my commenters will already be recognized by Disqus the first time they show up in your comments. They don't need to set up a new profile. They''ll have the same avatar/icon and identity.

Also, there's a greasemonkey script that brings disqus comments and commenting right into Google Reader. You can get it here.

I really only have about 10 regular readers on this blog, so the marginal benefit of installing Disqus has been pretty weak. But, if I did have a real audience, I bet it sure would be neat.

Every time we have a primary, my traffic numbers roughly double. Why? Because of traffic to a post that I wrote a long time ago about Obama being a smoker. Here's what I had to say:

I would be pretty disappointed if this ever became an issue, though. There are so many more important criteria to think about (e.g. positions on the environment, Iraq, taxes, religion) that if this one actually gains traction, then my faith in democracy as a political system will drop by about five points.

Thankfully, it doesn't seem to have been an issue. Last that I heard, he'd quit the habit (bravo). However, I find it interesting that despite this, enough people are conducting searches about him smoking (example search terms include: "obama smoking" or "barack obama + cigarettes") that they are somehow finding their way to my blog.

Following the quote about frictionless media consumption, I wanted to say one more thing.

I used to like the Freakonomics blog. Levitt's posts I tend to find particularly interesting, Dubner is sort of whatever. I stopped reading them a while ago. Why?

A) Truncated RSS feed, which happened when they moved to the NYTimes
B) Bloated posting habits

In B, I'm referring to the fact that they've juiced up the number of posts that they produce on a daily basis. This is a case in which quality has a very clear inverse relationship to quantity. Before, the only stupid posts that I had to filter out were Dubner's. Since then, they've added a random unnamed editor (Melissa Lafsky?) that posts random links and articles, some other economist (who might actually be reasonable, if I bothered to read his posts) and Jessica Hagy of indexed fame. I now have to jump many more hoops to get to the content that I want. Subsequently, I've stopped paying attention and drifted off to other sources.

WSJ, consider this your official warning.

Overheard by Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com:

Eric Feng of Hulu, on the digital innovation panel:

Media is an impulse business. It's foolish to expect that the user is going to climb mountains and cross hurdles to get to that content.

This is very broadly applicable. Clearly it's the driving force behind Hulu, which is delivering television content to people when, where, and how they want it. But it's also the reason why wsj.com should go free, it's the reason why RSS feeds should never be truncated, it's the reason why people are buying music on iTunes rather than at Amazon.

Damn straight. When Salmon says "broadly applicable," I think he should double down and say that it's "super directly applicable" to any media content available on the Internet. I'm basically drowning in Internet media these days. Much like a ruthless college admissions officer, the spread in my selection criteria is narrow to the point where I'm looking for just the slightest of reasons to off each of the many candidates for my attention.

SAI has a college person reporting on why facebook growth is slowing. It's just another person's opinion and doesn't add anything new, but it sounds right and pretty much squares with my experience.

Facebook's new mass-market appeal has eliminated its niche appeal. Facebook simultaneously has begun to lose its novelty for some of the first-generation users and to drive them away with the same features that are meant to attract them.

Personally, I use Facebook a lot less than I did as a freshman. I haven't added any of the new applications, and for the most part, neither have my friends. SAI reported that the average Facebook user comes back to the site less often and stays around for shorter periods of time, and that correlates exactly with my experience.

If I get an e-mail notification that someone has added a photo of me or written on my wall, I'll go on for a minute to check it out, and then log off. I used to go on Facebook to procrastinate, and now I usually go on for a specific, short-term purpose. I wouldn't go so far as to delete my account, though (although I'm glad it's finally possible to do so); being a member is still a necessity in college.

If the platform were a little bit more flexible, I think I'd probably use facebook for everything that I do with this blog. It has a huge built-in advantage, in that it's built to constantly update my friends on what I'm doing.

Unfortunately, there are just some issues that I can't get around. The biggest is access control. There are totally random people connected to me on facebook, and I just don't want all of them to have access to everything that I write. Roger Ehrenberg wrote something way back when about wanting the ability to have three different profiles, one for friends, family, and colleagues that I think is more or less what I want. Although, I'd probably shift colleagues to acquaintances and just be as MECE as possible. In any case, it would be interesting to see the data and figure out what's actually going on up at facebook.

Link

I'm kind of amused by the whole Scrabulous flare-up. First, I'm amused by the founders. From Dealbook:

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, told The New York Times in an article published over the weekend that they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

Still, they are now taking in $300,000 a year and, according to Silcion Alley’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, with a 10- to 20-times-revenue multiple that would make Scrabulous worth $3 million to $6 million. Allowing for a what the blog calls “a hockey-stick growth curve,” it could be worth more than $10 million, Silicon Alley said.

But according to the publication, again citing an anonymous source, “the brothers want a ‘multiple of several times that’ $10 million, and the four corporations they’re negotiating with think that’s ridiculous.”

I think it's kind of awesome that these guys can take someone else's idea, post it on-line, and then demand tens of millions of dollars from the company that actually owns the game. I mean, if you wrote a book, and then I stole, published and distributed a copy of it, would it make any sense for you to pay me a huge multiple of what I might potentially make off of the book that you wrote? If only I could be so lucky!

I can see that the game companies are trying to avoid consumer backlash and are probably conscious of the negative publicity that the RIAA and the MPAA have received for suing MP3 downloaders. But Hasbro and Mattel are dealing with guys that blatantly ripped them off and are now making $300k a year off of their game, not with the actual consumers of the product.

I think it's also funny that even though the game companies have been treating the Agarwalla brothers with the utmost of care, that there's still a consumer backlash, with facebook groups planning to boycott sales of Scrabble. People are addicted to getting things for free, and they get pissed when someone indicates that they shouldn't have ever had it in the first place. In light of this, I'd be curious to see what the response would be like if Hasbro/Mattel put out an official Scrabble application that was similarly free and of good quality, and then had the courts shut down Scrabulous for violation of their IP. Would people be mad because of the use of the legal system, or would they be fine because they could still play Scrabble online for free?