A low down on google swirl

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Pranav Bhasin

When google announced a preview of google image swirl I was compelled to check it out. After all lifeblob is also in the business of photo discovery and it is always good to know what other companies are doing in this area.

The preview is neatly built in flash and presents a very interesting visualization. This reminds me of a similiar visualization they did earlier for a “wonder wheel” view of navigating through search results. The part that I did not like though was that exploration ends very abruptly – perhaps this is because they are running on a limited data set and will not be a problem in the final version.

That brings me to the question – what is google trying to achieve through this? Is it just a ploy to counter the advances of microsoft in visual search or is there a bigger agenda behind this?

My verdict: There is a bigger agenda here. Read On.

1) Searching through images is not an easy task and given that google’s key focus is search, they would want to establish a big lead in the image search market as well. So far, google image search attempts to identify duplicate images so that they do not present duplicate results to the user. With this kind of a visualization however, google lets you explore variants of the same image so that you have more freedom to choose the one that fits your bill.

2) This is an excellent way to provide more visual detail around a searched topic. Imagine a wonder wheel kind of icon next to your regular search results, clicking on which opens up the image swirl widget and lets you see photos related to a search result.

3) Search is intent driven – you type in a few keywords and then choose a result that matches your intent. Google has used this information very effectively for its regular search to verify that the results being shown match the user intent and also to improve its data mining algos to continuously improve the results.

Images suffer from a terrible handicap that they don’t have any metadata to organize them and google typically relies on information around the images, tools like image labeler and some level of image analysis to understand what they are about. By presenting the results in a visualization like this and watching user interaction patterns, google will get excellent information about images and to improve their image search.

4) Navigating through images this way is very enjoyable and gets people to spend more time on google properties. Now, that may not necessarily align with their standard way of measuring search effectiveness ( its counterintuitive, but google wants you to spend as little time as possible on its search pages, which is their metric for measuring how good their results are ) but hey, the more time they spend here, the more time they are off Microsoft’s visual search and thats a good thing . Plus, the metrics that apply for text based search may not apply for visual media search anyway.

What do you think about this?

Facebook click fraud?

Posted on November 16, 2009 by pranav

Last week, we launched a couple of new features related to photo discovery on lifeblob and I decided to run a campaign on facebook to drive some traffic and see how people are responding to the new stuff.

Today, I looked at the reports and I was shocked to see the rampant click-fraud going on in facebook. And based on what I hear from others who have run similar campaigns, facebook seems to be least bothered about putting any checks on it.

Here is a report from the facebook dashboard for the campaign between 6th Nov to 14th Nov. As you can see, the total number of clicks that we got charged for are 4469.

However, my google analytics dashboard for the same campaign only accounts for 2372 visits from this campaign. Where did the rest of them go? And it is not an abberation on one of the days – the graph below will tell you that actual visits are consistently off by almost 50%.

Have you noticed similar abberations in facebook ads? Leave a note in the comments and lets come together and get facebook to do something about this.

Also, pass this link around so that if any of your friends are running campaigns on facebook, they also become aware that facebook is charging them double for what they offer.

Forum Nokia Developer Conference 2009

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Pranav Bhasin

FNDC09_Logo This is the time for technology events in Bangalore. The latest one that I heard of is the Forum Nokia Developer Conference 2009 that is happening on Dec 7, in Bangalore at Hotel Taj Residency.

This year’s event promises to be very special with live demos, real-life mobile application stars who ‘wowed’ the world with their mobile applications to win fame and fortune, and much more. Also, explore how Nokia’s new Ovi Store ensures developers have easy access to publish applications and content to millions of Nokia devices through a unified publishing channel.

Get to know the dynamic technology platforms for creating truly compelling user experiences. Get to learn new skills, new connections, and new ideas to create tomorrow’s technologies. You can find more details at http://bit.ly/FNDC09 .

And last but not the lest, there is a Nokia N97 up for grabs too. So check it out!

He is a great Guy

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Pranav Bhasin

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave. He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!

Business cards and networking

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Pranav Bhasin

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?

Thinking about usability

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Pranav Bhasin

Yesterday, I was discussing a simple feature with Vishwas when the discussion veered towards the very subjective domain of usability. After spending almost an hour in the discussion, I thought to myself if there is a way to think about usability when implementing a feature.

Let me put things in perspective here. The feature being discussed was “The ability to allow a user to select a facebook photo or upload a photo in our facebook lifeblob application ?” Vishwas already had a gallery like view for the facebook photos and needed to figure out how the upload gets integrated in the view.

Vishwas: Lets add a file chooser element and an upload button above the gallery. That way, we get both the options on the same page.
Me: Sure. What happens when the upload button is clicked?
Vishwas: The photo gets uploaded and gets added to the collage.
Me: Hey, wait a min. Isn’t that confusing? I just thought that the photo would get uploaded and show up in the gallery.
Vishwas: Why do you want the user to go through an extra click? If the user did not select a photo in the gallery, he/she obviously wants the uploaded photo to get added to the collage.
Me: Well, yes – but that’s not what the text on the button tells me. It just says “Upload”. Plus there is a gallery below which intuitively makes me feel that the photo will get shown there.
Vishwas: But thats an unnecessary extra click for the user. The user will drop off if we make him/her do that.
… and this discussion goes on and on.

Two quick observations from this discussion:
a) As developers, we tend to optimize everything. Vishwas is not trying to find out the most intuitive way for upload – he is trying to find the path that goes through the least clicks.
b) There is a fear that getting the user to do that extra click will make them drop off.

The user perspective:
A user thinks very differently. Based on initial screen, a user has an expectation set before he/she performs an action. If your implementation deviates from that expectation, you are asking for serious trouble. In simple words, if you call the button “Upload”, you should only upload the photo and show the user a message indicating whether it was successful or not. Or call the button “Upload and add to collage” in the first place and don’t set the wrong expectation by showing a gallery below it.

As for reducing clicks, everyone seems to be obsessed with it these days, but in my opinion it is not such a big deal ( of course, I assume that you are not adding extra steps that are not necessary ). As long as users understand the value of an action and have belief that your app will do what the action says, they will be happy to do not just one, but a few extra clicks. When you skip steps, you shatter this belief and in most cases, this is what causes the user to drop off.

Conclusion:
Usability is plain common sense when you look at your application dispassionately from a user perspective. When in dilemma, err on the side of giving user more information than less.

Photo management is an open problem

Posted on September 9, 2009 by pranavbhasin

Today, I came across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and I couldn’t agree more.

A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.

To me, a photo management solution is about discovery, photos connecting with each other and navigating through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.

Imagine taking a shot of “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.

The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.

We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.

If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, I would love to hear from you!