'Cross The Breeze » cloud

Registration is easy, what about activation?

Kris Hoet — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:08:27 +0000

Something bugs me. Not a day goes by or new usage data (preferably in the form of an infographic) gets shared online about one of the favorite social media initiatives such as Facebook, Twitter, … you know the lot. Big data, big numbers most of the time. What I don’t get though is why we all seem to copy/paste most of that information on our own blogs without really trying to understand what the numbers tell us (and what they don’t tell us). Everybody who once worked in a PR related job knows that companies publish numbers in a way so they look good. They use absolute numbers when they are worth it, percentages when they don’t look good and so on and so forth. When I say visitors to this website using Android have doubled over the last week (+100%) that is sounds much better than if I were to say there are now 2 people using Android to visit this blog instead of one. You catch my drift, I would really like to see some more analysis on those numbers before publishing if that’s not too much too ask.

Something else bugs me even more. When making these ‘analysis’, infographics and what not, people are not comparing apples with apples. Nobody seems to find it a problem that we’re always comparing 500M Facebook users versus 145M Twitter users (and some even against the 300M Windows Live users). For Facebook that are registered users, and as such most likely unique users. For Twitter that are registered users, and most likely that means registered accounts – and not unique users. I’ve got one Facebook profile just like most people but do use 3 Twitter accounts (@crossthebreeze, @iblogmustang and @krishoet). For Windows Live however the 300M users mentioned are active users, active meaning that they’ve logged on to the service at least once during the last 30 days. You can discuss about whether that is a good measure for being active or not, the point I want to make is that although they’re all big numbers they all don’t really mean the same thing. And that makes it unfair to just compare them like they are in my point of view.

Especially the registered versus active users is something really important to think about. When promoting webservices such as the ones we’re talking about you can imagine that generating awareness is the first big task on the agenda just like any other company. But because they are webservices I presume once you get the attention needed, driving registrations is not the toughest part. Registering to an online service is easy, I’ve registered to hundreds of services by now but use only a percentage of those on a regular basis. Activating users/consumers is the toughest part. People show interest when the buzz is up, but what is it that you do to keep them interested? That’s a tough challenge, a challenge to which many services fail if you ask me.

And it’s not just webservices of course, same counts for apps etc. There’s a boatload of apps available for my phone apparently and still I find it hard to find a dozen decent ones to download on the device. So don’t just report on the big numers PR people give you, those don’t always mean much (at least not to me). And please compare numbers worth comparing, otherwise that makes no sense either.

There you go. Had to get that of my chest.

Icons of the web

Kris Hoet — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:45:00 +0000

Is your website amongst the 1 million most visited websites? Find out here – and spot it between the million icons of the web. Or just order the poster ;)

[Via @fwa]

Mighty cool!

Kris Hoet — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:06:26 +0000

It’s not the first time I blogged about Photosynth but what can I say, it keeps impressing me over and over. Here’s a new video created by the University of Washington of a Photosynth they’ve created of the old city of Dubrovnik based on pictures of the city found on Flickr. Just take a look and you’ll agree with me, this is mighty cool. New York anyone?

{Hat tip Steve Clayton]

My persona?

Kris Hoet — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:15:00 +0000

First things first, Clo explained it best what this is all about:

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinmanis "a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Sounded interesting so of course I had to give this one a try. And indeed nice animation while your profile/persona is being created – mine ended with this:

Not sure where ‘religion’ or ‘politics’ is coming from but I suppose everything happens for a reason ;). In the meantime I saw other people I follow create their own Persona Web but then I got curious to see which results it would generate when looking for brands such as Duval Guillaume (the agency I work for), Windows Live, Kinepolis, Marlboro, … etc and then I must say I got kinda disappointed. The results always seem to turn out very similar… almost the same really. Too bad, hope they keep developing because they’re definitely on to something here.

All of this got me thinking though. Wouldn’t it be possible to search on a brand name for blogs, twitter, … etc and then look up the content of the last 10-20 posts and turn that into a word cloud similar to what Wordle creates? I would definitely be interested in seeing the result of that. Let me know when it’s ready ;)

The point cloud

Kris Hoet — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:56:28 +0000

This is so cool, it’s not the first time I’ve written about Photosynth but while I was playing with this new Silverlight viewer for Photosynth I got a little into this ‘point cloud’ views and again, must say that this really is awesome.

So I’m looking at this Photosynth (196 photos and 98% synthy – so a good one) and look at one of the photos in the collection:

We’ve all seen that right? ;) Then if we press ‘P’ we switch the viewer to this point cloud mode resulting in:

And that – and this is the really cool part – will enable you to look at these objects from an angle that you actually don’t have photos of like this:

Yes Photosynth remains one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Go check it out for yourself.

Microsoft BizSpark for Startups

Kris Hoet — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:17:09 +0000

I don’t regularly write about startups, at least not about developer technology, financing and that kind of stuff but I did want to highlight this new program for startups we just launched. Here’s how it was described on Techcrunch:

“Virtually everything a startup needs to build a web service (many of the tools and software compete with open source alternatives, such as MySQL) is being offered to startups for free for three years. The program, run by VP Strategic and Emerging Business Development Dan’l Lewin, is global and provides access to full-featured development tools and production licenses of server products with no upfront costs. BizSpark also provides the necessary hand holding with free technical support.”

First of all this seems like an exciting program to me but I also wanted to highlight that Dan’l Lewin will be interviewed by Steve Gillmor on stage at LeWeb in Paris this year. Also in case you’re going to LeWeb make sure you visit the Microsoft booth which will have a lot of information about this… and some nice surprises, but more on that later :)

Also check out the blog of my buddy Julien Codorniou who’s program manager for BizSpark in Redmond, he’ll be at LeWeb as well.

Windows Azure

Kris Hoet — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:29:38 +0000

Today at PDC 2008 Microsoft announced it’s new Cloud OS named Windows Azure which is all over Techmeme by now. I’ll be doing a write up of the whole event when I’m back but thought you should check that out already. Another significant announcement is that Windows Live ID is becoming an OpenID provider. With currently over 460 million active LiveID users, that is a pretty huge step.