DISQUS

Robert,

(First of all, you should use RescueTime to truly understand what percentage of your work life you invest where! <-- Shameless plug!)

Twitter & Friendfeed are pretty much forums/chatrooms... They are great places for you to invest some time... 2-way conversation is good.

But I'd question what you've "gained". I don't think a lot of people there constitute a "new" audience for you. I don't follow you on either service (sorry, it's like drinking from a firehose!), but many/most of the things you write about that are relevant to me get to me somehow (retweeting, techmeme, what have you).

Further, I'd question the number of "followers". First, most of those people aren't reading what you say... Following does NOT equal consumption/engagement.

Pretend you'd invested ALL of that time in your blog and instead of losing 14% of your traffic, you gained. And pretend you did a bunch of A/B testing to get your RSS subscription up. And pretend you focused a bit on SEO. And pretend you created/emphasized an email subscription program and promoted it. How many more individuals would you have touched? My guess is way the hell more than the 20-30k represented on Twitter/FF (lots of overlap in the two userbases, I'd imagine).

Heck, how many unique visitors does the 14% by itself represent?

Regarding Google and design... It's interesting to look at what clever UX design did in the mobile space with the iPhone.

Google's search UX is simple (and that's good), but there is certainly room for innovation. Of course, unlike other types of innovation it's hard to imagine how a UX could be improved until you actually see it and say, "holy crap-- it never occurred to me that a touch-screen with this crazy 'pinch' idea could turn the mobile world on it's ear."

@polysig I dunno-- maybe you should have had different expectations.

I was expecting a social/networking event with a DJ. I had a blast and had some great conversations!

I didn't ever hear it referred to as a "conference" -- if you did (of if you were expecting one), I can see how you might've been disappointed.

Members?

It's probably along the same lines as "audience" but earlier in the company life-cycle.

Community and social sites start by serving "members" and eventually graduate to serving their real customers (the advertisers) by harvesting clicks/views from their "audience".

Great post!

I always liken web startups to a leaky bucket with a hose pouring water into it.

You can focus on increasing the flow (making the "hose" work better) or you can focus on plugging the holes.

Increasing the flow (with new opportunities in viral marketing and old standbys like SEO) is comparatively easy and feels really good.

Plugging holes is hard and only incrementally rewarding.

If you look at great businesses that you envy, I think you'll find most of them focus more on plugging holes... Adding value for users (first and foremost), providing outstanding support, and optimizing the sales funnel.

it doesn't work against you. There were a lot of founders in their 30s in the last batch. Two were approaching 40.

Great post Andrew-- you might ponder referencing:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways-to-build-an-online-media-business-to-50m-in-revenue/

(Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue)

It's another great post on the topic.

This is why I'm not a huge fan of B2C plays (other than the "freemium" route). Every single free web site (without exception) has degraded as they shift focus from serving the user to serving the advertiser. Look at any 3 year old B2C play and it's inundated with craptacular ads.

Wow-- neat idea... Lousy new user flow.

I wrote a question, hit the submit/ask button and it took me to a sign-up page. Did my question go through? Does it disappear into the ether if I choose not to sign up?

Hi Caity!

Thanks for for mentioning us and thanks much for your great suggestions on our GetSatisfaction forum. Until Jan 3, RescueTime was a side project for the three of us... But based on the great growth we've been seeing, we've jumped into it full-time and have recently gotten seed funding from YCombinator (with a few of your countrymen!)

Sooo, expect insane progress over the coming months.

Cheers, -t

The real sticky challenge with a lot of your suggestions is to make it REALLY lightweight. WE don't want to make a time-management tool that takes 30 minutes a day of babysitting to get meaningful pile of data...

We are definitely doing some heavy experimentation/exploration to try to get more insight into "activity context".

Great and thoughtful ideas-- thank you!

@Chris311

Chris, what you're saying is (IMO) just plain wrong.

Quote from Fred Wilson:

“…Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. That means there a 2/3 chance you’ll have to significantly reinvent your business between the time you take a venture capital investment and when you exit your business.”



The team matters more than the concept. Though the market you're playing in matters more than your team (IMO).

Great post.

The Rails response will (inevitably) be, "we don't WANT to be big" (which I think is stupid, too.

Another side effect of being big-- you can sell installable products in the language. How do you think Mint ( the stats mint-- not the finance mint) would fare if he had released it for Rails (it's an installable PHP stats package).

Rails playing nice on shared hosting would make Rails better, would provide a incubator for budding devs, and provide a marketplace for low-cost Rails products.

My favorite marketing quote (dunno who said it) is "Marketing is a tax you pay for being unexceptional".

There are lots of brands out there that don't NEED marketing effort to be seen. IMO, founders should concentrate on making their offering differentiated and downright better than the competition. Make it something people WANT to talk about. Most startups f

Once you've proven that people want to talk about you, then marketing is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

@Pratham - Google's been making noises about indexing JS content for a while now... It'll happen someday.

I commented on Steve's post, but I'll comment here too.

I think bloggers are approaching this issue from the wrong angle. You need to think about user VALUE (the readers of the blogs), not about how to maximize the marketing exposure of your blog. Nothing is better marketing than having a better product.

Blog comments right now are pretty painful. They're hard to follow threads, rife with spam (or self-promotion), hard to scan (in high volume), etc.

But, if you're going to be a slave to page views and exposure, you should consider the SEO/traffic benefits of Disqus. All of the pages actually provide a nice pile of incoming links from Disqus.com. They also promote lively conversations on their home page (more SEO juice) and presumably could eventually offer TechMeme-like aggregation of conversations around a topic (yet more promotion).

Apparently, self-hosted folks can use the API rather than JS-- comments are perfectly SEO-friendly if you go this route.

Some excellent points here. Thanks for the feedback.

I totally agree on the clear text password issue. It's a carry over from our very small closed beta and should've been fixed before we opened it up.

We need to make the client a touch smarter about knowing when communication is occurring and when it's failing.

But hey, it's beta-- we're working on it! :-)