My latest guest post on TechCrunch, “What Startup To Build?”, can be read here:  http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/25/what-startup-to-build/

Past TechCrunch guests posts:

• “Will It End Very Badly?” Probably Not.
• The New Early-Adopter Addiction: Turntable
• Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Some other favorite posts off my own blog:

• 100+ Web Start-up Business Ideas
• The little startup that couldn’t (a post-mortem of MyFavorites)

and more TechCrunch writings from earlier years.

Yesterday I wrote a guest post on TechCrunch that can be read here.

It turns out not to be as awesome as I had hoped. I had really hoped I’d never have to plug my camera in again — or slide the memory card out, and put it back into my computer. But after some miserable failings, that’s not apparently going to happen.

In addition, Eye-Fi wrecked a few photos of mine (see screenshot)… I don’t know whether the memory card itself (Eye-Fi) just isn’t great for photos, or if it was too busy trying to upload photos at the same time to my iPhone or my computer.. but none-the-less, I can’t risk losing that perfect shot.

I also can’t believe how exhausting the process is, and how it doesn’t really communicate to me what’s happening. When connecting to my computer, it seems to show me the photos — but over the last couple hours, it had failed to put the most recent photos onto my computer…. or onto my iPhone.

The software on the desktop tells me it’s uploading to my iPhone, yet my iPhone app says “Idle”, and the pictures never appeared on my iPhone.

So I turned on iCloud’s Photostream from Apple. I think this will help me. I liked the idea of getting photos from my SLR onto my iPhone, so that I could Instagram them. I could do that with iPhoto, but Photostream enabled just always makes my latest photos on my desktop available on my iPhone. Pretty sweet.

Still would love to remove the friction of having to take the memory card out of the SLR and putting it into my computer. Maybe someday.

MG (@parislemon) has a good write-up on TechCrunch about why Siri is a big deal. Apple is shying away from marketing the hell out of this feature because it’s in “beta” — aka, it’s not fully ready. It’ll be fully ready in a year or whatever, likely once the software learns so many words from the millions of users that will be using it daily with their iPhone 4S’s. And once it is fully baked, the thing no one is talking about is the obvious game changer here: The desktop computer.

I can type lots of words per minute, but I watch my parents and other struggle to type fast. It’s a serious pain point.

When a Mac comes out (I’m going to guess before Christmas 2012) with full Siri integration, watch out world. Although users will likely still use voice commands of “Google for ……..”, if they were to use voice commands of “Search the web for ………”, then Google should be put on notice.

I’m officially putting MyFavorites behind me. The problem I was trying to solve, isn’t one of those problems you think you have… and I think those types of solutions/startups are a bit tougher. I already outlined my own problems with running a startup in a prior post about MyFavorites (“Repeat after me, I will not do another startup as a non-technical founder unless…“).

I’m writing this post with the intentions of telling you about the idea, sharing the debates that occurred with how the app should operate and be used, share mockups with you, share documents/spreadsheets of tasks/bugs/features/timelines, and simply give a glimpse into this failure. It was a failure because I called quits on it — I ultimately couldn’t keep funding it myself and the team was losing interest in working on this app that I kept going back-and-forth on how the user experience should play out — when we hadn’t even had any users using it yet.

THE IDEA

My initial pitch for MyFavorites was “Show + Tell Your Favorites”. That pitch eventually became: “The Like button for everything.” Nick came up with that one and it was solid gold — would have made a great TechCrunch post title… we discussed possibly using it as our tagline, knowing it might be controversial and Facebook might sue — but any press is good press We weren’t going to do that though. [Quick shout-out to Buffalo-native Chris Sacca, whose portfolio list has a one-liner that sums up every single company. If you can't do that for your startup, then you're likely too broad and not simple enough. Remember, if you can't explain your solution to your Mom so she can understand it, then most people won't understand it and they especially can't explain it to their friends]

The problem we tried to solve — wouldn’t it be great to know the favorite books of your friends (and celebs), so you know what book you should be buying to read this weekend? Facebook has interests, but have you ever updated those since you signed up for Facebook? Wouldn’t it be great to know your friend’s favorite … anythings? You’d be looking at a feed of just favorites — blog posts, beers, sneakers, drinks at Starbucks, things to do in Baltimore, apps for iPhone, tree cutting services locally, meals at a restaurant, etc.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see all of Ashton’s favorites? Or Britney Spears, or any celebrity?

We were tackling the “interest graph”. You can find lots of my notes and findings at the MyFavorites blog.

I’ll tell you my grandiose billion-dollar idea for MyFavorites — imagine 50k people that took pictures of themselves with their love for Starbucks (or any brand). Sure, Starbucks currently can show a Facebook widget that shows profile pics of their Facebook fans… but imagine just replacing their homepage with 50,000 people showing their absolute love for Starbucks? That’d be amazing — Starbucks doesn’t even need to say anything about their products, because here’s people that vouch for us. Imagine Gary Vaynerchuk when selling his next book to just show tons of pictures of people with his last book, showing creatively how much they love garyvee?

With all of these pictures, a new ad network could be created — per the one I wrote about back in 2007 (“Ads with Personal Endorsements“) — this is the future, there’s no doubt about that. The problem is how do you get people to take pics of themselves with brands/products that they absolutely love and personally vouch for?

In the feed, our plan was to always have a #dickbar at the top of the screen. That would be asking the user for their favorites. At first, these would all be some default categories that we ask everyone, but as the user gets friends and follows people, anytime those users are asking people for favorites in a category, that user’s profile pic and name would show in the #dickbar with category they want favorites for. Meanwhile, there’d be sponsored favorite questions — such as, if you favorited Doritos, then Doritos could ask you “What’s your favorite Doritos flavor?”, or if you favorited Starbucks, it could be asked “What’s your favorite drink at Starbucks?”, etc. It just keeps going and going. [Here's a spreadsheet of some more sub-question examples]

As a user favorites something, there would be sub-questions to those categories. If you favorited ‘NFL’, then we could ask the question, “What’s your favorite NFL team?”. The plan was to allow multiple favorites for any category, for every user… so that everytime you were drinking a beer you loved, we wanted you to whip out your phone and favorite it. Then you’d have a ranking of your favorite beers — with # of times you favorited each one. You’d also be able to see the favorite beer tally of all your friends combined, or individually… so then you would know the most popular beer amongst your friends. With us knowing where you live and where you’re favoriting this stuff, we could also figure out the most popular ANYTHING in every city — that’s powerful. We could basically show a map of the world and show Gibson vs Fender and which guitar brand is the leader in every city, every state, and every country.

LOGO

I used 99designs. I know that basically every designer out there loathes this service and anyone that uses it, but I beg to differ. If you’re awesome, you aren’t going to be replaced by 99designs. I think it’s a great opportunity for college kids and international designers that don’t have access to design work. It’s a great platform for learning as a designer — understanding a client’s needs/requirements/vision and trying to design for that. The designer gets feedback from not only the client, but other designers — and can see feedback on other designer’s work by the client [and others]. As a designer you need to go into knowing you’re basically paying for education — you pay by doing work for free and likely not going to get paid for that work. You go to school and pay for that education. Education and experience costs money and time. 99designs is disruptive and I understand the controversy. Various designers in the world will continue using it and so will various people — but it’s not going to become the defacto for the entire design world.

With the MyFavorites logo, I wanted something that could eventually be placed on blog posts like the Twitter ‘tweet’ button and the Facebook ‘like’ button.

FAVORITING PROCESS

We went back and forth on this so many times I can’t count them all. Granted, I was the one changing my mind a lot. We initially started with a sentence strategy — you would say “My Favorite beer is Duvel” — so basically “My Favorite (category) is (item)”. The problem you run into is pluralization — is vs are. I can’t even speak to all the issues with this, but our language is a mess  [Here's a screenshot of an old sentence structure process for our app]

The other problem with the sentence structure is that it seems a bit lengthy. We all went to SXSW 2011 and were almost ready to launch the app (this was after weeks of tons of late nights trying to cram this app to be ready) … and then we all saw Pete Cashmore’s interview of Dennis Crowley … where Dens talks about making the checkin process as easy as possible.. and I realized we needed to simplify our favoriting process. Nick had mentioned many weeks prior that we should start the process by showing like 10 default categories, with the ability for user to choose ‘other’ and input their own category. This would help guide our users and make the process slicker. So that was our final strategy on this focal UX point of the app.

We also originally allowed the user to input multiple categories for a favorite — this seemed to like it would make the user have to “think” too much. We found ourselves wondering what categories/tags to use.

Our other strategy was to focus on the ability for users to add tips to Foursquare. Initially we thought that when someone favorites something, they’d be able to checkin at Foursquare, post it to Twitter and Facebook. That doesn’t really make sense though — I use the Foursquare app — I opened that as soon as I walk into a venue — that’s when I think to use that app. The idea with MyFavorites is to use it when you are loving something — so likely, you’re already checked-into a Foursquare venue, and so this would be an ability to add more tips into Foursquare…. which hasn’t been done yet. No other apps are focused on getting more tips into Foursquare — and to me, tips are the most valuable aspect of Foursquare.

The big problem we just never knew how to answer until the app started getting used, was we didn’t know what to give the user after they favorited something. Foursquare gives points, random badges… should MyFavorites being doing game mechanics like this? Leaderboard seemed pertinent to us — but specifically showing the user what other favorites exist in the category they just favorited in — and where their current favorite item ranks in relation to other items they have favorited in that same category (i.e. ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon is your 3rd favorite beer!’). [Here's an old leaderboard mockup and another one specific to a user] [Here's a spreadsheet of tons of possible messages we could have delivered to the user after they favorited something]

MOBILE APP vs WEB APP

Initially we were building both an iPhone & Android app (after establishing our dev platform as Titanium Appcelerator), as well as a website where you could favorite things as well. It was all too much. Even with Titanium’s ability to “write once, and push out an iPhone and Android app” — that’s false; it takes a lot of work to manipulate features for iPhone and Android — there’s no scroll wheel function in Android; there’s no menu button on iPhone as there is on Android.

Having a web app being created at the same time was ridiculous too — especially since we still hadn’t nailed down the favoriting process or tried it with any users. I was blowing cash — at a ridiculous pace. I had 7 guys working on this thing at once, as we were hustling for SXSW launch deadline. We decided to focus on the iPhone app, which sucked for me and Dan the backend programmer, because we both couldn’t even use the app — we both have Droid X phones.

Focus on one platform. Get it out there — let people use it — nail down the UX with user input.

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

I looked at Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare — then wrote a post called the “Metrics of me, me, me!” — basically the conscious and subconscious interactions/metrics we make with these services. I also blogged about the “usage psychology” of those services to better understand how we could hook MyFavorites users. Our social interactions were the following:

• favorite [default action; like a tweet or checkin]
• ‘me too’ [trying to get users to add more favorites easier]
• ‘reply’ [ability for users to reply to someone's favorite with their own favorite -- i.e. your favorite car is a Nissan Altima, well mine is a Mattel. We found a lot of humor came from this action]
• ask for favorites [ability for user to ask friends for their favorites in a category -- i.e. if I were going to Ireland for vacation, what are things to do there?] [users would simply 'reply' with their favorite]
  

API

Eventually we wanted to open an API that allowed you to have favorites auto-imported — such as Twitter favorites, who uses that feature on Twitter anyway? Our site would give you a reason to use favoriting on Twitter. For YouTube, we’d auto-import stuff you favorite in there. Lots of apps out there have a like or favorite ability, and it seems like an opportunity exists for aggregating all of that.

MOCKUPS OF FUNCTIONALITY

These obviously took tons of hours of our lives nailing these. We looked at lots of apps for help/ideas.

Question Process:

This was up for serious debate all the time. Basically, I wanted this. I wanted to be able to ask my friends what their favorite things to do in Ireland were. Or Hawaii, where I’m going for my honeymoon. Or I am looking for someone to take down this tree in my backyard — Yelp sucks in Buffalo, so how can I find a friend that can recommend a tree cutting service? So the ‘where’ was a big issue — I didn’t want just a ‘tree cutting service’, I wanted a ‘tree cutting service in Buffalo, NY, USA’. So we had this ‘Where?’ optional field, which then would either take a Foursquare venue, or you could select a city or country from a DB we had. It was a complete mess — it was confusing to users [especially when we had this on the Favoriting process] — and the rest of my team didn’t think we needed this functionality at all anyhow.

Profile Settings and Adding Friends:

Signup:

Favorite page on web — we ultimately decided to do the Instagram thing, which was have a non-interactive website initially and simply have a webpage for every favorite that occurs by users, so that these could be shared. I think this minimal design was great and we planned to build out feed/category/profile pages on the web this way too:

Search / Discovery – nearby and everywhere. By the people you follow, or everyone. Too many options and thus too cluttered IMO:

Documents / Spreadsheets

• Sharing to Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare — get new users! Here’s a spreadsheet of all the possible copy (tweets, etc) that could have been used.
• URL examples of our website as a spreadsheet (more ideas of our future plans).
• Here is a spreadsheet of our final team push towards a launch. These were the remaining features to finish and some hours estimates on completing them.
• Here is a monster feature / task list, which clearly was just out of control. I didn’t know how to tame my beastly instincts for “we could do this, and this, and this, and..”
• Here is a list of common categories that most people would likely add favorites for.
• Here is a monster list of bugs and features (different from above) — you’ll see more ideas of our plans here.

OINK

Meanwhile at SXSW is when I first learned that Kevin Rose was gathering some troops (including Daniel Burka, whose design work I have been following for years in awe) to create Milk Inc., which was going to be an incubator of app ideas. One of those app ideas that possibly was going to be their focus (OINK), was dabbling in similar territory of MyFavorites. We had about 6 months on them, but still — that’s some competition.

THE END

I still want to use an app like MyFavorites — and I hope OINK can nail it. Ultimately, I wasn’t the guy to push this idea through. Being a non-technical founder, I just can’t throw money at this thing in the hopes of nailing it. I believe we were definitely at a point where we could have raised some funding around SXSW timeframe — we had the team, the focus, and an app that was working … but ultimately when we came back from SXSW, we all started losing interest, the team was all wondering where this was eventually going, and I was wondering if I even wanted to run a startup, have investors, have the responsibility of employees and answering to a board of investors, etc.

Moving forward I’m looking to help the OINK guys or anyone working on this problem in any way I can. There’s a solid 6 months of problems, solutions, strategy, userflow, monetization, and everything else under the sun… that went down. And there’s still a massive opportunity out there to nail.

• Want to read more of my startup failures? Read here
• Want to read the 100+ web startup ideas I’ve written about? Read here

In closing, I’ll leave you with some Jay-Z that pretty much sums my future up…

I’m onto the next one, I’m onto the next one…

I don’t know much about psychology, but below I have brainstormed my own quick thoughts on aspects of why users are using these various services. These services allow you to broadcast what you are doing. This is a follow-up to my post about the metrics of ‘me, me, me!’ on these services.

Twitter

• easy to tweet
• hope for a retweet
• hope for a reply
• people include URLs and wasn’t til last release that twitter embedded videos, photos, etc
• 3rd-party apps allow easy input to twitter
• celebrities to follow
• follow/stay up-to-date on friends
• discovery/bored
• unstructured data input
• my life history and interesting stuff

Facebook

• 600 million users
• easty to update status
• 3rd-party apps make easy to update your status
• hope for likes and comments
• stay up-to-date on friends
• discovery/bored
• unstructured data input
• my life history
• connect your account to 3rd-party services to easily find friends in those services

Foursquare

• easy to checkin
• specials
• focus on location
• my travel history
• ‘tips’ are useful
• see where friends are; what they are doing
• game/leaderboard; points (7-days)
• surprise factor: random badges
• tips nearby are useful
• discovery: explore around where you are to find stuff to do
• easy to share via twitter/facebook to tell my friends that aren’t on foursquare
• structured data input
• see who else is where you are… or aren’t
• mayor status
• friends (both users follow each other), and followers
• 3rd-party apps help get check-ins
• there are comments, but seem rarely used
• no ‘like’ buttons — user can get that on facebook/twitter if wanted. Replaced with game mechanics

Some notes on GetGlue (an app for checking-in to movies, tv shows, music you’re listening to, etc)

• Personal note: my friends aren’t there
• Personal note: If I was more into TV, maybe I’d use it more?
• Personal note: my friends wouldn’t be jealous of me watching a movie or show — they are out living life; the game of life is doing as much as possible, not being a couch potato
• “Guru” is like foursquare’s “Mayor”
• show details, no tips; ‘Guru’, ‘Superfans’, ‘Fans’

What are your thoughts?

I’m unimpressed so far at this year’s startups launching at TechCrunch Disrupt. It’s not just this year though, it’s been all years. It’s not TechCrunch’s fault, it’s mine. I know why I’m unimpressed — I’m sitting here watching the launch announcements and waiting to see the next Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, etc.

But that’s not going to happen — because it hasn’t happened for a Consumer Internet startup before. Yes, some good companies have come from these events — mostly enterprise, but most Consumer Internet startups don’t go anywhere after the conference. That’s the reality though for a startup trying to become a real business — 95%+ will die on the vine. Thus, 9.5 out of 10 of these startups (despite being filtered from 1,000 submissions) will be deadpooled.

So I was curious, have there been any big “wins” out of these TechCrunch startup events in the past? At first glance of the companies that have presented between 2007-2011, the names that I immediately think of as successful are:

• TC40 2007 - Mint.com (Intuit acquired), TripIt (acquired), WooMe (TC40, despite the controversy), Powerset (Microsoft acquired), DocStoc, PubMatic, Xobni
• TC50 2008 – Yammer, Dropbox
• TC50 2009 – ODesk, Clicker (CBS acquired)
• TCDisrupt 2010 SF – Qwiki (Facebook founder Eduardo invested)
• TCDisrupt 2010 NYC – Soluto (who knows, maybe they will be; product/solution seems awesome)
• (Here are DEMO’s success stories, looks similar to TechCrunch’s conferences)

Thus, TC40 2007 seems the most successful, but those startups have also had more time to prove their business, iterate, and innovate. There are some good companies that launched and many years to go until we see how big they really become, but I’d say the biggest out of all of those will end up being ODesk, with Mint.com, Yammer, and Dropbox being the other big successes.

I think the big problem is that there’s way too many consumer startups launching here and they think they can break from a conference like this. The truth is, they won’t. There are tons of consumer startups and only a handful gain critical mass, so it’s very unfair of me to have expectations of seeing the next Twitter launch here. The next Twitter will launch organically, as we have historically seen — not on a stage.

A consumer startup that has nailed the product/market fit can not be kept under wraps for launching at a conference like this. If you are awesome, likely it’ll leak out somehow if you have some private beta users — you simply can’t stop someone that is loving your service from exploding with sheer passion to everyone they can tell.

These startups are brand new and most need to get more feedback and iterate further to nail their product/market fit. On the other hand, some of these startups never had a problem they were solving — thus, they never stood a chance.

Real-time search is going to change things up on the web. To me, real-time search is essentially “conversational search” — what are people talking about right now? What events, what trips they are planning at this moment, what answers they are trying to find to looming questions, etc.

Twitter is all about conversation and what people are doing now. Twitter has real-time search, but hasn’t made it widely available yet — imagine when Twitter puts this search box at the top of every Twitter page; it’s going to be a game changer.

Some companies have been trying various methods of helping users of Twitter make some money, but generally putting ads in their feeds. I think this will work if they insert a link that is 100% relevant to what ever the person is tweeting about.

But what really needs to happen is another Google AdWords, but for real-time search. Text ads to people doing real-time search queries, are going to read/look different than search queries at a search engine. Some company needs to start figuring out what these ads are going to read/look like — and also how people will be searching the real-time web, because it’s going to look much different than their search habits on Google. People will use different keywords/phrases and ways of phrasing their queries.

Some searches will stay the same (i.e. “tickets for Purdue Ohio State game”), but others will change (i.e. instead of “hotel recommendations in Buffalo NY”, they might search on how others would be saying it, “hotel great Buffalo NY” — to get people twittering ‘The Mansion Hotel has been great in Buffalo NY!’).

This was a post I started writing April 25 of this year, I never finished it, but thought I’d post it now.

Alternative title to this post: Web 2.0 Dust Settles. Enterprises wondering how do we now use this stuff in our businesses?

This year’s Web 2.0 Expo (in SF) had a completely different vibe than last year’s event. The innovation in Web 2.0 is in the deadpool. That’s obviously not all true, but for an entrepreneur/innovator like me, the crazy chaotic mess of innovation has gone through its’ whirlwind and settled down a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, I still feel we’re at the very beginning of innovation, but you all know it’s not as whack as it was in the early days of TechCrunch. Mobile will bring us a ton of new early-day TechCrunch craziness in the coming years. (In fact, I’m shocked no one has stepped up with a blog that is the early-day TechCrunch blog for Mobile applications/startups)

I’ll be honest, this past year has been much of a yawner for me in “Web 2.0″. What was interesting at Web2Expo was Enterprise — but not in terms of Enterprise-specific applications. Enterprises sent many representatives to the conference and they were all collectively saying, “OK, you entrepreneurs/innovators have screwed around enough — and you found some things that don’t work, and found others that do work. Now how do we integrate those things that do work into our own businesses to increase profits and maximize efficiencies?”

And as Allen Stern and I just discussed, Enterprises = Money. If the Web 2.0 companies that are left standing can learn how to adapt their businesses in someway to Enterprises, they’ll be tapping into some large pools of capital.

These are just some scattered thoughts I have on Search. These numbers are based off a large general base of searches from a project I’ve been working on…

• The number of user’s queries that actually result in a match is ~70%. Which means on average, each user does ~1.4 searches to narrow down to ultimately clicking on at least 1 result. If you were to improve that average, you could assume you’ve improved user’s search results and allowed them to find what they were seeking faster. However, there is an assumption that user’s knowledge/use of how to use search engines improves over time/use, so the user is getting their results easier by understanding how to use multiple keywords and such.
• Tons of users type ‘google’ in just to find a Google search box — I think they just think Google is how you search the web and that their current search box won’t actually do that.
• Google has just a search box — that’s where the billions are. The billions are in relevant text ads based on a search. They don’t put the latest headlines on their homepage, because that will distract the user. They want the user to search for what they want, then hopefully click on a sponsored result. ~21% of the time, the user clicks on a sponsored result.
• Google doesn’t [til lately] show images or videos in their search results. The “glimmer” of a photo or video distracts the user to click on them — when Google really wants you to click on a sponsored text result.
• Even if you could create the “Google killer” and started gaining traction in the market, Google OWNS sponsored text advertising. OK, ok, Ask, MSN, and Yahoo all have their own initiatives (MSN AdCenter, Ask Sponsored Listings, Yahoo! Search Marketing) [and there are other 2nd/3rd tier alternatives: Miva, Looksmart, etc] … but advertisers flock to Google right now. It likely would take years for them to flock to you, even if you had an easy system for them to use and had gaining market share. Google dominates the advertiser/money inflow on the web. I don’t think we’ll see a Google Killer for text search — just like we haven’t seen an Outlook killer for email, or an MS Word killer for word processing.