The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown)
- Colnect Is A No-Frills Collectibles Marketplace And Wiki. Someone Wake Up David Cowan!
- The App Store Needs A Genius Feature, ASAP
- Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say
- Interview With NPR On Process Journalism
- Hands Down, The Best Facebook Vanity URL
| For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown) Posted: 14 Jun 2009 07:22 AM PDT
Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor. Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits. Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days: Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch Twitter has been rising up that chart, just recently surpassing Digg. TechCrunch is certainly not typical of most Websites, but this data certainly shows the potential of Twitter to generate traffic. A large portion of that traffic comes from the TechCrunch account on Twitter, which has nearly 715,000 followers (it is one of the accounts suggested to new users). For many people, Twitter is replacing their RSS readers. One of the ways we use that account is to Tweet out links to our stories, which then spread virally as followers retweet those links. Retweets are becoming a new type of link currency. We are big believers in retweets (in fact, there is now a retweet button at the bottom of every post). About a month ago we started using Awe.sm, which lets us send out our own custom short links (http://tcrn.ch) and track how much traffic we get from them. About 73 percent of our Twitter traffic comes from people clicking on an http://tcrn.ch short link. Another 23 percent comes directly from Twitter.com via other short links such as bit.ly’s. We can also approximate how much Twitter traffic comes from desktop and mobile clients. At least 44 percent of Twitter traffic comes from clients, and that counts people clicking directly on http://tcrn.ch links from those clients. So the true number is easily more than half. For us, and I’d argue increasingly for other large Websites as well, Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere. Or to put it another way, the shortened link may just be the most powerful type of micro-media there is. Those retweeted links are turning Twitter into a social broadcast media that rivals any other on the Web. (Photo credit: Flickr/Brett Weinstein) Top 5 TechCrunch Traffic Sources Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Colnect Is A No-Frills Collectibles Marketplace And Wiki. Someone Wake Up David Cowan! Posted: 14 Jun 2009 05:11 AM PDT
Good news David, lightening may in fact strike twice for you because here's your chance to invest in Colnect, a community site for collectors of coins, banknotes, stamps, phone cards and bottle caps. And no, I'm NOT kidding at all. Colnect (Collect+Connect) is a collector's community site that assists its users to organize, share, trade and sell their collectables. There are no fancy algorithms, the UI is modest—old school some may argue—and it's literally a one-man show having been founded, coded and operated by 29-year-old Amir Wald. He's still the only employee(!) The core of Colnect is a community driven wiki where Contributors add content (collectibles), Editors make changes to existing items, and Coordinators supervise content contributions and provide permissions to Editors. Wald also employed crowd-sourcing to translate the site to 35 languages. Colnect's catalogs currently encompass 158K phone cards, 68K stamps, 15K coins, 15K banknotes and 5k bottle caps. Users have marked 11M items so far: 6.6M collectibles in wish lists, 4M in collections, and another 800K in swap lists. Wald tells me that in the last month alone over 650,000 items were marked in the system. He plans on continuously adding categories, with upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—barf bags. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Part of Colnect's charm is that it really doesn't try to impress you, it just aims to provide basic but critical utilities for collectors of mass-produced collectibles. Collectors can easily manage their inventory with personal collection, swap list and wish list management tools. There's also auto-matching between collectors' inventory and wish/swap lists (huge time saver I'm told). Then of course there are the run of the mill social features such as personal profiles, ratings, friends and private messages. These are all on top of the actual catalogs which are continuously updated and therefore a godsend to collectors. All trades on Colnect are currently free of charge for now. There is however a premium membership option starting at just over $6 per month with the purchase of a one year subscription. Benefits include Custom Personal Lists, Premium Member Highlighting which helps member profiles and their items stand out, and the removal of ads across the site (AdSense and eBay ads are plastered everywhere). So there you have it Mr. Cowan, your second opportunity to invest in stamps, coins and barf bags. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| The App Store Needs A Genius Feature, ASAP Posted: 13 Jun 2009 03:56 PM PDT
I spent this week at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco talking to quite a few iPhone app developers. One thing that struck me was just how many of them shared the exact same concern with the App Store: App discovery. By now, you’ve likely heard some of the success stories from the App Store (Apple does what it can to promote these at just about every event it holds pertaining to the iPhone now). But for each of those, there are also a ton of developers who work hard on apps only to watch them fall by the wayside. Apple’s greatest strength with the store — the fact that there are now 50,000 + apps — is also turning into its weakness with many developers. And if it doesn’t adapt the store to its huge growth, those developers might start looking at other platforms. The problem is that while early on, it was pretty easy for small-time developers to make an app and get it noticed in the store, now with 50,000 apps, we’re getting to the point where you need to do something else to promote your apps. That’s good news for big time development studios like EA, which can throw marketing money at the problem. But for some smaller developers — some of which are just one person — that’s simply not an option. But there is one potential solution, and it’s one Apple already has built-in to iTunes: Genius recommendations. Apple rolled out its “Genius” feature for recommending music on iTunes last year. Based on my experience with it, I believe it really is genius — it scans your music library and uploads the information to iTunes’ servers where it compares it to other users’ libraries (anonymously) and sends back recommended playlists based on the other songs you have on your computer. And, perhaps more importantly, it also recommends songs on iTunes that you will probably like based on songs in your library. Apple also more recently rolled out the same feature for movies purchase recommendations on iTunes. And it’s the iTunes Store recommendations that are key, because it could easily do the same thing with the App Store.
While such a system may not be perfect, it would be much better than the current system of app discovery through iTunes, which really isn’t too fair to little developers. Apple features some apps within iTunes, but those are usually skewed towards ones made by the bigger App Store players. For example, look at the apps featured along the top of the App Store right now: The Sims 3 (an EA game), ESPN Scorecenter, A Home & Garden app, a Lonely Planet app and a Square Enix game. Now, to be fair, those are all popular things in their own regards, so the largest collection of people would probably be interested in them and so it makes sense for Apple to highlight them. But in doing so, it’s perpetuating a type of “rich get richer” system that threatens to take over the App Store. And if you are a smaller app, it’s not like being featured on this main iTunes App Store page matters all that much anyway. I spoke with one developer of a top application this week who told me that when his app was featured on this main page, they only say a single-digit percentage point bump in terms of downloads. Much bigger, he says, was when it was featured on the iPhone version of the App Store.
The Top Paid and Free app lists are great when it comes to helping with downloads, I hear as well. Of course, you have to actually move a lot of apps to get on those lists to begin with. So it’s another of the “rich get richer” situations. Some smaller developers have started to think outside the box to promote their apps. A bunch of them have started banding together, forming their own networks of sorts, for promotion. This method allows them to not only promote each other’s apps over the web, but within the apps themselves. That way if one of them takes off, the likelihood that another one of the apps in this group will be seen, is much greater. Another outlet that app makers use to try and get traction is the press. Every day, we’re pitched dozens of apps, even though we don’t really cover that many apps here at TechCrunch. If we happen to, that seems to be a decent way for an app to get some downloads, but that fame is often fleeting. A developer’s best chance in this regard is to hope that their app gets enough coverage from multiple outlets over an extended period of time. That should help it both spread by word of mouth and hopefully make it onto one of the top apps lists. But again, this is very hard to do. And these alliances and means of promotion pale in comparison to having Apple actively promoting your app. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you can get our app on one of the iPhone’s television commercials, your downloads will absolutely go through the roof. And if Apple puts your app on the demo units in its store, that helps sales in a big way as well. But Apple can only do that for so many apps. There needs to be a better way, that scales to a huge store — which the App Store has become. All this matters because there is plenty of money behind all of this. The App Store is already a big business for many developers, and increasingly for Apple itself. And when Apple launches the in-app payment system in the iPhone 3.0 software due next week, I think the store could even jump to the next level in terms of people making money off of it. But to keep the overall momentum the store has going, Apple needs to make sure its ecosystem is enticing for the small developers to work in. And that’s getting to be a problem with so many apps now in the store, and with so many big name development houses now making apps. I think a Genius app recommendation feature would go a long way to help this.
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| Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say Posted: 13 Jun 2009 03:55 PM PDT Chris Yeh from PBWorks responds to Things A Venture Capitalist Will Never Say slide show with a few funny-because-they-are-true slides of his own: Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say My favorite: “We reached out to you because your portfolio shows you are about as selective as Paris Hilton.” Good one! Second favorite: “Our marketing plan is to pray for TechCrunch coverage.” Founder Non-Admissions View more OpenOffice presentations from Chris Yeh. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Interview With NPR On Process Journalism Posted: 13 Jun 2009 01:15 PM PDT Yesterday I did an interview with NPR’s On The Media about the idea of Process Journalism. Process Journalism is the posting of a story before it’s fully baked, something the New York Times officially despises, but they do it too. From my original post:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Hands Down, The Best Facebook Vanity URL Posted: 13 Jun 2009 11:23 AM PDT
As you no doubt heard last night, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. But who got the best one. The best one I’ve seen by far, was grabbed by Christine Shipley of San Francisco. Rather than go for facebook.com/christine.shipley or even facebook.com/shipley, she went with facebook.com/default.aspx. Yes, her name could easily be confused as the default landing page for Facebook. (Though, savvy users will know that the site is actually built in PHP, and not ASP, which the .aspx extension suggests). Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize, which we wrote about yesterday, already has 4 accounts for sale. The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids. But according to the service, one name has already sold, though it has to be bogus. Assetize just started partially blocking out names sold so you can’t see which ones were purchased, but I loaded the page earlier and saw that it was facebook.com/alex. Apparently, it sold for 99,999,999.99 — so unless it went to Alex Rodriguez, I say this buying and selling system is already broken. What else is odd about this is that alex is a 4-letter URL, which is against Facebook’s rules. So unless it was a Facebook employee who got the URL and was selling it, the whole thing seems to be a sham. Not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab. Michael was one of the unlucky ones who didn’t get the name he wanted, even though he originally broke the story. Knowledge, it seems, isn’t always power. [thanks Loic] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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The granddaddy of all venture capital funds, 
You may not realize it yet, but the App Store is broken.
At its most simple level, it could probably work like this: Say there’s an app that you downloaded and really like, Apple should be able to recommend other apps of a similar genre you might like based on what others’ downloading habits are. But Apple could probably go much deeper than that and see which apps you use (or at least launch) the most, and use that as a basis for these recommendations as well. And it could also use the star rating system it already has in place as another point of recommendation — though it should probably make it easier to rate apps from within iTunes if it does that.
But let’s look at the featured ones there. It’s largely more of the same: ESPN Scorecenter, a THQ game for the new Disney movie Up, the Sims 3 again, an AT&T app, etc. Apple does do a much better job diversifying this list, wrapping in some smaller apps as well, but there are still only so many apps they can fit in this area — especially since it’s on a much smaller screen. Again, a Genius feature on the iPhone or iPod touch would go a long way in helping to uncover new, under-the-radar apps.
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