Blurring line between private and public data

In case you haven't noticed, the line between private and public data is really blurring.  Traditional notion of privacy is breaking down due to pervasiveness of social media.  New internet users, especially teenagers, who grew up with Facebook use the network as primary mode of communication.  These next wave of internet users communicate via SMS messages, Facebook posts, share photos on Instagram and watch YouTube videos from their iPhones, and they feel natural communicating with their friends this way.

Search your way to social readership

As I continue my daily blogging, I am getting insights to how world of blogging works by trying it myself.  By setting up a blog site and posting daily I get interesting stats from blog owner perspective.  Now I see why newspaper owners can be obsessed with getting the rating up.  Not only it's easiest number to track, but in their case it's directly tied to their bottom line.

Thinking about this for a while and looking at my monthly stats got me started on this question.  What would be the next logical thing for a guy like me, a part-time blogger, can do to increase the readership?  What can I think of to increase the incoming traffic?

Product Management: fast wins in internet company

Yesterday I talked about how YouTube is becoming discovery engine for video content.  I thought I would share what I discovered on Product Management topic with you.

Keval Desai gave a talk to UC Berkeley business students last December.  Among other positions he has had product management position at Google and Digg for several years.  It was interesting to hear him talk about his lessons learned from product management experience at successful internet companies.

YouTube: a new way to discover what to watch

In our living room we have a TV, but it's rarely on.  Part of it is because of my wife's no TV policy for my two and half year old boy.  Yet I don't feel as I'm missing much by not having a cable TV.  One big reason why I don't feel the need is that I get most of my video content from YouTube.  Facebook news feed shows me YouTube links that my friends are sharing, and I click to watch the video clip.

Product Management: build a product to be counted

You have an awesome idea.  You saw a problem.  You have been thinking about a new way of solving it.  You have been perfecting it to get it just right, i.e. simple and highly usable.  Now you are ready to build it.  You go find an angel investor.  You go out and get coders who can implement your idea into an actual product.

Zynga's own social platform

Yesterday Zynga announced that they will start offering games on Zynga.com.  Announcement included that Zynga will provide popular games, such as Cityvill, Farmville and Words with Friends on their website with social elements.  You'll be able to play with no only your friends but also other social gamers who are looking for quick and easy social game play.

Zynga.com will let people play with other gamers

From Zynga's perspective this is an important step to gain an independent platform that they control.  Zynga has built their fortune on top of Facebook social platform, and Facebook has also enormously benefited from Zynga's huge success.  Now that Zynga is getting traded publicly and needs to control its own destiny, creating a social gaming platform of its own makes good sense.

Interesting thing is to see how Zynga.com will be received by current and future gamers.  Because most of users are on Facebook, it makes little sense for Zynga to launch exclusive games for Zynga.com platform.  At the same time, Zynga must think of a way to draw people into their Zynga.com platform and make it sticky for those gamers to come back to play at their site if this launch were to be meaningful.

From Facebook we've seen that personal relationship and social graph were the main drivers for explosive growth.  Without personal relationship aspect, Zynga may have difficult time to build the user base on Zynga.com.  But then you can also argue Zynga has fueled the initial ramp up at Facebook by attracting users to play simple and easy social games.  Whatever happens, it's clear that Facebook and Zynga are trying to become more independent of each other.

Windows 8: Smartphone UI for your laptop

Windows 8 consumer preview debuted yesterday at MWC Barcelona.  It's difficult to predict how users will receive the new Windows 8 UI/UX without playing around with it, but from the video clip demo it looks interesting.  One thing interesting is that Microsoft is now fully embracing gesture navigation, but doing it in such a way that it unifies smartphone, tablet and PC user experience.  This may sound familiar if you were paying attention to OS X Mountain Lion announcement a couple of weeks ago.

Touch gesture interaction is the new graphical interface.  Combined with simplified UI layout, smartphone-like interface is setting the standard for how users are expecting to interact with devices.  As a result, if you look at Windows 8, you might think that it might have come straight out of your smartphone.

It will be interesting to see how Windows 8 actually performs on laptops.  Whether it's easy to navigate and get things done, whether it's actually stable enough for business users to upgrade, and other than cool new UI what other features are available that can connect with other mobile devices running Windows 8, would be some things that I will be interested in.

At any rate, on the first glance, it certainly looks like a step in the right direction.