Alex Schultz: APIs

PR is a beautiful thing

This month has been amazing for me in PR. The image above is an article from the "connected" section of the Daily Telegraph in the UK telling people to try out my cocktail website this summer. I did nothing to prompt this and yet it is worth thousands of visitors to me AND the back link in the article is a really positive natural search boost. I also managed to get featured (only offline) in FHM Australia this month for my paper airplanes book.

Over the years PR has been great to me and so finally I am starting to think about putting together a bit of a pr plan to seek out some press for my websites rather than just wait for it to happen. Here's hoping that will work out!

Awesome Discovery

A friend from work accidentally opened my eyes wide last week at eBay live in Boston by creating a potential new design for my cocktail recipes website.

The eye opening event was using some stock photography from iStockPhoto (an example of which is above). The concept of iStockPhoto is simple photographers and designers offer up licences to use their photos and designs through iStockPhoto for a small fee and people like me can buy them for PPT use, posters (up to 500k reprints) and websites. The photo above cost me $1 and I just integrated another $1 photo into my facebook app newsfeed posts to have an even greater impact when my news feed stories appear.

I am a terrible designer but a pretty good coder. I thought my websites would forever be doomed to look rubbish because of this but now thanks to iStockPhoto I have hope. Look for improvements in the future and even new projects!

Revver Blows Me Away Again

I want revver to win in online video... badly. These guys do a really fantastic job on quite a few fronts. #1 they pay you a revenue share of the money they make with your content. #2 their product just works... no fuss no faff, upload your video and go. #3 they don't shy away from user forums so I am confident can give my input and will be heard.

They even have a developer program which I hadn't even looked at man I have ideas how I can make money with that. Today's post is however all about their analytics.

 

They now offer me reports by video for the revenue I am making

They also graphically displaying completion rates for videos.

Using this data I can do a lot of optimization for my site of which videos to display and where. Ideally I would like to be able to do some more granular tracking by inserting my own tracking ID by which I can report as well. Perhaps some classes of user do not convert well into advertising dollars and so I shouldn't show them a video. Perhaps some users only ever view videos and so I should put the video above the fold for that class of user. Who knows? I would love to track it.

The future is bright for people exploring online videos to help improve user experience AND make money. Long live revver and their undeniable talent...

Understanding Cocktail Rating Distribution

Something interesting with my facebook application is that in the past week I have gathered >1000 ratings on the cocktails in my database from 745 unique users of my cocktail making application. This is a fairly small number for data analysis but 3 things stood out:

The most votes were given in the bucket of "10" - people seem to tend to vote on the cocktails they like.

The cocktails that were rated 10 tended to get more votes in general i.e. 3 votes per cocktail and not the average 1.5

When looking just at the users who gave a ten and what % of each voting bucket they made up it became clear that these users were pretty much all or nothing guys relative to the crowd, either they gave a cocktail a 10 or they gave it nothing.

More to come on user voting behaviour over time I am sure and also on the most popular cocktails, cocktail ingredients, favourite cocktails lists and so on... I now have far too much data to work through and that is great!

Great Pride in my Colleagues

Sometimes I spot things in my day to day work which I simply have to link to from here. This is the latest one, the new my eBay that the team are working on. An awesome blog post looking for feedback and opening up to the community. The New My eBay - eBay Chatter Blog

I am particularly impressed with the "My Reminders" section idea.

Over 10 000 Users on my Facebook App

Wow in under one week I have added 10 000 users to my cocktail recipes application which is totally amazing. I am still getting c. 1000 signing up a day and that's fantastic. One of the things that makes me most happy about this is the fact my application was the second mover in the market and that the message board/review board for my app is not crowded with complaints about how it is broken and doesn't work. Instead it is full of cocktial recommendations.

This week I will add the ability for users to add their own cocktails via this app but until then hopefully the app will continue to be useful to users just at a base level. Also look out for more stats and some how to information on how I have created some of the cooler features of the application.

"This week, live from Boston..."

I am speaking at the eBay Developer's Conference 2007 (after I had an awesome time last year speaking about "Taking your application International"). This year my main talk is entitled "Data Mining: The Key to Affiliate Success"... awesome title huh? ;) Here's the blurb

Data Mining: The Key to Affiliate Success
Alex Schultz
Speaker Alex Schultz put himself through college as an affiliate and run the eBay UK affiliate program. That’s why you should come listen to him speak about the key to affiliate success: data mining. Hear real life examples of how data mining gives affiliates an advantage, how to optimize where you send your clicks, how to be truly certain you have a significant result from your optimization efforts, and more. Learn my secrets and make lots of money for very little work.

I am hoping that a fair few people turn up to this talk because I am going to be letting people into tips of the trade with regard to the data eBay passes in affiliate reporting but also more importantly into how you can back engineer your way into useful eBay data and stats to give you an optimization head start with our APIs. Stay tuned and check out my eBay Dev Con del.icio.us links related to my talk. I will also be walking the floor at eBay live and in the "International booth" located between Canada and PayPal so please do head over!

Facebook Application Customer Support

"Err whoops" is probably the best way to start this off. My websites have essentially no customer support, it is not a fact I am proud of but it is true. I don't make enough money to quit my day job and work full time on the site, let alone employ a CS team. That being said I do get about one enquiry a week which generally I reply to and I have a few processes built to help me run through all the cocktails added and vet them. I kinda expected the same level of support would be needed for my facebook application. Boy was I wrong:

I am daily receiving about 10-20 enquiries/feedback points/general CS issues for my app (and this is with only 1week of signed up users - 7000). This is great and I want it to continue. It means my app will be better and better as I implement what is asked for enough (and do so thoughtfully and well). Heck I use my own app a lot so it'd be nice to make it better. I do however have a day job and keeping on top of this as well as a HUGELY busy week at work leading up to eBay Dev Con and eBay Live 07 is pretty tough. Those of you looking for application improvements trust me they are coming but bear with me while I get over the hump of the next week!

In the Facebook Directory

So I have been working on my facebook cocktail application for a little over a week now having started it on the memorial day weekend. It allows you to do everything my cocktail site does and a little bit more including recommending a cocktail to a friend and seeing the most recently popular cocktails and the top 12 users yesterday. I actually have a bunch more ideas of what it could do like little graphs of the popularity of the cocktail over time and so on.

What is exciting is that in 3hrs I have added 300users to the application, now obviously rates won't stay that high but realistically most of the east cost wasn't browsing facebook when the app was approved and neither was the UK. It will be really interesting to see how things go over the next 24hrs.

The best news is I have log files tracking everything going on so I will be able to note down and describe what the growth of a facebook application looks like!

More posts to come down the line but I want to leave you with a thought. For my cocktail recommendations engine I now have a track... at a user level... of every cocktail viewed and rated, and at what level (pretty much tied to demographic too if I can get my ass in gear and pull that data). This recommendation engine can get much, much smarter :D

Free Gifts - Another Viral Facebook App

I am really enjoying the phenomenon of Facebook apps and totally loving the way they have exploded from zero to infinity and beyond so quickly! The arguement that facebook just added a quarter of a billion dollars of RnD to their platform is looking more and more realistic to me.

The apps I like the best are the ones that have exploded without the help of the directory and hardly surprisingly these have exploded because of interpersonal activity. The latest great app I wanted to show case is Free Gifts. The Facebook Gifts product is really cool and not too dissimilar to the ze frank concept of gimme some candy. The 2 mistakes I feel facebook made was making all gifts the same value (since surely if there were expensive and cheap gifts you'd give your girl/boyfriend a more expensive one) and not expiring the gifts after a given time (i.e. flowers might last a week, a teddy for a month etc...). Differentiation is key in many things.

 

Well the app above is giving away gifts for free and when you send a gift to someone they have to add the app to display it... how perfectly viral I really love it!

The image above shows the current user base and all without the use of the facebook directory, pretty incredible stuff, keep it up Zachary. I am excited to see how far this one goes!