This query had enough volume that it was in the goog typeahead so I thought I’d note it here in case anyone I know needs to know. It’s simple: go to http://bit.ly/account/your_api_key/
I’ve just been playing around with the bit.ly API since it’s a holiday and I like playing around with code sometimes on the holidays. bit.ly has a simple REST API and you can get the details here: API Documentation
It’s very simple. Hope this helps.
Playstation Store hits 650,000,000 downloads and Facebook Connect goes live on PS3.
Zynga crosses 100 million users and expands beyond Facebook games.
There were of course a lot of articles about the sale of playfish to EA which makes me for one really excited about the idea of getting all those great EA games (e.g. Risk) onto my favorite social networks.
And finally Xbox announced 2MM users connecting via Facebook already in just days.
People want to play games with their friends (I for one love farmville and would really like to see Risk on the Facebook platform and would pay to play).
One thing is completely lacking from the Amazon.co.uk homepage that dominates the US homepage. The Kindle.
The kindle will launch in the UK soon and when it does I believe it will be even more successful than in the US. The big reason why is public transport. Whereas in LA and the Bay area and even to some extent the east coast people love to commute by car, in the UK everyone uses public transport. For example in London (where 1 in 5 britains live) every train is massively crowded. The whole newspaper format was changed after 100years to make them easy to read on the train. I was reading my Kindle on the train this morning and noticed lots of people staring (at it sadly not me 🙂 ). They were all struggling with newspapers and big books on a fast moving, rocking train. I had one hand on the rail and was controlling the kindle easily with the other hand and had lot’s of books at hand (currently reading the tyranny of email).
Anyway just a general thought but look for kindle sales and associated book sales to go bananas (technical term 🙂 ) when the kindle launches in the uk.
The above graph shows market share by browser type from 2006 to 2009 for my cocktail making site. I reviewed the traffic to both cocktail making and paper airplanes which have very different traffic types and global compositions but together make 300k visits a month now and millions of page views so have a relatively large sample. As such both sites have a non tech audience which I think makes them good subjects for reviewing this data.
Bottom lines: Chrome is surging. Safari is still growing strong (most likely driven by mac market share). All of this is purely data from my websites but it is a pretty large sample set and I think what is very interesting is that after a long time of being on the sidelines Google and Apple are leveraging their dominant market share in their particular markets to be really competitive in the browser market.
I am personally not convinced this is market share leakage driven by competitive products rather than by different companies leveraging their different dominant market positions (in different markets) to succeed in this one and again I am not convinced there is true innovation happening in the browser business… it feels to me like getting your browser installed is just a ploy to get more searches on your service (not that there is anything wrong with that).
According to all the data I look at regularly the second half of 2009 has really been a deviation from trend for them in terms of growth. They are doing a really great job. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?
I would love to get your thoughts.
A year ago I was writing a blog post entitled “The Power of Focusing on Something” but in the end I couldn’t get it into great shape to post and so I chose to step back and leave it alone. Finally I am ready to post something a year on 🙂
I have now prepared a few examples that make a lot of sense and I wanted to share. The great thing about having your own projects or your own business as a sole proprietor is you have no one to blame but yourself when something goes right or something goes wrong. My websites provide this for me.
At every major life change my website performance slipped esp. in terms of revenue (which is in my experience driven more by short term focus than traffic for advertising driven websites – sales, network choice and optimization etc…). Each of these changes was very necessary and good for me overall but the websites provide a good independent measure of how they distracted me from other things in my life. These changes took away focus and losing focus harmed performance.
I have settled into my job at Facebook now and so have some time to focus on my websites again. One thing I did recently was start to focus on videos of me making paper airplanes. These videos get a lot of positive feedback, are easier to follow than diagrams of me making paper airplanes and thanks to the new youtube revenue sharing also make me money.
Daily views on my videos have doubled and now something between 200 and 600 hours a day are spent by people viewing videos of me making paper airplanes in fact on average every visitor to my site views one paper airplane video.
All of this spills into my real life. During those periods of negative website performance I also stopped going to the gym, stopped going out and really became pretty introverted.
So bottom line focus = results and lack of focus = fail. If you are going to make a major change as a business, as a team leader, as an individual, as a wife, husband, son, father, brother or whatever realize that it’s a trade off and make that trade off of focus explicit. Is the upside of a new focus worth the downside of focusing less on something else?
This image has been burned into my brain for 7 years now. This image and the story behind it taught me a great lesson about physics and business while I was studying for my undergrad at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge.
The lesson was that you can get to within an order of magnitude of calculating the power of a nuclear bomb using that picture and a bit of common sense. The full story can be seen here and I highly recommend you read it. Spending a short amount of time and really thinking through a well defined problem should give you a good idea of the answer. If the order of magnitude of the result of a test isn’t interesting to you based on that reasoning, don’t do it. Move on to the next thing. Focus on the high impact. Your time on earth is short, don’t waste it doing trivial things.
The fermi problems are also an interesting space which I consider really similar to dimensional reasoning which is just using common sense to determine a value. My favorite is “how many blades of grass are there in a front yard”. The idea being you realize the yard is something like 10m by 10m and there are something like 20 blades of grass in a cm squared so you have 10^6 cm squared and hence 20million blades of grass in that lawn give or take.
I am a huge fan of doing this common sense checking before you do projects or to make sure that a number you are quoting is right. Really great reminder from o’reilly radar (an awesome blog) to think about this stuff.
Earlier this week I posted a blog post entitled “massive changes, minimum impact“. This blog post follows on from that. In making the navigation changes in that article which had essentially zero impact on the cocktail making site I also made changes to the advertising on the site. Moving the ads from the right to the left hand side of the page and moving them up 50-100 pixels.
Today I had my highest revenue day ever across all my websites and revenue has been climbing steadily since I made these changes despite user engagement staying flat and traffic volume growing.
Big impact is all about focusing on what you want. I have seen folks made huge impact in my internet marketing jobs over the last decade through minor creative changes in wording shifting text to be a call to action instead of a passive informational call out: in adwords, in onsite merchandising, in email and even in plain text links.
Plan your goal, make your change, optimize for your success metric and you’ll see massive success for minimum pain should you do it right.
I am confused. I thought goodmail was meant to fix spam or help it and yet here I have two goodmail certified mails from a company who I didn’t subscribe to and have no idea who they are.
These are the first two goodmail certified mails I have ever seen.
Last week I made a major change to my cocktail site. I moved the main navigation from the right to left and reduced the number of navigation links shown by half (to reduce duplication of top bar navigation with side bar navigation and give more space for ads).
Below is a graph of page views per visitor before during and after the change from Google analytics. Can you spot when I implemented it? It’s the 3rd dot from the right. There was absolutely no change, I even studied the hour I pushed the change and nothing happened.
Sometimes things you think are important, aren’t. I stripped out half the navigation on every page on my site and completely changed the site and still people use the site the same way. I guess the advice is make bold changes, see what happens. Sometime’s it’s good, sometime’s it’s neutral, sometime’s it’s bad but the easiest way to find out is to try it.
