La Vallée des Papillons
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Netcycler: First impressions
I got my invitation to Netcycler yesterday and had time to browse around last night.
They describe themselves as:Netcycler is a swap and give away service for acquiring secondhand goods. We will soon add buy and sell options as well. When you no longer need something, the service will find someone who does. It's an alternative for consumption centered lifestyle, an easy way to minimize shopping while still getting all you need. We are still developing the service and there are plenty of new features to come.
They also warned the invitees that there aren't many items shared yet, which is understandable as the site just opened to alpha and bugs are expected. So, the first 4 things that came up while using Netcycler:
1. It. is. slow. I have a 100 meg connection at home and loading the front page takes 15.74 seconds. Fifteen seconds! And it's not about great strain to the servers, as there are only 300 users currently in the alpha and I'm sure there are only tens of simultaneous users. For me, the sites sluggishness is an issue that stops me from using the site and it seriously needs fixing. UPDATE: Did I say slow? 38.34 SECONDS to load the browsing area. That's the average attention span of a 20-year old. Multiplied by 40. UPDATE 2: I just got an error 500 after 37.4 seconds of waiting. It's down. 2. The concept Freecycling and 2nd hand stores are really trendy at the moment. Similar chains are buzzing in Facebook as well, the problem there is the people. People want too much and want to give too little. Even in Netcycler it's "I'll give away this old, used USB cable and I want a full 7mm wetsuit in change." I believe this can be evaded by adding some sort of category of "value" to the items, an average retail price or something similar - you know, "how much would you expect to get for this item on a flea market." In order for the service to work, it has to have movement, a sense of urgency. Otherwise is stagnates and it becomes cluttered. 3. Adding items Adding items has been done very well considering the amount of stuff out there. Sure, it would be even nicer to have a product number search tool that would decipher the information of my DVR, but the questions we logical and simple in their hierarchical method. Doing this right is one of the most important tasks in designing a service like this - especially when their goal is obviously to go multilingual in the future. 4. Usability Sure, the basic site and its navigation is very standard 2.0 usability, can't go wrong there. But there are still a lot of places where more information would be appreciated, while setting up an item to be given I get a prompt asking for me to "select meetingpoints" with two options of public and private meetingpoints. First of all, meetings and points are two different words - and what do they have to do with recycling? Did this become a dating service? Can I get that camera by meeting someone in a forest doing "services"? There's no explanation on what I should do and I can't even skip this as I could skip the previous steps (such as a photo and description). So, fixy fixy, more descriptions and explanations to forms, please. UPDATE: After clicking OK to the meetingpoint question, there popped up another popup below the latest popup saying that it's a place where I meet my contacts. Would have appreciated that info earlier. Maybe people could insert these meeting points already while setting up their profile? All in all, the concept has promise and as soon as they can fix the lagging, I'll start using it more efficiently. All the other things are minor user experience improvements - and I would appreciate seeing Netcycler to use the expertise available in Finland, I mean, just using Twitter in Finland gives one great resources to get feedback.
Who can guess where I am?
{Rick Smith}.
{www.RickwSmith.com}.
---------------------------------------------
Sent from my iPhone - {sorry in advance for any spelling issues, shortness of email, or use of shorthand}
米国発 Pay Per Tweet の波：透明性の確保を含む5つのリスク
いずれこの波は日本にも来るのでしょうか？New York TimesにPay Per Tweet（PPT） の実態についてのレポートがありました。
記事で紹介されていたのは、50,000人のフォロワーを擁する@JohnChow氏。例えばM&Mの顔や名前をカスタマイズできるサービスをツイートして、彼は200ドルを得ているほか、通信企業やMake-A-Wish財団についてのツイートなどを通じて、10月には約3,000ドルの収入をTwitterから得たそうです。
ボタンを押すだけで収入を得られる（John Chow氏）
PPTを提供しているのはAd.lyやIZEA、Likesという新興企業。登録している（Kim Kardashian, Dr. Drew, ミュージシャンのErnie Halter ら）セレブリティは$10,000をTwitterを通じて得ているとのこと。
Ad.lyの説明を読んでみましたが、セレブリティ本人の承認をともなうものなので、ツイートされるものは自分のフォローしている人がいい（悪くはない）と思った広告で、むやみやたらにプッシュされて来るものではないようです。
やはりここで問題になるのは、信頼性・透明性と、今のTwitterの健全な感じの環境が少し変わってしまうことだと思います。 以下に2つの例をご紹介したいと思いますが、上は広告で下は広告ではないツイートです。
広告でないツイートの方がよっぽど明確に関係性を説明しています。
このご時世、透明性の確保のために自分と企業との関係性を明示するのが基本ですが、#adの3文字をツイートの最後に書くだけで十分なのかなぁ、と若干気になりました。しかもご丁寧に"RT pls"とRe Tweetのお願いまでしています。
さて、とはいえ、始まっているものですし、いずれ日本にも来ることでしょう。
PPTで発生しうるリスクについてのまとめがあったのでそちらも併せてご紹介。
1. ユーザーが一斉にフォローを解除する危険性あり：なにせ初めてのことなので、広告に対する重要性は未知数
2. 技術的にまだ確立できていないので、ビジネスモデルを破壊する可能性も：クッキーの活用などができていないため、例えば同じ広告を何度も見せられる可能性がある
3. ROIが見えないため、比較が困難：CTRはとれても実際にツイートを見た人の数を特定することが不可能。かつ、ターゲットとして適しているかも判定不能
4. 広告主は会話を妨げることを好まない：広告主はソーシャルメディア上での評価に敏感であり同時にユーザーの会話に割るこむことを好まない
5. 透明性の欠如はTwitterの信頼性のモデルを傷つける：Twitterは互いの信頼をベースに成立している
Serializing custom ActiveRecord attributes as JSON
I'm not a big fan of ActiveRecord's serialize. But I have kept it together until I learned about DataMapper's custom serializers for custom types. At that point, I was ready to cry. I was saved by the following inspiration.
I've been looking for a fast (no YAML) and framework agnostic (no classname stored) way to serialize a custom object into an ActiveRecord attribute. Here's my simple hack to create custom serializers in Rails using composed_of.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
composed_of :settings, :class_name => 'Settings', :mapping => %w(settings to_json),
:constructor => Settings.method(:from_json),
:converter => Settings.method(:from_json)
after_validation do |u|
u.settings = u.settings if u.settings.dirty? # Force to serialize
end
end
Yes. It's that simple. To clarify, after_validation self-assignment is needed to make sure that if you edit the Settings object in-place, that it gets serialized into the attribute. Note: I've tried the user.settings_will_change! option and it didn't work -- it forces the save, but not the serialization.
Now you can get crazy like a fox (ie. FriendFeed) and store schema-less data via Rails.
30+ Examples of What Social Media Success Looks Like
:: By Michael E. Rubin, Social Marketing Manager
Back in August, we asked "Is Social Media a Fad?" with the help of a provocative video from Erik Qualman and the Socialnomics blog. Erik is back with an equally provocative video exploring Social Media ROI and asking "What does success look like?"
Let's do the numbers (here are a few of my favorites):
- #6. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers
- #10. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter
- #18. Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.
- #29. eBay found participants in online communities spend 54% more money
I definitely encourage you to watch the video and learn more. Erik has graciously included full sources and attribution at Socialnomics.
More about Michael:
Twitter: @merubin
LinkedIn: Michael E. Rubin
Amazing Rugby kick scores £250,000
Check out this awesome kick from an amateur rugby player. He was picked at random from the audience and won £250,000 pounds for winning the challenge. His victory face is almost more awesome than the kick itself.
Much more video.
