Mini-Applications Are the Future of the Social and Mobile Internet

The age of min-apps is here, creating a new set of problems and opportunities for the entire internet supply chain - from developers to VC's. With the announcement of the Facebook Verified App program, we've clearly entered a new level of social ecosystem. The amazing number of 48,000(!) applications available for the Facebook will continue to force the platform to adjust and change in ways they could never predict. As a corollary, the mounting number of applications available for smart phones / mobile platforms like the iPhone and the new Blackberry Storm are pushing new boundaries in application availability. With the Storm setting a MySpace record for application downloads, and MySpace's focus on all mobile platforms, the age of applications (min-apps) built for multiple platforms is apparent. If the social leaders on driving mobile use, the mini-apps will surely thrive there, too.

What does this mean? Well, a little something for everyone.

Platforms
Facebook is leading the charge here, but even after the '5,000 apps and counting' announcement a year ago, it was clear that for a normal user to find and sort through that many available apps was going to be a challenge - even at that time. With boundaries to app development getting lower and the ability to monetize getting easier, the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience for finding apps has only grown. Facebook's Verified App program is a great step here, giving credibility to hopefully some outstanding apps, and verification is something I've been discussing for a year now. But, that's not going to be enough. The FB app directory needs a huge overhaul (OpenSocial directories need this too). Every provider, from Apple to Bebo to MySpace will need to provide more detail to users about each app as they search and browse, so installing the app isn't required to figure out what the thing really does.
Hmm...where else are there tens of thousands of products?
Let's take a look at software download sites like CNET's download.com, eBay and Amazon for some examples of 100k+ items for sale. App listings will need to be filtered and results sorted / refined by multiple factors, including verification, popularity, user-ratings, and maybe a few new factors like a 'usefulness' rating, 'virality' (do people recommend it to their friends on purpose?), and a SPAM rating, and maybe some categories (productivity tool, utility, personals, game, group management, time-waster, etc.). User comments are there today, but a way to quantify these would be more helpful for the fast-reading user. Maybe the app canvas page needs more screenshots, a video demo, and some good usage data (installs v. un-installs is an interesting metric). The more ways to differentiate the app, the better for both the developer and the user.
Better directories mean more users will look for and find apps that are useful to them, driving up time on the site and ad clickthroughs.

Developers
You could see this coming like a train wreck - it's too hard for 'useful' applications to stand out from the crowd on Facebook and other platforms, and just developing a good app isn't good enough. (When I say 'useful' I mean the apps do something other than make you invite your friends to join - a pretty low bar, I know.) Developer emphasis on app virality has been capped in FB and other networks, and is not the way to propagate an app on any mobile platform. What's a developer to do?
I'm predicting that over the next 2 years, we'll see more 'app factories' that roll developers and their apps together under a single company name, much like the organic way that Slide and RockYou developed, but with freelance developers instead of employees.
These 'App Studios' will be able to market the apps on behalf of the developers and split revenues. They will have much more success due to the volumes they can manage and the brand association / credibility they'll be able to create. We'll see an app built for one platform, then under this movie studio model be adapted to multiple platforms and marketed and cross-sold as an incremental addition to a brand portfolio across networks. You'll be able to install an app on your iPhone and Facebook profile, and maintain your single data profile between the two interfaces. This concept really makes sense from a user, developer and investment perspective, it just needs a bit of juice.

Users
Platform users have benefited so far, and will continue to benefit as the platforms and developers make it easier to determine what's good, what works and what doesn't - and what fits the specific needs of each individual. With future programs like 'Recommended Apps' based on demographics, usage and preference selection, platforms will be able to deliver a lot more value through their developer network directly to the user, because, of course, they have the data. They can offer a product they don't own to their users, with a direct benefit to them - a very unique concept and a true ecosystem at work. Maybe by recommending apps instead of ads, then advertising in the apps, they'll see a more effective model for monetization. You get a specific usage scenario, a more specific set of profiles, and a user who's doing something, not just socializing. Users would feel more catered to and have a better experience wherever they are. (Platforms: leverage these apps to gain the hearts and clicks of your users.)

Investors
The venture capital community is already transforming to respond to the new world of mini-apps . It's faster and much much cheaper to develop an app when you don't need to develop the platform, the user database, or do the same amount of marketing to find users. VC's continue to raise large funds, and it seems they need to seek later-stage investments to put the 'right' amount of money to work. Small apps aren't home runs, and they aren't going to use enough capital with a $100 - $350k launch range. Just enough to keep a developer or three happy for a year. Again, the 'App Studio' concept with an aggregation of apps, "ownership" of the user, and marketing of a product portfolio makes a lot of sense - the scale of such an operation fits more inline with a $2-5M 'A' investment. There will be 3 trends: a) existing VC's will continue to only invest in game-changing platforms b) mini-funds will form, with much lower investment parameters c) VC's will see the App Studio concept as a viable option.
An App Studio acts like a proxy for the VC to diversify and invest in multiple apps. It makes betting on any one app a risk, but with the main focus being operational expertise and distribution, the risk is much less. We'll probably see a few VC leaders start (if you've seen any, please comment!) and the rest will follow soon after like sheep and saturate the market...

Applications that reside within networks (social or mobile or both) are the new Chinese menu model of the internet - use what you want, where you want it, wherever you are. This is the intention of Facebook and the concept of the social utility - it's actually becoming a platform and a new operating system. Mini-apps are going to be here for a while - this is just the beginning.

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New Media, Social Publishing or just Social Media?

I get asked quite frequently what makes OleOle different from a 'social network'. The concept of tracking your online or offline network of friends, family and colleagues was never the driver for the OleOle site design, even though 'networking' features are available. It was the ability for amateur or professional writers to instantly find an instant audience of people interested in the topic they were writing about. Publishing and immediate delivery of relevant content, from multiple sources, personalized for each individual, delivered in the way they want it.

Publishing through social media, or Social Publishing, is really that ever elusive "New Media". Everything a newspaper does offline leveraging everything possible online in a true crowd-driven, automated fashion. New Media still in relative infancy and continues to undergo transformation as technology and understanding of crowd behaviour and the social network matures. The idea that blogging is dead - don't beleive the hype- is related. We're seeing a change, and blogging as we know it is evolving as rapidly as it's appeared. We're seeing far fewer independent blogs and more commercialized blogs and blog networks. Not only that, but the standard web-based blog post is changing shape - into iPhone app snippets, Twitter tweets and - get this - ListServes. There are still millions upon millions of blogs, but there are fewer independent blogs making it out of obscurity. Not because it's any harder to setup and write a blog - that's getting easier every day. Rather, it's much more difficult to get an individual blog (like this one) read. Bloggers are now finding that the laws of big numbers work, and blog networks are able to pass along Pagerank, a captive audience, and 'recommended reading' to visitors in a way that a stand-alone blog cannot. Not to mention the ex-old media writers, left to wither on the street in the past two years, are bringing their organizational maturity and editorial skillsets to the web.

So we're seeing a professionalization (not sure that's a word but we'll go with it) of blogging; networks are better able to monetize their readers in aggregate, and able to pay the blogger a bit of that. Blogs and 'collectives' are still working at generating any significant ad revenues, but lumped together with an audience around a single theme, it gets a lot better. Writers are banding together, and we're seeing publications that are challenging 'old media' sites as they grown in prominence, reliability and even scope - even without that offline "doorstep" delivery.

OleOle takes the social media concept to this new level of Social Publishing. Where it's possible to have enough content on a site about dogs or cats or maybe even cars created by a team of 5-20 bloggers, it is impossible to have enough content about a topic as big as soccer / football with a paid writing staff. Covering 6,000 professional soccer teams - around the world - would be far too cost prohibitive. Big media companies haven't done it, and will never do it - TV, radio, newspaper, magazines - nobody. But, find one (or more) passionate fans per team who are basically literate, and you've got a global publication that covers the entire sport. Fans are out there, otherwise the teams wouldn't exist - it's a matter of time before they stop relying on the AP for their news.

But how do you organize posts from 6,000++ independent blogs? Throw in millions of photos, videos and other user-generated content - how do you find it all? Its not reasonable to be 'friends' with all 16 mllion fans who follow Manchester United. Social networks aren't geared for this for sure.

Social publishing takes the concept that everyone in social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc) can publish things to their profile and pushes that to the public arena. Social network blogs are only available at the profile level - so you've got to know the person or have access to their profile to read the content. With organized blog publishing (TechCrunch, Huffington Post) everything is public but there's a high standard of editorial - someone manually arranges content, features it on the right page, and even commissions it in the first place. Again, impossible to do at reasonable cost for 6,000+ bloggers speaking 20 languages in 200 countries. Social publishing enables individual bloggers to self-organize their user-generated content for public consumption leveraging an underlying publishing framework. Social publishing relies on the concept of "Topic Centers" that visitors can easily find and access, and individual contributors can push their content to. Topic centers can be built around any topic the site anticipates - in the case of football it's players, competitions, teams, leagues, WAGS, etc. Finding a topic center must be easy for the user (accessible directly from their homepage) and it must be easy to navigate to, and find new ones. This requires something big - a reversion to what web 2.o brought to the world - the sidelining of those uber-cool things called 'tags'.

Tags, by their very nature, are personal. They are used on blogs to group and classify content around a specific keyword, and that keyword is completely variable based on the author's preferences. A topic center requires centralization and sharing of keywords, so that every author has equal access to publish to where their best audience is visiting. A Topic system is at the heart of the OleOle publishing platform - providing a way for authors to publish and visitors to find the right content - outside of profiles, outside of user idiosyncrasies. The topic system also drives site navigation, page generation, menus and SEO - it's the fabric of the platform matching publisher and visitor together invisibly. However, just because topics are site-wide doesn't mean they need to be static, although in the case of football they are hierarchical to some degree due to the complexity of the sport. So, you're not really giving up the personalization of tags (which can still be employed to filter submissions made by a single user) - but tags are now "personalized" for the collective editorial team, and evolve as needed.

Social publishing is the organization of social media. It's the next step in Web 3.0, social aggregation and smart filtering. Social publishing means leveraging the power of the crowd and the individual writers to publish. The organization is automated, not human, and visitors and volunteers stand in for a managing editor to both rate content and correct things published to the wrong topic centers. Where social networking is useful for keeping tabs on people you know, social publishing is the maturation of social media and user-generated content enbling groups rather than individuals.

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Top 10 Must-Have's When Hiring a Product Manager

Hire the Right Product Manager: Skills and Experience to Look for Beyond a Job Description or Resumé

A smart man asked me last week, "What do you look for when hiring a product manager?". A great question, and one I'm not sure I answered fully at the time because there's so much to consider, and so much at stake. An average product manager vs. a great product manager can make such a huge difference in a product and its market success, it can translate to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars difference in revenue. How could a company ignore putting a product manager through the interview wringer?

Product management is the science of distilling a real, immediate customer problem into a solution those people will pay for (in time or money). In the world of technology, where I live, that means specifying the target market, target buyer, features, functions and customer experience for software, hardware and/or internet sites. The Must Have traits are crucial for making that happen and getting a timely result that resonates with the buyer. Most are personality or behavioral traits, rather than specific skills, and therefore are much overlooked during interviews which tend to focus on skills and domain.

Here are the top things that, after 16 years of interviewing hundreds and working dozens with product marketers and product managers, that I've come to look for when making a hiring decision. The product management interview is much more like an hour with a psychiatrist (you) - finding out what makes them tick and how they work with and relate to people. Being able to uncover these traits during an interview process is exceedingly difficult, so in upcoming posts, I'll be talking about the different ways I've found to evaluate these attributes.

Top 10 Things to Look For When Hiring A Product Manager
(ordered from least to most important)

10. Domain Knowledge
9. Verbal and Written Communication Skills
8. Organization
7. Goal-Driven Motivation
6. Analytical Thinking
5. Ability to Make a Decision with Limited Information
4. Selflessness / Lack of Ego
3. Problem Solving Skills
2. Social Skills
1. Empathy

10. Domain Knowledge
Understanding your market is something that will help any product manager when starting out at your company, but too many hiring managers put far too much emphasis on this. They say
nobody can just learn my industry". Of course if a product manager (PM) "gets" the market and the customer, their ramp speed and usefulness will come much faster. But, having experience within a market doesn't make a great product manager. In many cases, someone who thinks they understand everything about a user or a market becomes closed-minded, stops listening, and creates a barrier to developing good products. Or, applies the same "knowledge" to every problem.

In many cases, someone with strong PM traits and a solid understanding of the product lifecycle process can make a bigger impact with a new product because they're listening 100% to the user - they have no choice. I've seen so many companies hire a product manager - even at a VP level - because they come from a competitor or from 'the industry', and so many times that person fails to make a difference. So, when interviewing for a product manager, weight domain knowledge the least important of all attributes. A great product manager can start making an impact in 1-2 months in any domain (as long as its not super-super-technical).

9. Verbal and Written Communication Skills
Product managers are the evangelists for a customers, potential customers, and for the company. They must be able to quickly and clearly articulate plans, goals and processes to many different personality types, all the time. Many times they'll be in sales situations directly interfacing with prospects or customers. They take executive feedback to the engineering team, and take engineering feedback to the marketing team, and customer insight and data to all teams. They've got to be able to speak well, create excellent, readable and influential Powerpoints and product specifications. They represent the company to the press, to industry analysts and to everyone at tradeshows.
A great product manager is a great communicator and naturally becomes a central hub of information flow about a product. A superlative product manager takes this one step farther, and creates an automated hub of information about a product that removes him from the day to day as much as possible. The superlative product manager understands the importance of communication as well as the fact that he's only one person, so intranets and portals, or at least document shares, are critical for keeping communications moving without personal involvement.

8. Organization
Product managers must juggle dozens, hundreds or thousands of moving parts - feature lists, schedules, names, faces, data, specs, customers, developers, sales people, special customer requests, bugs and fires and more. A product manager must be able to triage issues and move quickly through the items (bullets) that other constituents send (fire) at him every day - so he can tackle the things that are actually on his own To-Do list. The product manager must be constantly classifying and organizing things for immediate projects and also for reference and for future projects. Not everything is immediate, so having an an excellent storage system / scheme (and excellent memory) is critical. If a product manager isn't organized and can't move through the hundred emails they get before 10am, they'll never have time to make an impact and will get put into 'reactive' mode very quickly. They become pawns of the organization, rather than leading the organization to new revenue opportunities.

7. Goal-Driven Motivation

A goal-driven product manager is a self-motivated person, and most of the time a very competitive person - they like to win. They see and understand what the end result needs to look like, what it needs to achieve, and they have the mental fortitude to motivate themselves and others to reach that goal, step by step. Goal-driven product managers can persevere and do the many things along the way they need to hit goals, going above and beyond any job description. These are not 9 to 5ers, these are people with the dedication and focus to get to the prize, the launch, the release, or whatever the goal is. Goal-driven product managers work independently with little day to day oversight and naturally feel a sense of responsibility and a sense of urgency that they pass onto others. Goal-driven PM's also understand that aligning a team or organization around a goal is the best way to get everyone working in the same direction. Starting with the end in mind is the only way to ensure the team focuses on what matters, and acts as a filter against everything that inevitably pops up on the way.

6. Analytical Thinking
Product managers must be able to acquire, organize and analyze data and come up with solid conclusions. Like any science, there are theories and there are controlled experiments to test those theories. Theories can be created from customer feedback, market feedback or ideas from executive meetings, but having the ability to run a multi-variate test or experiment to prove or disprove the theory is the difference between a market leading product and a dud. Great products are developed according to data - qualitative and quantitative - from multiple sources. There are budgets, there are feature priorities, there are time constraints. Good math and the ability to extrapolate, work back, and identify the big wins is simply critical.

5. Ability to Make a Decision with Limited Information

Almost as a caveat to #6, a product manager can't be overly analytical or completely reliant on data. There is always the risk of analysis paralysis, and often the data isn't available, isn't available for a reasonable price, or something just needs to get done without the time for good analysis (yes, it happens!). Product managers must think on their feet and make good, decisive and quick actions based on the data at hand. Product managers are not bean counters, not statisticians - they're going with what they've got and are comfortable with that.

4. Selflessness / Lack of Ego

You can't listen to customer problems if your opinion gets in the way. Period. Product managers must have ideas, of course, but can never let their personal opinions take the place of real buyer / customer feedback and data. I like to compare product managers to CSI investigators - they have to know where to look and why, they've got the training and understanding of good processes, but the evidence they uncover must be irrefutable and speak for itself. If an ego gets in the way, this objectivity flies out the window and the data is no longer unbiased, the decision to go or not go is unsound. A product manager with an ego is not doing anyone at the company a service, they are merely guessing - and even someone in the mailroom can do that. There are a few things that I love about Pragmatic Marketing, and this quote is one of them: "Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant." It's true.

3. Problem Solving Skills

This is a talent that can get you through school, but you just can't learn in school (or even an MBA program). This is "street smarts" - using your experience and common sense to overcome a challenge or obstacle. You can be a 4.0 student, a Harvard MBA, and not have any of this. I've seen them out there, and there's almost nothing more frustrating.
Problem solving is critical - finding a solution from the data and resources you have at hand. Figuring out what features to cut if the deadline slips. Determining if priorities need to be juggled. Handling 100 requests at the same time. It's all in a days' work. Product managers must be able to solve problems that are 'outside the book' without running to their boss for help. Much of this is natural or 'nurtured' intelligence but a lot of it is being able to see the big picture, envision multiple scenarios, then frame each in context - 'what will be the most effective way to reach my goal?'. Problem solvers get things done without burdening other staff, complaining, or delaying projects.
Problem solving is also critical when dealing with a customer problem. A product manager has to come up with one on more ideas on how to solve the problem they identify. They have to be able to envision software before its built, screens and interfaces before they're designed. They've got to be able to solve the customer's problem FOR them. Even the best customer /user / buyer will never be able to describe the best way to solve a problem, that's the key to what the product manager does.

2. Social Skills

Product managers that make a difference can communicate internally with just about every department within the company. To define an ideal customer experience, they have to work with everyone. A technical, geeky product manager might be able to write a great spec and put it in front of the development team, but making things happen in an organization, calling in favors to get work and work product from people that you don't directly manage, is a social art. Much like a salesperson, the product manager must be able to get along with multiple personality types, to work on the level that those people like to work on. PM's are chameleons and can talk at a high level to execs and 4 minutes later be in the engineering department translating the same message at a low level. They have an ability to "change gears" instantly depending on their audience. I don't want to say product managers must be friends with everyone - that is rare; but if they are friendly and get along well with different groups, they tend to be much more effective at getting the organization to change (for the better).

1. Empathy

Empathy is the most important product management trait. Without empathy, the ability to put oneself in a potential customer's shoes and find a solution for their problem, a product manager is superficial. A deep understanding of the problem, and the ability to say 'if i had that problem how would I fix it?' are the essence of the product management function. An empathetic product manager can walk through a problem with a customer, uncover sources of frustration or inefficiency, and really identify with the problem. Empathy is extremely difficult to learn - some people are born with it, some aren't. This is probably the biggest constraint on salespeople. Most are thick skinned - they get No quite a bit and are naturally insensitive to this. Empathetic salespeople have a much harder time with No, but make much bigger sales. They solve problems for their customer because they take the time, and have the skill to understand the motivations and the drivers involved.

So, that's my Top Ten list. I'm sure there's more, and related items, but you can only look for so many behavioral or personality traits during an interview. The thing that's not on this list is execution - has a PM successfully done this before. That's a leading indicator that they can do it again, regardless of domain.

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Is the Network The End or Is Productivity The End?

Yahoo! just blogged that they have completely opened up their platform - the "Yahoo Open Strategy". You can read about it all on the Yahoo! developer blog and of course on TechCrunch, but the really interesting thing is the entire content and application platform is now (theoretically) social. Much different from adding applications (productive or not) on top of a social network, Yahoo has taken almost the reverse position and is allowing OpenSocial applications to be built on top of its own (extremely popular) applications, content and tools.

Yahoo really didn't have a choice in the matter, since they control no specific social network other than MyBlogLog (which is pretty small and targeted). So, this approach is probably the most practical approach, but it might just be a soc net killer. They've ended up building the network into the tools that millions already use and are comfortable with (especially email which I think is personally the best free email out there). That means much much less work for a casual user, and a ton more benefit.

Jay Rossiter the Head of Yahoo Open Strategy referred to the opening of the network as the "big bet" and I'm sure every yahoo hopes he's right. I'm sure they're still wrestling some big big problems like getting each of the very different Yahoo segments to work together around the new authentication scheme and the Universal profile. Yahoo has had some practice with this, as they've been able to integrate profiles pretty seamlessly as of last year (with MyBlogLog), but that's still a huge data mess - gone long without cleanup (the organization could probably use the same cleanup and streamlining (I'm available BTW)).

From a developer perspective, the key to success here is monetization. The impact of this from a technical standpoint is amazing, opening up the levy to access all 40 million monthly unique MyYahoo users, in addition to Mail, Travel, Jobs, Personals, etc. etc. The difference from MySpace apps is the My Yahoo users are there to get information and be productive, where MySpace not so much (last time I checked). So, developers have an engaged audience trying to be (generally) productive. So, as long as Yahoo doesn't mess with its current advertising requirements for applications developers should be able to make some great ad revenue. And, MyYahoo users are used to adding portlets / gadgets, so if adding apps is virtually the same, the install rates should be very high. Users know what they know, and will be comfortable with the concept of adding new and better "things" to their page.

The big picture: the first ad network that enables contextual advertising based on the Yahoo app the person is using, in combination with the developer app, profiled against whatever user data is available is going to do quite well. A tricky equation, but that's what computers are for. If Yahoo was REALLY smart, they'd do this segmentation and ad serving themselves and take a cut. I think this could be the magic formula for improving CPM that just doesn't exist in the social part of social networks - because it's centered around context and real subject matter.

Yahoo has a ton of content, and with the Y!OS 1.0 platform has created a way to really segment audiences for advertising in a way the giant portal just hasn't been able to do on its own. It's very early, not everything is ready yet, but I think this just might really bring Yahoo back to life. And save Jerry's neck.

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