Simplifying things...

In recent weeks, we have started to see a bump in the usage of the site. <-- Very Pumped!

As mentioned in the past, we're trying to create an experience that combines 'user interests' with watching videos AND shopping. Before we went live with a new release last night, the user had the ability to scroll through videos and shopping at the same time but could not do the same thing while watching a video. From the useage data, it became apparent that it was difficult for the user to want to do both.

Soooo, we started brainstorming and came up with a new, easier to use, video and shopping scrolling experience, as well as, added the ability to shop while watching videos.

Notice on this screen that the user can watch a 'Simpson's spoof on Star Wars' and also shop for 'Star Wars' goodies below the watching area.

We very excited about this new user experience. It puts shopping right in the middle of the action and also allows for room for great new features that are in our little heads at the moment.

Stay tuned for some really cool, engaging features to come in the near future!

-the BaconMarathon Team

Part 3: FOAFOAF <-- Achieving the 'triple loop'

This is the final part for of the 3 part series focusing on how we have focused the last month on achieving viral-ness with top3Clicks. We started with learning how the application behaves using cheap Facebook ads and then we added a new 'Igniter' called YouTube videos.

Now we have started to achieve what we internally have been calling a 'triple loop'.

What is a 'triple loop' (friend of a friend of a friend)?

1. A user clicks on a Facebook ad and authorizes that they would like to watch videos on top3Clicks.

An example of an ad we have been running for the last week or so.

Click on the ad to the right to give it a whirl! -->

The ad is targeted towards users that love to watch spoofs on YouTube and specifically "The Dark Knight" franchise. We thought this is a natural for what we're trying to do because The Dark Knight is one of the big holiday items this year. Users watch Batman spoof videos from YouTube may be interested in buying relevant items on Amazon.

2. The original user enjoys the experience and invites their friends to try out the application via the link. Their friends will see the request to try top3Clicks in the upper right corner of their Facebook home page.

3. The invited friend tries the application and also enjoys the experience. This second user then notifies their friends to try the application.

The triple loop is when the original friend (1) has spread the word about top3Clicks to friends (2) that then tell their friends (3) where the original friend may or may not know the third.

Conclusion: With Facebook ads we are now achieving viral-ness. Stay tuned as we make enhancements to the experience to continue to get users to consistently come back.

Part 2: The new 'Igniter' --> YouTube Videos!

As mentioned in the previous post, we believe we are on to something by getting a significant amount of users to the site (using an inexpensive approach) but we did not see any increase in orders or authorizations. We needed a new igniter.

We started brainstorming how we tackle this issue by looking at other Facebook applications that users have virally embraced. (Important note: we're not talking about the applications that use mandatory inviting or spamming techniques)

Looking at Adonomics, the top 10 companies focus on: self-expression widgets, social games, non-profit causes, dating/meetup helpers and vertical reviewing (movies, books, etc.) All of these applications enhance the users experience on Facebook but none seem, on the surface, to give users an experience based on their interests.

The light bulb went off for us that since top3Clicks is already recommending items based on the users interests then it is feels natural that these users would want to see videos based on their interests. We hoping we can add to the YouTube phenomenon as the igniter. So we burned the midnight oil and launched the ability to select, watch and share YouTube videos in a way that may not have been presented this way before.

Here is a screenshot:

If a user has Guns N' Roses in their Facebook interests then notice how they can watch YouTube videos and also shop for items on Amazon. The igniter idea is that users tend to want to come back often to watch new interesting videos and if there is something 'impulsively' interesting they can buy right there.

So continuing from the last post, we dropped an ad to test our theory...

5. With the new Guns album arriving in stores today after 17 years, we decided to drop the following ad yesterday. -->

Our expectations: We focused the site and the advertising around watching videos and suggest that you can purchase items.

We learned: First, people love Guns N' Roses. Second, when users clicked to our site a much greater number of users authenticated in to watch videos. <-- big improvement! We also saw a great deal of clicking to Amazon but want to do more research into what users were doing. Conclusion: It is super early, only a half week, but we're already seeing the qualities we hope to see with YouTube videos. More users have authenticated to use our service and we're seeing the addictive qualities of YouTube.

Part 1: Learning how your application behaves using cheap Facebook ads

The next three posts are all tied together.

top3Clicks was created with a two part vision:
1. Help a person find items to purchase based on their interests.
2. Use that persons expertise to educate and entice friends to find items to purchase.

When we set out to create an application with Facebook, we had a hunch that a users profile interests would be a 'killer' starting point to then recommend items for potential purchase. We focused on making it real simple to use and allowing users to opt into telling their friends about their items of interest.

As expected, we built the application, went live and told all our closest and dearest friends to give it a whirl. From all their wonderful feedback, we fine tuned the experience adding features to make better suggestions, added a Getting Started page, etc. (check the archives) We really have appreciated all the friend QA efforts.

But I have to tell ya, there is nothing like random users to help understand how your application is really performing.

To find random users, we decided to use Facebook ads. As we ran each ad campaign, we started to learn a great deal about our user experience.

Here is the path we took and what we learned:

1. A big congratulations to the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies! (Bacon grew up in Philly and hadn't seen a championship since 1983)

With the victory, we started placing CPC ads to just see if we could get users to top3Clicks and purchase Phillies gear.

Our expectations: We didn't expect a lot of clicks and we were really pumped to see users click on the ad.

We learned: We sent users to the about page for top3Clicks. This gave users a chance to add the application but didn't give the user the thrill of seeing Phillie recommendations. We needed to send users directly to the recommendations.


2. Another big congratulations is in order for president-elect Barack Obama!

With election day a couple days away, we decided to test to see if we could entice users with Obama gear and send the user directly to the recommendation screen.

Our expectations: We knew people would click on ads so we were focused on whether users would purchase items. To our surprise, many users clicked on the ad and went to the site and ordered!

We learned: If we send users directly to our recommendation page (skipping the about page) with a compelling item then a percentage of users will order. The bad news was that not a lot of user that clicked on the ad actually 'Allow' authorization to add the top3Clicks application. So we focused on trying to get that number up.


3. Bacon is also a big Howard Stern fan and knew Artie Lange (his sidekick) was about to launch his new book. So we targeted New York Facebook users with the following ad -->

Our expectations: We wanted to get a bigger percentage of users that click on the ad to actually authorize top3Clicks application. Authorized users allows us to use the users profile for recommendations and to notify friends of interesting items.

We added an auto-authorization feature to send users directly to the recommendation screen to see items and potentially order and added tracking IDs for every action on our site.

We learned: Artie delivered a significant amount of users to the site but we did not see any increase in orders or authorizations. This was disappointing but started the brainstorming process that lead what we'll be talking about in the next 'part 2' post.

4. Marathon is a big The Office fan. We targeted people who like 30 Rock, Comedy Central, The Office and Steve Carell with the
following ad. -->

Our expectations: We focused on creating an 'automagical' flow where a user clicks on an ad then sends a notification to their friends to get their friends to try the service.

We learned: When users clicked to our site and looked at recommendations, we also sent notifications to their friends. We were able to see friends of the original user also sign up for Artie Lange on top3Clicks. (FOAF)


Conclusion: With Facebook Ads, we learned in an affordable, iterative way that we can add features to top3Clicks to achieve viral usage and orders. We're now focused on how to get users to keep coming back. We have successfully had random users start a 'loop of usage'.

Last week news feeds now enhanced notifications!

We just went live with a very compelling feature that will notify friends that you added an item to your own personal top3Clicks list.

What does the feature do? If you add 'Phillies' to your personal watch list all of your friends that ALSO use top3Clicks will receive a notification that you added an item.

We added this feature so you can leverage the expertise of your friends. If Brett is a Phillies fan and is looking for Phillies jerseys then you may be interested as well.

Please let us know what you think!

The Clash - Live At Shea Stadium

If you are like me and a fan of The Only Band That Matters (The Clash), you might know that the surviving members just released a stellar live show that was recorded weeks before their demise.

Live At Shea Stadium was recorded on the Combat Rock tour when The Clash was opening for The Who. Overall, the band, sound quality and song selection is top notch.

I also picked up the latest DVD, Live Revolution Rock,

which features the band over several years in a number of venues -- *and* I also ordered the forthcoming book, "The Clash", written by the band.

I wasn't aware that Live At Shea Stadium was forthcoming, I actually learned about it via Top3Clicks, watching The Clash, which was really motivating. The latest feature (news feed integration) was written listening to the Shea Stadium gig and the DVD.

Fiddling with new Facebook UX features when old features fail

When we launched top3Clicks, as third party developers, we focused about a third of our attention around the users Facebook 'profile' user experience. This was the major way to keep your friends in tune with what you are watching, etc.

With the new Facebook user design, we have found the profile section (now the boxes tab) to be absolutely useless (or to be nice - 'less useful').

We took a hard look at where we could make changes to get friends thinking about friends again and it became crystal clear that the 'news feed' is the only road for seeing what your friends are up to. Sooo, we just released a new update, tweaking our use of 'news feeds' focusing on tipping off your friends when you add items that you are watching in top3Clicks.

For example, if you are interested in watching 'Phillies' items. You can add the item to top3Clicks, example below.

Now notice below that once the item is added, it will appear in your news feed as something you recently added. Your friends will see this item and can either add the item to their top3Clicks page or they can click on an item that is available at Amazon (like the Phillies jersey). This gives your friends a chance to impulse purchase the item.

As the top3Clicks community adds more items this feature is going to really be cool.

Feedback (good & not so good) always welcome.

-The BaconMarathon

Note that the BaconMarathon is supporting the Phillies this year to win the world series over the Rays. The first time since 1980 when Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton ran the show. Go Phils!

We just made recommendations much better!

We're hitting our stride!

One of the biggest feedback items centers around the quality of the recommendations we're offering. Last night, we believe we took a big bite out of refining the search within Amazon and now our recommendations really nail it.

For example, in the past, if you wanted to look for items centered around 'Lost' and selected 'DVD', you would have to scroll through a couple screens to get to actually get to the 'Lost' season DVDs .

With the new updated, when you type 'Lost' and select 'DVD - Title' (shown below), the results will show the Lost TV show first.

Another example, on the 'Getting Started' tab, we added new text fields to help refine what recommendations we can offer. For example, the user can move the Beastie Boys from 'Music' to 'Music - Artist' and get much better results.

Thank you all for the great feedback and special thanks to the following: Milt R., Stokes, Jen S., Brett R., Yen T. and all others that helped get this feature on the radar. We're really listening!

Stay tuned, we have some really big ideas a-coming...

-- BaconMarathon team

We just helped launch a new Skinny Songs special offer...!

We just worked with Heidi to introduce a new "special offer" to get the song 'Skinny Jeans' free on itunes!

To get the song and see the widget we created in action, go to: http://www.skinnysongs.com

...and click on the offer. (example, within the red square pictured below)

The top3Clicks elevator pitch...!

We're very excited to mention here first that we're pitching top3Clicks to participate in the Facebook Fund. The submission is due by the end of this week but here is a taste of the video elevator pitch that will be a part of the submission package.

We're going to just have to wish ourselves luck...

..."luck" ;)

the BaconMarathon Team

'Getting Started' just got 1000 times easier...

Last night, long after Hillary said, "No way. No how. No McCain", BaconMarathon Labs quietly went live with a major tune up centered around making it 1000x easier for you and your friends to get started on top3Clicks.

We have added a new 'Getting Started' tab to the application that allows you to see all of the items you would like to watch by category before you start receiving recommendations.

Starting today, top3Clicks will examine your profile interests. The picture below is an example of interests you may have on your Facebook profile.

When you get to the 'Getting Started' tab, notice that we have pre-populated categories of items. You are now free to add a ton of new items to the list to watch. We made it so you no longer have to add one new item at a time.

Once you are satisfied with the items in the list, hit the 'Suggestions' button and you will be sent to the suggestion tab where you can see recommendations for each item on your list.

This new tab came from all your excellent feedback. One of the themes we heard from you was how did we come up with the initial list of items to get started, the Getting Started tab tackles this request and also provides and easy interface to add/remove many items at a time.

Thanks for all the support. We would love to hear from you about this new feature.

The BaconMarathon Labs Team

BaconMarathon was at F8 yesterday...

...and here are the take aways.

The BaconMarathon opinion of the state of the Facebook Partner Platform:

Year 1 = a ton of abusive applications taking advantage of the fb tools that were provided

Year 2 = will be about creating engaging 'real' applications by playing by the rules to build user trust and focusing on engagement

Year 3 = making money. So much talk about needed payment systems, etc.

The new Facebook user experience is all about the 'news feeds'. When we started top3Clicks the news feed was really the 'third' option behind the emails and notifications for getting the word out to friends on what is going on.

In the business track, Mark Pinkus and panel had some great advice for the young entrepreneurs:

1. If you are building an app on Facebook today you are way ahead of everyone out there today.

2. F8 feels like the first Internet World back in 1995 (we were there and agree!)

3. If you go to Yahoo's front page there will probably be an fb app for every link on that page by next year.

4. Make something engaging and use the social graph as a 'tool' to achieve viral-ness. don't make something viral then figure out engagement.

5. Good VC's focus on the team first and the idea second.

6. Ship often and learn <-- something we learned many many years ago.

Great EC2/S3 Tool

Tim Kay of ActiveBuddy fame has been working on aws, which he says provides “simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3”. I ran into Tim a while ago and we chatted about aws – around the same time, I also heard about it from Mike.

As all the BaconMarathon apps are running on EC2 and using S3 for storage, I’ve been looking for an easier way to interface with S3 in particular. I finally got around to trying out aws the other day and found it be more than advertised. Finally, I had one simple command to examine buckets on S3:

aws ls

That was it. Creating buckets, puts and gets are just as simple:

aws mkdir BUCKET
aws put BUCKET/[OBJECT] [FILE]
aws get BUCKET

We’re now using aws to push our MySQL backups to S3 on a scheduled basis – a simple change to our existing backup jobs

How do you distribute a ton of dynamic iTunes online coupon codes?

That is the question we were recently asked by our good friend Heidi Roizen.

BaconMarathon Labs took a step back and thought about how we are tackling scalability and delivery of dynamic content with top3Clicks and applied these concepts to help Heidi distribute a large number of redeemable iTunes coupons.

To see it in action, go to: http://www.skinnysongs.com/greathealth/
and take a look at the upper right corner of the page for the "Get a free download of 'Skinny Jeans' on iTunes".

The Bacon portion of the BaconMarathon Labs testimonial:

"While working on getting this feature live, I downloaded 'Skinny Jeans', put it on my iPod, went to the Potrero Hill 24hr fitness and proceeded to listen to the song while getting my butt kicked during my daily painful 30 minutes of running in place...

...and the 30 minutes flew by."

Stay tuned for some hot new top3Clicks features coming down the pike!

Dialogs and Asychronous Calls in Facebook

One feature of BaconMarathon's Top3Clicks Facebook application allows users to construct free-form item searches. The search queries are augmented and are used as we attempt to find items that are relevant to the user. To make this work, lots of things are going on in the back-end. The UI output is a list of items displayed in the rotator.

Like any application, we need to make this process as fast as possible, while providing the user visual cues to let them know the application is working quickly to provide a result. One of the strongest pieces of feedback we have had is in this area - and something we've tried to tackle in several different ways.

Our design goals were as follows:

• call the back-end asynchronously
  
• provide cues to the user via a UI dialog
  
• tear-down (hide) the dialog when the back-end has completed its' tasks and refresh the UI with the latest information

Yesterday, we rolled out our latest iteration (shown below), which utilizes FBJS and Ajax.

Using this post as a basis, we made a number of tweaks, most notably the ondone function of the asynchronous call (via ajax.post) handles the form submission and actual tear-down of the dialog. Implementing it was non-trivial as the FBML Test Console didn't seem to like any ajax.post calls we made. Unfortunately, the onerror function does not provide any information about the cause of failure. Firebug was a large help -- make sure to use it if you are debugging FBJS.

Our current implementation looks something like this:

FBJS

function showItemDialog() {
var title = 'Add Item'
var ok = 'Cancel'
//create dialog
var dialog = new Dialog().showMessage(title,add_dialog_fbml,ok);
var ajax = new Ajax();
ajax.responseType = Ajax.FBML;
ajax.requireLogin = true;
//ondone function, called when post returns
ajax.ondone = function(data) {
 frm = document.getElementById(searchForm);
 if (frm) { frm.submit(); }
 dialog.hide();
};

//onconfirm actually does nothing
dialog.onconfirm = function() { };
//grab input value and use in ajax.post call
var item = document.getElementById('item').getValue();
var params={'item':item};
ajax.post("http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php",params);
} 

FBML

<form method="get" action=http://apps.facebook.com/yourappname/search.php name="search" id="searchForm">
<input type=text name=item id=item>
<a href="http://apps.facebook.com/yourappname/#" onclick="showItemDialog(); return false;">
<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/submit.gif" border="0"></a>
</form>

<fb:js_string var="add_dialog_fbml">
<div id="add_dialog">
 <div class="dialog_loading">
   <img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.gif"/> Retrieving item info ...
 </div>
</div>
</fb:js_string>

Try it out and let us know what you think!

3 Good Books for Facebook Developers

If you are building an app for Facebook, good information can be hard to find. The Developer Docs do a decent job at getting you up to speed, but don't dive too deep.

A few of my favorite books at the moment are:

1. Facebook Application Development - most heavily used book in my collection. Solid examples, minimal errata.

2. Facebook Applications - Good sample app in the last third of the book that goes beyond simple implementation.

3. Facebook API Developers Guide - Great kick-starter, super quick read. Doesn't dive deep, but lays it out in a readily consumable fashion.

One overall issue - I haven't found a book that uses anything other than PHP. As we're using Java for our BaconMarathon apps, we've had to do a bit of "translation", but it hasn't slowed things down much.

Optimizing -- On our minds all the time!

One of the things we are consistently hearing from the early feedback is when adding the app for the first time, "there are 'no items' appearing right away... and if I come back in a bit then I see many products (from my profile)"

Well to be honest... the app was taking significant time to grab suggestion items from Amazon. Presenting, depending on the items searched, a really bad first time experience.

So after much thought, perspiration and of course genius intellect, we just went live with an 'under the covers' optimization that speeds up product adds for new users of top3Clicks by 75%!!!

Also note, we added some feedback (screenshot below) when we're taking some time to load items into top3Clicks. It feels a ton better...

As always, thanks again for all the wonderful feedback. If you find top3Clicks to be useful, please pass it along to your friends. -- the BaconMarathon team

Dave's Post about the genesis of the top3Clicks project...

Dave took a few minutes from his crazy schedule to write a post on why we are tackling what we're calling 'social commerce'.

Click on Top3Clicks or Why Dive Into Social Commerce? to go to Dave's blog.

Whew, one week has flown by...

Big thanks for all you super early adopters that have given top3Clicks a try!!!

Based on your really great feedback, we have made some pretty cool changes to make the notification experience much more useful.

1. We added a 'New Items' column to the item list - As new items become available on Amazon.com, top3Clicks updates your item list with the number of new items that have become available.

Here is a top3Clicks screenshot of what we added:


2. Emails - When we launched, we were sending quite a bit email listings. The email provided all the items on your list that had new items available. When you clicked on the item you were sent back to top3Clicks to look at the items.

We are now delivering one daily email in the morning detailed listing of all new items. If you click on any specific item, will take you right to Amazon.com for more details, etc. about that item.

Here is what the email looks like:


3. Notifications - We started sending 4 or so notifications a day, providing a list of each new item on your list that had something new become available.

We are now delivering one notification to you daily in the afternoon. The notification is a simple reminder that there are new items. When you click on this notification you will be sent to the top3Clicks app in Facebook where you will be able to see what items are new (number 1 above)you list that have new items.


Thanks again for all the feedback. If you find top3Clicks to be useful, please pass it along to your friends. We love the feedback.

-- the BaconMarathon team

When the Bay Area (San Francisco) hits 100 degrees it is time for the BaconMarathon team...

...to announce something really sizzlin...

The BaconMarathon team has been working feverishly on a project called top3Clicks.

The project consists of marrying the social network and notfication power of Facebook with the ecommerce power of Amazon.com.

top3Clicks is 'Social Commerce'.

To get started...

1. You will need to have a Facebook account. Go to: http://www.facebook.com/ and create an account. You may be the last one of your friends to not have one!

2. Once you have an account, simply go to http://apps.facebook.com/topthreeclicks, you will be taken to the top3Clicks Add Application screen.

3. When top3Clicks is added as an application, interests listed in your Facebook profile are placed in a top3Clicks item list. Item suggestions (from Amazon.com) will appear based on these interests. You can easily add and remove items, as well as notify friends about items.

4. If there is a item that your are interested in purchasing, simply click on the item and you will be taken to Amazon.com to complete the order.

So give it whirl...! Tell us what you think, we love the feedback.

-- BaconMarathon team

When new ideas start to sizzle...!

The ideas just keep coming and it is going to be really good...

Stay tuned...