BaconMarathon Labs

PersistentFan has a new sharp look!

2011-08-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

After a little hiatus, the BaconMarathon team started to brainstorm how to make the site better and decided to try and make the site 'pop' with a little style!

The new front door places an emphasis on getting users to sign up. It is now easy to look for a specific topics to watch but signing up allows users to know when new things are available and is the real magic sauce on the site.

We also redesigned the way you watch videos. We made the actual viewing area bigger and put social tools right next to the experience to entice users to share with friends. Note that we're now supporting sharing (Facebook, Twitter and email) and Facebook 'Like' & 'Comments'.

We have some real good ideas coming, so stay tuned!

Sincerely,
Bacon

Twitter Trending Topics - Fixed!

2011-07-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

Hey PF'ers -- as some of you noticed, our Twitter trending topics integration went AWOL.

I dug around and found the misbehaving squirrel so now things are once again working.

If you haven't ever tried this feature, you should. We pull the latest trending topics from Twitter on a regular basis and mash the results up with the latest vids. We use a completely different PF algorithm for this as users are looking for the very latest videos (spam removed of course) -- works especially well for breaking news events.

As I write this, Yao Ming has just announced his retirement. PF has video on his announcement as well as excellent highlights (sorry Dwight Howard)

SEO and Sitemaps on PersistentFan.com

2011-01-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

Bacon and I are always working on search engine optimization (SEO) for PersistentFan.com. In addition to ad buys, viral features, etc., like many sites, we have a monthly spend for acquiring traffic. Also like many sites, we constantly tweak many aspects of this spend to optimize.

Over the last few months, we added features to improve the visibility of a given topic (like Justin Bieber) by tweeting new topics from our @PersistentFan account, making it easier to share a link for a specific video (e.g. Jimmy Fallon), and Facebook/Digg sharing. Search engine crawlers are fairly latent; it can take upwards of a month to see the impact of certain changes. As we introduced various features, we began to see an uptake in both eCPM and search engine traffic/visibility. However, the progress was fairly muted overall. Before the holidays, we decided to start back at the beginning and analyze how search engines were crawling our site. I spent a lot of time doing this:

tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log

One thing that struck me almost immediately was that I saw a ton of crawlers (Tweetmeme, etc) from the @PersistentFan tweets, but didn't see a lot of folks like GoogleBot. After some analysis, we noticed the obvious - the front door of PersistentFan.com showed both the most popular topics of the last few hours, along with a scrolling list of recently viewed videos. At any given time, we were exposing about 15 or 20 topics to bots, but no more. The many thousands of topics we track for persistent fans were effectively hidden from bots because we didn't provide direct linkage or navigation to discover them. (doh!)

The solution to this was to provide a sitemap. Since our topics grow dynamically, both from user-generated searches and topic creation and various feeds that we use on PersistentFan, we needed a solution that generated a sitemap on a regular basis. I looked around but couldn't find much in the way of libraries so in the end I wrote a Java app that grabs all of the topics in our database, builds and serializes a DOM to create a sitemap on a nightly basis. Once this was complete, a simple change to our robots.txt let the crawlers of the world know where to go:

Sitemap: http://www.persistentfan.com/sitemap.xml

Within a few hours we began to see crawlers performing GETs on URLs which were not previously requested. Sitemaps, FTW!

All of the new goodness...

2010-11-30T21:53:00.000-08:00

We may have seemed like we were away for a long time but we have actually been heads down and focused on a couple big fronts...

1. A new & improved front door - We were watching organic traffic hit the old front door over time and watch the big bounce. So we decided to make a new 'clean' front door design that focused on showing what people are doing on the site at that moment.

2. A new improved signup process - We all know that logging into a site with a Facebook and/or Twitter account increases the fun. We modified the signup process to focus on getting users to use their accounts over creating a specific PersistentFan account.

3. Facebook Like - There is a new Facebook Like button just below the playing video. If you click on this button you can leave a comment on your wall about the video you are watching.

4. Adding Wikipedia snippets - We add a dynamically created Wikipedia snippet for every topic a fan is interested in following. This makes the site more compelling for fans that want to dive deep into the subject while watching videos.

5. Suggested topics to follow - We are now providing a quick list of the most watched topics at the moment the user is on the site. Another way to give users ideas of what to follow.

We have more on the way, stay tuned...

Regards,
Bacon

The new PersistentFan widget

2010-04-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

Quick update from coffeeshop headquarters. We just created the first PersistentFan widget that is focused on allowing sites that are persistent fans of any topic to add content to their sites without taking important real estate on their page.

To see the widget in action go to ElevatorSpeed.com and play around.

The user experience:

Screenshot 1: Click on the orange Check out Coachella videos tab on the left side of the page.

Screenshot 2: When clicked the PersistentFan widget slides open on top of the publishers site. Coachella fans can click thumbnails to watch concert footage, the Twitter conversation and share with friends on Facebook, Digg and Email.

Screenshot 3: User click on the orange on the orange tab again to close the widget.

As with all the features and ideas BaconMarathon Labs implements, we are putting this widget out there and looking for feedback.

1. If you think it has the potential and totally awesome, let us know.

2. If you think it is missing features or you just don't get it, let us know.

3. If you have a site and are also a PersistentFan of pretty much anything and want to add this widget to your site, lets us know!
(just email info@baconmarathon.com and we'll get right back to you)

Take care,
Mike (Bacon)

Defining what is a PersistentFan

2010-03-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

The BaconMarathon team's interest/enthusiasm has always centered around being PersistentFans of something in all the major genres (music, movies, TV shows and sports, etc.) since well, forever. (Look at previous posts to see what we dig.)

We have been heads down focused on the ever evolving study of online fandom and what fan's must have to keep up, discover and influence.

Defining levels of fandom:

Everybody has interests. When a person's interest gains enthusiasm that is the genesis of becoming a fan of a topic. From our own experiences, we know there are different passion levels based on certain topics.

Which leads us to write down what are the levels of passion a fan can have? Mike May's "The Five Levels Of Beatles Fandom" provides a simple example of what we're looking to use as a guide.

level 0
'Casual radio listeners' that hear a Beatle's song and enjoy it but do not pursue much further.

For PersistentFan.com this equals a fan discovering PersistentFan.com from Twitter or a friend and watching a couple videos.

level 1
'The entry level Beatles fan is the kind of person who, having heard and liked some of their music, actually goes out and buys a couple of their albums.'

For PersistentFan.com this equals a fan that watches a couple videos then adds topics to watch on their list or the user selects a twitter trending topic and watches videos on the subject.

level 2
'Having absorbed and grown to like the initial handful of albums and craving for more, our fan moves up to the next level when he decides that he wants to own a complete set of Beatles songs.'

For PersistentFan.com this equals a fan that creates an account on the site and has created a list of topics they want to watch (get notified) over time.

level 3
'By now interested in all things Beatle, our fan’s happiness is short-lived, however, when he discovers that, although he owns all the tracks the group released, there are a large range of compilations, singles and EPs and so on that were originally released but which are missing from his collection.'

For PersistentFan.com this equals the user sharing videos on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and/or email with friends. In turn friends use PersistentFan.com send videos to other friends, etc.

level 4
'Once again though, this happiness does not last long. Our hapless fan has by now taken to reading extensively about the group. To his dismay, he finds that his collection is very far from complete.'

For PersistentFan.com this equals providing the ability to allow fans to easily get to content beyond videos and the conversation for any given topic. The PersistentFan Widget allows influencers to add content to their sites a provide fans with more.

level 5
'But then one day, a final calamitous realisation dawns. He spots a copy of the Spanish Por Siempre Beatles or the Brazilian Os Reis Do Ié, Ié, Ié!. Not only were there a vast number of albums with different tracklists released all around the world, but even the familiar British titles came with a range of alternate artwork.'

For PersistentFan.com this equals providing the ability for fans a one stop shop to aggregate and post content, create channels where they control content is important and share this content via widget or over the social networks.

Couple questions for the PersistentFans out there:
1. Using the levels mentioned above for things you care about what would you like to see in a website to make your heart rate go up a level?

2. What sites do you use today to keep up with the things you care about?

Feedback is always welcome,
Mike (Bacon)

We just got addictive with 'Autoplay'!

2010-03-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

From user feedback, we implemented what we are calling 'Autoplay'.

In the past, if you discovered a topic with more than one video you wanted to watch then you would watch the first video then click the next preview to watch the next video.

Now, with Autoplay, PersistentFan automatically goes to the next video in the list. This allows you to sit back and enjoy a series of interesting videos without stopping what you are doing.

The user experience is outlined in the screenshot below, notice the 'now playing' box around the preview. This is the video the user is currently watching. When the video finishes the next preview to the right becomes the video that starts playing.

Here are a couple of great topics to give this a whirl:
Breaking bands at SXSW 2010
Aziz Ansari
The Simpsons
The Onion
Star Wars Spoofs

Enjoy,
Mike (Bacon)

PersistentFan has a new logo design!

2010-03-05T15:09:00.000-08:00

In celebration of Army Day (March 4th), we decided to take a bunch of new features live today.

First, check out our new logo design! The idea behind the new logo was to figure out how to incorporate the branding into the actual user experience. (Plus get rid of that overused 'search' word!)

Logo was designed by Tello Design, check them out!

2. We have enhanced the video share section to include the ability to Digg, share via Email and cut 'n paste the URL into websites, etc. the videos you love the most.

Thanks Digg, your API was dirt easy to implement. We got it working in a day, unlike some of your 'competitors'!

Email directly, if you want to talk 'Army Day' talk,
Mike (Bacon)

Under the hood...

2010-02-25T16:26:00.000-08:00

We over the last couple years the main focus of this blog has been to talk about user experiences, features, distribution lesson, cool discoveries and dreaded bugs.

To get a taste of some of the things we're doing under the hood, check out: Marathon's (Hodson's Blog). His current post (Queuing Tweets with Amazon’s (AWS) SQS) focuses on how we're handling sending traffic to the Twitter platform.

This little itsy-bitsy startup is tackling some nice problems!

-Bacon (Mike)

So busy, I mean really busy...!

2010-02-16T15:57:00.001-08:00

When the BaconMarathon team started working on PersistentFan, one of the philosophies we discussed adhering to was to iterate, iterate, iterate and riff on the initial idea in the public forum. We decided to take this approach to prevent the gridlock of not shipping due to perceived lack of readiness the crippled some of our big company experiences.

To accomplish this goal, we knew we had to focus on two things:

Constantly tweak, add features & fix bugs in quick cycles after the initial launch.
Communicate with our users/fans with what we're up to often via Facebook, Twitter, our blog and on the actual site.

Well... we have been so busy doing #1 that we have let #2 slip, just a little...!

To help catch up with number 2, we're proud to announce following list since launch:

Bubble help - While watching the first videos on the site users are presented with bubble windows that show features to educate what the site can do and help explore.
If user is not signed in we're still going to save their fan topic to the list in their cookie. If the user comes back again they will be able to see what they have looked at in the past and add to it.
Trending Categories (music, movies, TV and born today) were added to give users a great getting started point. Note that these categories are dynamically driven from RSS feeds and will be adding more as we go.
Streamlined the rotation of the video experience. This was part of a bigger optimization effort to make our pages load extremely fast. (<-- always on going!)
Added dynamic "Shop with Amazon" links per topic. Our thinking is maybe users will want to explore Amazon after watching videos of their favorite topics.
Added Google Banner Ads at the top & added Google Link Ads at the bottom. This is one of the monetization streams we're planning to implement.
Moved the 'follow us on' Twitter and Facebook links to the upper right portion of the site. We want you to follow us so you can keep up with what we're doing.
Increased the size of the overall site horizontally 100px. We're getting ready to add more exciting content to the site.
Moved the Share with FB and Twitter buttons above the videos. From your feedback, it was difficult to see how to share cool discoveries.
Added a dynamic 'Sign Up' banner to entice users to sign in and get notification features. Users that sign up get a much better experience over time.
SEO - Made browser title dynamically display clear English titles
SEO - Made all the URLs display in clear English

Take care,
Mike (Bacon)

Note we plan to update the blog on a weekly basis going forward with what we're up to...

What did the BaconMarathon just do?!

2010-01-21T10:13:00.001-08:00

After months of racking our brains, we have officially pulled the "the invite only" lock down and made the site available! As of today, everyone can now become Persistent Fans of the stuff you love! (at least we'll call it BETA)

Feel free to go to http://www.persistentfan.com and play around.

To give you some ideas to get started, here are some of the topics Bacon is watching:
animal collective
artie lange
cheech and chong
Coming To iPhone
Conan O'Brien
fillmore SF
gilmor gang
guy smiley
Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
Japandroids
jersey shore situation
koko cocktails
LCD Soundsystem
mavericks surf
Philadelphia Phillies
philly cheesesteaks
pitchfork tv
silversun pickups
techcrunch
The Simpsons

We've have been eating our own stew here for a couple months so we're very excited to see what you think.

Take care,
The BaconMarathon Labs Team

Mike (Bacon) & Dave (Marathon)

Introducing... (to anyone that loves to help early development)

2010-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

After a little hiatus, we are full steam ahead with a brand new website called PersistentFan.com that we think users will find to be a lot of fun.

How did we get here?
From previous blog entries you can read about the steps we took towards developing top3Clicks within Facebook's "walled garden". After plenty of market testing it became painfully clear that the changes made to the user experience of the Facebook developers platform hindered ease of use for our users. Also, with the announcement of Facebook Connect, for us, it became increasingly more costly to take advantage of the initial goodness Facebook had once offered.

What is PersistentFan.com?
PersistentFan.com searches for terms from specific sites and notifies you to watch as new content that becomes available for that term over any length of time. While watching terms you can also monitor and participate in Twitter chatter of that topic.

Here are some of the new features users are in complete control over:

Quick search of topics to see what content is available
Maintain a topic list of terms that are important to you
Get notified when new content become available (User controls notification frequency)
Share cool videos on Facebook wall and participate in Twitter conversation
Watch the Twitter chatter for specific topic
Available as a website and modified iPhone website

So, as you can see, we rolled up our sleeves and took the steps to keep some top3Clicks concepts (and added a ton more) as a stand alone website.

As far as Facebook is concerned for us, we have enabled Facebook Connect and plan to continue to add features leveraging the 'new goodness' Facebook now provides.

Take care,
The BaconMarathon Labs Team

Mike (Bacon) & Dave (Marathon)

Smell Starbucks and Philz Coffee perculating again...?

2009-12-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Stay tuned...

It is all about sharing...

2009-03-14T11:37:00.001-07:00

The BaconMarathon team just launched a cool 'sharing' videos with friends feature.

Here is how it works:

Step 1. Find a video that you either totally love or you think your friend will totally love and click on the red 'Share Video With Friends' button. (pic below)

Step 2. When the new pop-up appears, type in friend(s) you'd like to share with and hit 'Send'.

Step 3. On the next screen, type in a witty comment to entice your friend to waste a little of their time watching the video and hit 'Publish'.

Step 4. A message appears on your friends wall and they are notified that you requested them to watch the video!

I have been sharing videos that I have been watching over the last month to my friends all morning. It is a total blast!

As usual, feedback is mandatory and welcome...

-Bacon

What are the top3Click-ers doing?

2009-02-12T08:38:00.000-08:00

We have turned our focus on adding features that make top3Clicks more compelling.

With that in mind, with the recent significant uptick in video watching, we added a new section called 'Most recently watched videos' that when selected will display in rotation videos that are being watched by everybody.

We're diving into helping users find new videos they may have never thought of watching in the past. (Even if they are frequent YouTube users!)

Users just need to click on the Watch Videos button (in red above) to see what everyone is doing!

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

- Bacon

Where have we been lately?

2009-01-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

I love that title!

Over the last month we have been very focused on working on the user experience. We have been analyzing user behavior and making small tweaks, here and there, to see if users make better decisions.

One example, we noticed users were clicking on the 'Watch More Channels' button but a majority were not clicking to come back to watch the cool videos. We changed the button name a bunch of times starting with just 'submit' and ending with 'Click to Add List'. We have seen significant improvement. The tiniest of things matter in this game!

New Feature:
We also noticed a lot of users only tend to watch one video topic (i.e. Star Wars). To help give users some more ideas, we added a 'Watch Top 15 Items' button. (screen shot below)

When the user clicks on this button, a popup appears offering a list of the top 15 watched items, at that moment, from the entire top3Clicks user base.

We named it 'Got Brain Freeze?' because we want to help users that are just plain stuck trying to figure out what to watch. ;) (screen shot below)

When we took this feature live, we instantly saw a lot of people taking advantage of it.

We are so excited about this feature that we realized that this is now only the beginning of our plans for this direction of features.

So as always, stay tuned!

-Bacon

Simplifying things...

2008-12-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

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'

2008-11-23T13:23:00.001-08:00

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!

2008-11-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-10-31T13:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

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...!

2008-09-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

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...!

2008-08-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-08-27T09:31:00.001-07:00

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...

2008-07-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

...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

2008-07-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-06-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-12T21:35:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-06-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-06-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-05-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-05-13T22:00:00.001-07:00

...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...!

2008-03-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

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

Stay tuned...