I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds, and use a great application called Reeder to read my subscriptions. A great feature of Reeder is that I can share articles on Twitter quickly, with only a few clicks.

When I find a great article or photo using my web browser, easily sharing it on Twitter is much harder. I have to open my Twitter application (or go to the Twitter web app), copy & paste my text (or create my own), copy & paste the URL, and shorten the URL. All before the tweet is actually posted.

I want to share content on Twitter through a web browser as easily as I can with my RSS reader. Therefore, I created a bookmarklet that does exactly that. With the lloquy.com bookmarklet, you can tweet anything to your followers right from the web page you are currently visiting. 

Here’s some benefits.

• No need for a separate application. The text box opens right within your browser. You don’t even leave the web page you are currently visiting.
• Make Sharing Incredibly Easy. Highlight some text on the web page before clicking the bookmarklet and we’ll auto-populate the tweet with that text. If no text is selected, we utilize the page title. Note you can remove all this and just be creative. We also automatically add a shortened URL to the page your currently visiting.
• No New Credentials. Users logon through Twitter with their credentials on Twitter’s website. We never see or store your password.

This bookmarklet is exactly what I needed, and I thought I would share it with people who needed something similar. To get it, go to lloquy.com and logon. Below is a short video on installing and using the bookmarklet, in case you are interested (Apologies there is no voiceover).

How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? - Eric Ries

If you are part of a startup, you have likely read Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries. The quote above is based on this post, and details his experience utilizing Google Adwords to attract initial users to IMVU. I wanted to slowly increase our user base at lloquy.com, allowing time to pivot implementation and limit mistakes to a wider audience. Therefore, his method to attract users really got me excited, and I wanted to write about my experiences utilizing this type of marketing.

My previous experience with Google Adwords was positive. Around 2003/2004, I used Google Adwords to gain users on a videogame-related blogging website I created. My daily budget was a mere $2/day, and the service consistently brought 30-40 users each day. That website wasn’t a business, though (merely something I did to learn new technology). I felt that if Eric Ries was having better success today, then this method could easily provide a high return on investment and warranted some of my attention.

Unfortunately, my experience in 2011 was less successful then Eric’s and my past experience in 2003 (by a wide margin). Google Adwords, like Google’s analytics’ service, has become extremely complicated and hard to use without a significant time commitment. For Adwords, I believe this is because common and popular keywords are being taken by companies with a much higher budget, leaving bootstrapping startups behind. 

I tried many, many keywords, but at most times, my keywords ended up being in one of two categories. Either the keyword did not have enough data to adequately gauge the number of daily clicks (meaning a low percentage of users searched on it), or the keyword was really expensive (meaning my $5/day would result in 1-2 clicks only). 

Since you only pay for clicks with Google Adwords, I decided that casting a wide net was still a good method, and utilizing a wide net of lesser-used keywords would still produce a sufficient number of clicks at a low cost. This hypothesis proved to be false. I did receive some visitors, but the majority of clicks were from Google’s Display Network, and not from the keywords I entered. With the majority of clicks coming from the Display Network, I was unable to figure out any information that could help me improve my campaign.

I’ll be the first to admit that if you’re willing to really study Adwords and put in the time commitment, then you may have better luck. For a startup, there are 1000x things to do at any point in time, and I reached my limit with what I felt I could accomplish with Google Adwords. I felt bummed that this technique wasn’t working for me and decided to ask Eric Ries whether he still believed in his blog post. His response is below.

Me: @ericries Do you still find your post on SEM… relevant? I had tremendous success years ago, but not so much in 2011.

Eric: @presstartgames yes very much so- but AdWords itself has gotten too expensive for most keywords. try reddit or stumbleupon

Great advice, and my test validated his response. Eric offered two alternatives, so I researched both and decided to try StumbleUpon next. StumbleUpon utilizes a system where you pay for users to “stumble” on your website. Users have the capability to “like” or “dislike” your website, and you can earn free stumbles if enough users like your page.

Unfortunately (again), StumbleUpon did not produce the results I was hoping to achieve. While I only put in a small amount of funds for this test, StumbleUpon did not provide one sign-up to lloquy.com.

The results so far? Two different services with two similar results. At this point, I concluded my issue had to be one of three things

• The services (Adwords and StumbleUpon) weren’t bringing the early-user I needed
• My launch page sucked
• My vision for the startup sucked and users didn’t want it

I decided to ask Hacker News users (through this post) on issues with my launch page, and while I received some excellent advice on how to improve the launch page, I also received the following advice.

Stumbleupon traffic doesn’t work well. People are simply browsing from one site to the next looking for articles or funny cats and your bounce rate using SU is probably 100%. 

Google ads might work but you might be better off getting on http://betali.st and http://startupli.st to get those early adopters.

Another request for advice and another excellent response. BetaList and StartupList are both free websites that attract users looking for early access to websites. I thought this could be a good approach and decided to submit lloquy.com to BetaList. After my submission, a few weeks had passed with no news on if it would be featured. I’d given up on that avenue and concluded the website would not help. I thought I was back to the first step.

Then BAM! it gets featured. The result was a steady stream of new users signing up on the launch page. In total, BetaList resulted in approximately 100 new users, which is exactly the goal, since lloquy.com has still not “launched” (in a marketing sense).

To summarize, the message of Eric Ries initial post is still valuable (and true), but the technology is constantly changing. For startups looking for the initial set of early users, I highly recommend BetaList over more established methods like Adwords. I haven’t tried StartupList yet, but plan to in the future.

Like this article? Have a comment? Leave it here.

Content aggregation and consumption is inefficient. There’s just too much information for people to consume at any point in time. This is true even though the amount of information humans are able to consume continues to increase every year. 

A few weeks back, I read an article from VC superstar Fred Wilson regarding curation. 

I’m a big fan of curation in these services… If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build curation into your model. It will make the service easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users.

Good content aggregation does two things. First, it quickly helps find content that is relevant and interesting. Second, it should help increase the chance you will not miss content you’re interested in. Curation is a difficult problem for content aggregation, but I believe its an area where lloquy.com can innovate. 

• Follow people, not crowds. Most content aggregation websites utilize a system that promotes popular content through a voting mechanism. We think a better system is to follow individuals. If you can find individuals that share your interests, then you receive a much higher success rate discovering content through recommendations from that user. Twitter is a great example on utilizing people for content aggregation, even though it was not the sites’s primary purpose when the site was created.
• Social Discoverability. Discovering people with similar interests is only part of the solution, however. While many people share similar interests, not all of those people share great content. Following people who align with your interests but share inferior content is just another form of noise. You need to be able to quickly discover if the person is worth following. Our reputation algorithm strives to provide you the answer quickly. The great thing about our algorithm is that it takes your actions on other social networks as well as lloquy.com. In other words, while sharing content and being social on lloquy.com is the best way to increase your reputation, sharing great content on Twitter will also affect your score here (Which is how it should be).
• High Signal, Low Noise. With content aggregation, I feel many websites present a high level of noise. Again using Twitter as an example, you have to process a lot of noise to find the content. The problem with solutions that contain high levels of noise is that there is a greater probability of missing the “signal”, or content. 

This morning, I quickly scanned 214 tweets and RSS posts and found 2 articles to read. This is a huge amount of waste, but I think by focusing on the improving your ability to get better content (through the bullets listed above), lloquy.com can greatly increase people’s ability to curate their content.

Like this article? Have a comment? Leave it here.

I browse hundreds of articles from websites, RSS feeds, and social news websites each and every day. A few weeks ago, I noticed something about my web surfing habits: I skip the majority of content that is sent to my RSS reader or found on the front pages of social news websites. Even though I subscribe to each RSS feed I receive, I do not read most of the articles. There’s just too much information for me to consume. While social news websites always contain 2-3 interesting articles per day, I find myself skimming tens or hundreds of articles to find them. 

This presents several issues. First, it takes time to browse all this content. This amounts to a lot of wasted time. Second, because I’m skimming quickly, I know I’m missing good content. I’ve realized that these methods do not help me curate my information consumption. RSS feeds send me everything, and social news websites utilize a voting system which may not align with my own interests.

I believe recommendations from people who align with your interests are the best method to manage information consumption. Think about it. Facebook does this right now when your friends “like” something. People you follow on Twitter post content all the time (some interesting, some not, but that’s another post). The problem with these networks is that it’s difficult to discover content outside your initial layer of contacts (friends).

lloquy.com was created to connect people and their actions, through their content. Through web content, you can see what actions users have made, and make connections through those users to discover other users who share your interests. It’s through this discovery of people that you can create a stream of information that will hopefully be more valuable and a better return on your time.

I recommend you sign up for lloquy.com and try it. Once you have registered, check out this page to get started.

I get it. Hipster got 10,000 people to sign up by offering “early access” to their product if they invited their friends, and LaunchRock started an entire project based on the concept. With these successes (as well as fork.ly), it seems many new projects are utilizing this concept, even when it doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I really respect the companies who have had success utilizing this marketing method. I also think LaunchRock is a great idea. So understand it’s not the concept that I’m against. There are many situations where using this type of sign-up method (for early access) is valid and reasonable. For example, if you are performing problem validation, then this type of splash page is particularly useful. Or, if a user’s experience is enhanced by having their friends on the site (such as a social network), then it makes sense to push this requirement. 

Using “early access” as an incentive to obtaining a viral launch page is a nice idea. My frustration arises when this concept is used for ideas that do not benefit the people I must invite. For example, being informed that I have to invite friends to access a new blog, newsletter, or email is frustrating. If I want access to a new web application, such as an analytics service, I don’t want to pressure my friends to sign up so I can get access. In today’s world of information consumption, I quickly forget about the newsletter or service and move on.

While using early access on launch pages have provided success, I believe it’s time to offer other incentives to encourage launch pages to be shared with your friends and contacts. LaunchRock is seeing this as well, as their latest blog post shares how one company is utilizing the service for more then just early access. Startups should offer enhanced services to people who share, or something that is harder to achieve without sharing with your friends. lloquy.com enhances your influence score, which is one of the main indicators of reputation on the website. The ability to increase your reputation even before you have access provides a reason to share the site with their friends.

In summary, while early access may work for some websites, it does not work for others. Services like LaunchRock have made it incredibly easy to create a launch page, but it doesn’t replace the strategy of attracting users to your website.

For the past month, I’ve been working on a new web app/service called lloquy.com. The purpose of the website is simple: Discover new people through their content. If you like discovering interesting stuff to read through Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, or some other similar website, lloquy.com may be interesting to you.

Online, people are consuming data at an incredible rate. In fact, people double their consumption of information every two years. With this incredible increase, it’s becoming more important to curate, or filter, the information you are receiving. Today, you probably use your friends and social networks to curate content for you. The problem is that this type of curation only occurs from people you know. We believe it’s the people you don’t know who may have the most valuable information to share. lloquy.com was created because we want to help you find those people! 

lloquy.com is “people” focused instead of “content” focus. What does that mean? When your friends link to an article on Twitter, for example, you click the link to read the article, and then move back to Twitter to find the next curated article. lloquy.com focuses on the person who wrote the article, allowing you to easily follow that person and read other content created by that person.

lloquy.com is currently in “beta”. If you want to get an invitation, sign up on the launch page. You’ll get one shortly. If you refer people to the website, you’ll get in quicker. Referring people also has the added benefit of increasing your website influence (Trust me, it’s important. Like currency.). 

Currently, you’re able to do a few things on lloquy.com.

1. Create Dynamic Content Streams: Follow interesting people you meet, and we automatically create a Follow Stream of their actions on the website. This way, you’ll see what these people write, comment, and like on the internet.
2. Comment & Vote Up Webpages: Using the lloquy.com bookmarklet, you can easily comment and vote for content you find on the web. You can also share your comments with your followers on Twitter.
3. Bookmark content for later reading.

That’s about it. While I’ll have more over the coming days/weeks/months, I really want to hear what you have to say. Let me know by email or follow my Twitter account.

I have a belief that social engagement is a required task to increase trust with your audience. Unless you already have a huge following (and startups have zero followers), you have to create content and engage your audience to gain their trust before they use your product(s).

I’m proud that this blog is starting to increase in followers as I put more focus to it. If a startup founder’s (or blog author’s) ego can take it, growing something organically from zero to something larger provides you with the opportunity to directly communicate with the “earlyvangelists”, allowing creators (and start-ups) to gain valuable feedback that can only make your product or content better.

Most importantly, you can get to know those few customers in a way that people with zillions of customers can’t. You can talk to them on the phone. You can provide personalized support. You can find out what it would take for them to adopt your product, and then follow up a week later and see if they did. Same with finding out what it would take to get them to recommend your product to a friend. You can even meet the friend. - Eric Ries

Eric Ries periodically would query his audience for feedback on his blog. In fact, the title of this post is borrowed from him, as I think it is a great idea. 

If you have a minute, I’d appreciate your time to answer some questions. Feel free to post at lloquy.com (BONUS: You get early access to lloquy.com). If you sign-up there, I’ll turn on your beta access within 24 hours (in most cases, much sooner). Or, feel free to email me. 

1. On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is most likely), how likely is it that you you would recommend this blog to a friend or colleague?
2. How did you hear about it?
3. What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or, if you’re not a subscriber, what would it take to convince you?)
4. What do you hope to see here in the future?

Thanks in advance. 

Connecting with people online has certainly changed in the past 15-17 years. My first internet-connected computer came with Prodigy, and I still remember speaking with people through their online message boards. The only way to communicate with people on the message boards was through email, but this service provided a great way to communicate with people online, and share information that aligned with your interests. 

Around the mid-to-late 90’s, chat rooms and instant messaging took off, and services such as Yahoo chat and ICQ became extremely popular on my college campus. These two services could replace message boards and email (for 1-on-1 communication), as you could meet people in real-time by entering an interest-based chat room, and keep communication going through instant messaging.

Blogs and RSS feeds started to gain popularity after the new century, allowing everyone to talk about their interests from their own platform. People who enjoyed their writing (or aligned with their interests) subscribed to the author’s postings, receiving updates through their RSS reader. 

Today, social websites are starting to complement blogs and RSS feeds. Searching websites such as Twitter or Quora, you can easily find information and discussion about any topic that interests you.

Taking a quick look back through time, I believe that while it’s become much easier to find information and content related to your interests (what you are looking for), it’s become much more difficult to connect with the person who wrote it, long-term. In other words, it’s much easier for people to find what you wrote, but it’s much harder to retain those people when you write other material, even if the reader’s interest in that material is high. I think this is a problem, because people who share their knowledge and write content have goals and reasons for doing it. For many, the ability to retain an audience is crucial to their end goals.

Why is it difficult to retain the audience? When message boards, email and IM were the primary communication method, it was more difficult to discover new people with success. However, the 1-to-1 communication made it easier to maintain communication. In today’s 1-to-many communication environment, it’s much easier to move on to the next 1-to-many discussion instead of seeing what else the original poster has to communicate.

For example, I enjoy reading about startups and entrepreneurship. If you’re also interested in startups, a great blog to read is How to make it as a first-time entrepreneur by Vinicius Vacanti (who co-founded Yipit). A few weeks ago, I started thinking about how I found Mr. Vacanti’s blog, and realized that it was pure, dumb luck. Somehow, I ended up following him on Twitter, but never checked out his blog or other writings. It was luck that I caught his posting about How to get your first 1000 users. After reading that article, I started clicking through his other links and found articles on other topics that interested me, from other websites that he found interesting. If I wouldn’t have taken the time to discover his other writings, I wouldn’t have found this wealth of information.

Today, it’s just easier to move on to the next “1-to-many” conversation or discussion then discover more content from a particular writer, and websites like Twitter and Quora provide some social proof to much of the content you see.

So what’s needed? A few items are listed below.

• A place that allows users to easily see content people have authored, as well as comments they have made.
• Compile and provide access to the content, no matter where the person wrote it. This is crucial, as many people write on several social sites (from Quora, Twitter, StackExchange, blogs, etc). 
• The ability to provide social proof on an individual piece of content, which allows users to skip content that may not meet their interest.

Many websites provide the capability for some bullets, but not all. When you meet all three, you have the capability to connect with people, not by who they follow, but by the content and interests that each person shares. I feel this is an amazing way to discover and share information. By discovering and sharing information with a wider audience, we help the people who contribute the information meet their goals, no matter what they are.

Like this post? Then you may enjoy lloquy.com. Sign up for the beta, as your feedback would be greatly appreciated. Refer friends and increase your influence with the service, as well.

I know what you’re thinking; The answer should be “both”. You’re right, in that if a person could be both smart and get good grades, that is the best outcome. What if you could only choose one, though? Most people would probably say “Smart”*, but I believe in many cases their actions say the opposite.

I understand this question is really an oversimplification of a larger human dynamics question. However, I wonder if it is better to learn what’s “known” (what is taught in school), or learn what may be unknown (through experience).

The truth is that a person’s overall “drive” (being proactive) and lessons they take away from their own experiences are far more valuable then what they learn from a formal education. Having the skills to understand tough problems and find solutions make any person more valuable then a person with multiple degrees but no ability to solve problems.

So why do companies put more focus on education than experience? I believe the key answer is “drive”. Solving the unknown is only possible if you are proactive in solving it. The opposite of being “proactive” is “reactive”. If you’re reactive, you tend to take what you know to solve a problem. Education helps immensely when you have to be reactive.

So back to the original question. If most people were asked, I believe they would put “being smart” over getting good grades. However, to have the ability to solve the unknown, you have to be proactive. This quality is very tough to learn, and it’s something that is never guaranteed. It’s also hard to quantify. For example, when employers look at resumes, they would always prefer proactive, smart people, but tend to look at education first, as education is easy to quantify.

If a random young person asked me this question, I would want to state that he should be “unknown problem” smart. However, I would probably push him to get good grades and attend a good college, unless I knew he would have the drive to succeed without college. Good grades help you get into a good college. Good college grades help you get a higher salary job. Degrees help the majority be more successful.

Peter Thiel doesn’t believe good grades are that important. I think he’s right for a small minority of people who are going to make it no matter what they do (because they’re smart). Good grades are important for the majority though, and help ensure more then a small percentage have successful careers.