Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Jeff Atwood has a great post on his blog called ‘Reducing User Friction’ in which he talks about counting the number of steps needed to accomplish a goal in your application. He also mentions Reddit about having one of the smoothest signup processes around. I completely agree. I remember the first time I tried to sign up there, I almost felt let down that I hadn’t been forced to jump through 17 hoops and check 4 boxes about being over 13 and promising not to sue if I got a hernia from web site overuse. OK, that’s not true - I was seriously blown away.

Simplifying our signup process is something we’re very focused on at Judy’s Book. We currently require an email activation link to be clicked before you can proceed and we’re looking to streamline this significantly. Reddit is a great example of what’s possible. If you know of any others, I’d love to hear about them.

Chris jumped in and took this mapping off my plate. Thanks a ton, Chris. This time I was happy that you were willing. This is one of the things I love about Judy’s Book - everyone’s happy to roll up their sleeves and make things happen.

Alex Krupp has a great post on his blog about the role that responses play in encouraging repeat participation from members in online communities.

I recently saw Bob Kraut present a paper on the mediating variables for Usenet participation. The study looked at how getting a reply affected the chance that a poster would return and post again.

For oldtimers who received no replies, 84% posted again. For oldtimers who did receive a reply, 86% posted again. For newcomers who received no replies, 16% posted again.

What’s startling though is the effect getting a reply had on newcomers posting their first time. When looking only at newcomers, getting a reply increased their likelihood of posting again from 16% to 26%. That’s a 62% increase!

Apparently, getting a reply increases satisfaction in all four dimensions. It increases current benefit, it increases expected future benefit, it creates a common bond with the individuals who posted replies, and it increases identification with the group as a whole.

This is completely in line with our experience at Judy’s Book. Receiving responses to questions and getting comments on your posts creates a reason to re-engage with the site. One important thing to remember is to not just have feedback be an online thing.

In the early stages of your community’s evolution prospective participants are not going to be coming back frequently to see what’s happening. Communicating with them via email is a great way to give them a reason to come back. It’s a great way to keep mindshare high and to provide a gentle reminder to people that others care, they should keep the conversation alive.

Last week was a big one at Judy’s Book from a release perspective. We launched a new home page (existing members will have to sign out and clear cookies to see it), put more local offers in the system, and pushed out a host of bug fixes. There were a couple of cool improvements that didn’t make our release deadline and they should be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

We’re very focused on helping consumers find out what’s on sale near them and the new home page reflects that.

Oh, we also released some improvements to Couponlooker - we added some more sites to our index and improved the performance of the widget. Bloggers with the widget installed will now see it load much quicker and perform much faster on searches.

A basic truth of startups is that there are many important tasks that aren’t always fun to do. Another basic truth is that no matter what role you play in the organization, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of these. One great example is partner category mapping.

One of the really fun parts of aggregating local deals is the need to map the category trees of your partners to your own. And when I say fun, it’s about as much fun as getting your wisdom teeth out. It’s especially awesome when working with local data providers because the local classification systems are so granular. For example, there are categories for things like “Junior’s Wallets and Accessories Cases” and “Miscellaneous Sprinkler Systems.” Sometimes you can automate the process of mapping inbound data to your category structures, other times, you have to review a list of thousands of items and make judgement calls.

While this is painful, it’s important to do it correctly to ensure users have a good browse experience. Otherwise, you either end up with data in the wrong place or your ‘uncategorized’ bucket getting incredibly large.

Dave and I were talking about a complex mapping that is on the horizon and that will take a good chunk of time to do correctly. We were exploring automated ways to do it and drew a blank. At that point, I said that I was ‘happy’ to do it by hand. Dave corrected me and replied that while I was probably very willing to do it, he’d be surprised if I was happy about it. He’s right. I don’t think I’d ever choose to do this for fun, but it needs to happen and it will get done. Actually, come to think of it, I’m willing to do it and Dave is happy that I am.

Wait a second. What’s wrong with this picture?

Last week, we released an update to the site that makes Valpak coupons mappable and searchable. The coolest part of this for me was navigating to the Seattle Restaurants page and dragging the map around and seeing which restaurants had deals in the neighborhood I was browsing. I’ve never paid any attention to the Valpak envelope that shows up in my mailbox but I found myself exploring the categories to see what was available and also to see what deals were available in my neighborhood. I’m excited about this release and for what’s to come in the next few weeks.

I came across a cool thread on LinkedIn Answers via Powerset’s Blog. In it, the COO of LinkedIn asked the following question:

“If you could build the perfect search engine, what would it do?”

The answers are pretty interesting and the themes that crop up are around context, intent and some interesting questions are raised about the role of social search and commenting on search results.

There are some ideas here worth exploring in the context of local deals search and coupon search on couponlooker. In both these cases, restricting the domain should make it possible to do a better job of inferring intent and delivering relevant results. Definitely a case of easier said than done, but a problem worth attacking nonetheless.

It’s also clear that spending more time on LinkedIn might not be a bad idea.

On Thursday we released a number of couponlooker search improvements. You can now use quotes around phrases to get an exact match and use the ‘+’ and ‘-’ operators to require or exclude specific terms. In addition, multi-word query performance has been improved as well. Response overall has been very encouraging so far and we’re getting requests for index-inclusion from coupon sites that were not in the initial set.

I love the stress associated with the day of a big release. You’re running around trying to sort out last minute issues, getting bugs ironed out, making sure your data is in the right place and your marketing team is anxiously waiting for the site to be live so they can start their work. It’s hectic, people are crabby, but it’s really fun.

I went through this last week with the release of couponlooker. It felt great to get it out and to take the 15 minutes to appreciate what we had been working on. Even though I knew there were issues and things we had to fix, I think it’s important to take the time to step back and celebrate the accomplishment.

I just finished reading an essay by Clay Shirky titled ‘A Group is its own Worst Enemy‘ on community and social software and it’s one of the clearest analyses of some of the factors inherent in online communities. This was based on a talk given in 2003 and I’m going to try and summarize it here because it’s a fantastic piece which anyone interested in community online should read and understand. I came across the article in the Best Software Writings Vol I, another great read. (I’m actually disappointed in myself for only discovering this article now, but better late than never.)

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

From Clay’s perspective, social software is not a new creation, it has existed for over 40 years. Mailing list software, BBS-systems, Usenet were all forms of social software. Some of the learnings from those days, are just as applicable today.

Patterns of Group Interaction

The items in this section are a synthesis of a book called ‘Experiences in Groups’ by W.R. Bion which was written in the mid-1900s.

Bion identified three patterns:

• Sex Talk - This present, usually as innuendo in any group and “is in scope.”
• Identification and Vilification of External Enemies
• Veneration - The nomination and worship of a religious icon or tenets. For example, in a Tolkien group, anyone criticizing the Two Towers would be shot to pieces.

We saw all of these to varying degrees at Judy’s Book and they were present on any mailing list I’ve ever been on.

Groups Need Structure

Groups that are founded on open principles tend to break down as they grow because invetiably, people join the system who aren’t interested in the original goals. As a result, there needs to be a way to enforce the goals of the group and stamp out bad behavior.

He quotes Geoff Cohen:

“The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.”

We saw this in spades at Judy’s Book as the size of our community grew. Initially, we had expected to be able to let the community regulate itself completely, but over time we realized we had to step in to set up a structure within the community and to take steps to remove bad actors from the system.

Three Conclusions

Clay drew three conclusions that make a ton of sense:

• You can’t separate social froms technical issues. Different groups running on the same technology exhibit very different characteristics. It’s the people that define the culture. A group is more likely to be destroyed by people logging in and posting rather than by people trying to flood servers.

• The group within the group is what counts. He says it better than I do, so I’ll quote him.

“…In all successful online communities I’ve looked at, a core group arises that cares about the community as a whole…and takes care of the social environment by encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad behavior.”

• The rights of the group trump the rights of the individual. It’s not a democracy. This is necessary to preserve the original intent of the group.

Our Experience at Judy’s Book

We saw all of the elements described by Clay in his essay at Judy’s Book as our, community evolved. Initially we had a completely flat community that was tightly focused around reviews. As it grew, new entrants weren’t committed to the same goals and we ended up having a lot of discussions that had nothing to do with reviews of businesses. We then began getting calls from members to step in to moderate the discussion. In retrospect, we should have moved on that earlier. We also created the City Editor program to highlight members who’s interests aligned with the core goals of the community. It was a bumpy road at times, but I think we got to a good place in the end.

It’s the people (duh!)

Ultimately, it’s people not technology that drive communities and we would do well to remember that as we think about the sites and products we are building. Also, there’s been a wealth of writing on human interaction and as technologists, we have to remind ourselves that the human dimension is critical.