Posts filed under “Product”

Content Links from Amazon

I just got a note from Amazon with the following information in it: Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your website and monetize your content. Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time [...]

Plan for multiple releases of new features

The first release of a feature is often just a foundation for the iteration that is going to be required for the feature to be successful. Just sticking up something like a link to sign up for an alert isn’t sufficient. You’ve got to merchandise it, track how it’s being used, improve the parts that [...]

Got Blist?

Matt gave Dave and I a quick demo of Blist’s software last week and I have to say I came away very impressed with what they’ve been working on. They’ve clearly thought a lot about the user experience and it shows. They’ve innovated a lot on the UI front and I saw some things I [...]

This time, it's personal

Good article in the WSJ this morning (username/pw required) about the growing importance of personalization in search. The approaches discussed: Google – Statistical tracking of web and search history to deliver more personalized results. A search for ‘Giants’ in NYC would return a football team whereas in SF it would return a baseball team. Yahoo [...]

Great Post on Deciding What Not To Do (via Raymond Chen)

Whether it’s product or business strategy, until you decide what you’re not doing, you’re not going anywhere. Dreaming about the end state when your product is all-conquering and you’ve gone public on the NASDAQ is all well and good (and necessary), but you have to sit down, prioritize, decide what’s in and out of scope [...]

New Features at Judy's Book

Last Friday, we had an important release at Judy’s Book which included several new features. Some visible to consumers, others more in the back end, but all of which should lead to higher quality deals on site. The primary elements of this release were: Deal Approval Queue User Posted Local Deals (supported by¬†Local Editors in¬†select [...]

Your best path to strong SEO is for users to care

What is going to make people seek out your website, not just click on a link in search result pages? That’s the key question that you need to focus on. Dave asked me this earlier this week and it’s exactly the right perspective. In the long run, I think that the best way for a [...]

Awesome Post on User Acquisition by Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen¬†has a great post on his blog entitled¬†“Why Bloggers and Press Don’t Matter for User Acquisition.”¬†I often find myself nodding as I read his posts and this one is no exception. Press & Blogger buzz while it drives traffic, often has no connection¬†whatsoever¬†to driving users and user engagement.User acquisition is a critical part of [...]