I always stop by Mashable every morning to check the Spark of Genius section and I found http://mashable.com/2011/10/04/hearsay-it/
Hearsay.it plans to share everything you read with your followers. Now my first question is why? But then I remember there are certain individuals that just happen to have a great book list or seem to always find news stories otherwise never posted in the mainstream. This has the potential to be the Spotify of reading, which is fantastic.
It’s tempting to worry and fret when a web behemoth like Facebook comes and parks a tank on your lawn. Of course Facebook doesn’t even know it’s our lawn and in fact our lawn is currently little more than a patch of sprouting grass and anyway nobody owns a lawn any more. But still, it’s tempting if you’re trying to make a new idea stick to think that you’ve lost when a big company comes along and seems to do what you do only with an existing audience of hundreds of millions of users. Game over, right?
Not at all. We love Facebook. We think they do amazing things. But we also believe that they do best when they bring an established concept to a mass market, not when they try to bring early adopter products that haven’t established an audience yet to the masses.
It’s one thing to mess around and experiment with what you are comfortable passively sharing on a small, very specific startup like Hearsay. It’s quite another to be okay sharing a whole lot of stuff to a Facebook news stream that you know will be seen by many of your friends and family right away.
Our scale and ability to learn from what we do and focus on that is what makes us strong. Hearsay can still win because we are fundamentally and singlemindedly exploring passive sharing of news. We exist to see what happens if you extend sharing beyond content you think other people will be interested in and instead open up everything you read and let other people decide what to consume from that. We want to try and recreate the thrill of Last.fm when you first see what total strangers who are just like you are listening to.
All the feedback we get on Hearsay tells us we have plenty to learn about our audience. Some people love it. The majority of people don’t see the point or find it worrisome. That’s entirely normal. We are fine with that. We know that we need to find a niche of people who love Hearsay, are interested in the potential of the idea, find it useful and want to help shape it and build from there. We have time. Our failures won’t make it to Mashable or Techcrunch. We get more than 24 hours to make something work. That’s the advantage a startup has.
Facebook doesn’t just face a challenge on adoption. They also face a challenge on making the data useful and useable. We took quite a few failed iterations to come up with our Tweetdeck multiple stream UI and it still isn’t perfect yet. But if you throw all that passive sharing into a Facebook pot which contains shared pictures, status updates, happy birthdays and wall posts, the chances are that the passively shared data doesn’t get in front of the right people other than by accident and certainly not in a format that makes the data truly social.
The third issue is how easy it is to forget that you are sharing stuff on Facebook. I have already accidentally passively shared a piece via Facebook’s frictionless sharing. I clicked a link on a Facebook group that took me to the Guardian Facebook app version of a story and bang - I’ve now shared it on my stream.
I am passionate about the benefits of passive sharing but I felt uncomfortable about that. To us at Hearsay, passive sharing is something you should actively decide to do. You should always know you are doing it. And there should be no possibility that you read something that you don’t want others to see you have read.
That’s why we believe that a standalone desktop app is the right way to pioneer this new frictionless form of news distribution. You come to Hearsay knowing what you want to do. If you see something you don’t want to “share” we have now introduced an “anonymous read” function so you don’t have to exit the site to read it. It’s transparent what you’re doing. And in pioneering this space, we think that this is fundamental.
But we also think that because Facebook is important and a central part of social media for so many people it will inevitably lead a bunch of people to dip their toes in the idea of passive sharing and let many early adopters see its potential. In the long run, that can only be a good thing for Hearsay.
Interesting post. Have you checked out http://Hearsay.it? It’s passive sharing but you know you’re doing it - because that’s the whole point of the news reader. It meets some of your concerns about people being able to forget that what they are reading is not private.
(Source: donohoe)
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I still don’t believe in vision. I believe in bumbling around long enough to not give up on things. Eventually, when success comes your way because you’ve failed in every possible way, and the only way that’s left is the one successful way. And, always for those of you who are entrepreneurs, it seems to come last.
— Vinod (via brycedotvc)
I got into an interesting discussion with a journalist friend yesterday. How, they said, can Hearsay compete with the other social news platforms that are already out there and well established like Flipboard, Pulse or Digg? It’s a great question and one I love answering because it’s the most exciting thing about Hearsay. This is an idealized version of how the conversation went (ie I have slightly reworked it for clarity and to make my arguments look particularly well thought out. Editing, I think they call it.)
Friend: “So how do you compete with other social news platforms?”
Me: “Actually, you know, there really are no other truly social news platforms.”
Friend: “Don’t be ridiculous. Flipboard and Pulse are social. Twitter could hardly be more social. Linkedin is making a pitch for social news. News.me is there. There are a whole load of social news platforms out there. You’re being silly.”
Me: “No, not really. All the companies you mention there have great products that I love. I’ve used and enjoyed all of them at one time or another. But they aren’t social news platforms.
I’ve always hated the term “do what you love”.
Not sure why it’s grated on me but I’ve always found it trite. It’s too pretty a package for how messy and hard startup life actually is.
But, a few quotes last week have me warming to it.
I found the first floating in a sea of Steve Jobsisms:
Why do people share? It’s such a fundamental question for most businesses but very much a core question for a social news business like us. The New York Times provided the.ANA Digital and Social Media conference recently with a fascinating run through the findings of a survey they conducted into it, trying to come up for the first time with a picture of the ecosystem of news sharing.
Bazaarvoice probably did the best summary of the talking points around why people share.
- We share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others
- We share to define ourselves to others, and to receive social validation
- We share to strengthen and nourish our relationships with one another
- We share for self-fulfillment—“We enjoy getting credit for it”
- We share to advocate for causes we believe in, and less commonly, brands we want to support
So sharing is pretty high stakes stuff. A lot of who we think we are is tied up in it. And in some ways that gravitates against honesty. We share in order to get something in
I have been re-reading Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston (2007) this week. In it she interviews a group of startups from a variety of era and talks to them about the process of starting a company. The people and the interviews are amazing.
It’s the most inspiring book I’ve ever read about entrepreneurship. I didn’t think that the first time I read it, because I hadn’t tried to launch Hearsay.it
then. Now I’m inspired by the fact that the chaos and joy and self doubt that I’ve already tasted as a nascent startup ceo, has been felt by even the most successful entrepreneurs. Hooray - I’m normal!
It is an inspiring book because of how ordinary and prosaic and fortunate these founders all make themselves sound. No one seems to have had a very clear idea of exactly how they would be successful when they started out. No one had a plan and implemented it exactly the way they thought they would. Contrast that with the mythology of individual greatness that tends to be the core theme of history according to business school case studies.
One of my favorite case studies from my MBA in London was an HBS case about Honda’s motorcycle division and their entry into the US market. The Honda (A) and Honda (B) cases were a perfect illustration of how eager history is to regard success in business as a function of brilliant insight and individual intellect. Credit to London for teaching it as a lesson in skepticism.
If you haven’t read the cases then you should. Honda (A) paints Honda’s entry into the US as a masterstroke of strategy, in which Honda executives understand the weakness of the incumbent and exploit them to gain a foothold that over time becomes a stranglehold in the market. Students then discuss the case at face value and analyze the strategic brilliance of Honda and the inevitability of their eventual success.
Then the professor whips out Honda (B). This case gets much closer to the action, interviews a lot more people, and uncovers the series of accidents, mistakes and fiascos that led to what Honda execs did and the degree of good fortune that allowed it all to come together in the end.
This latter picture of success - as a battle to stay alive in the face of adversity long enough to get a stroke of luck that allows hard work to mean something - is the core invisible theme of the Founders At Work book.
The interviewees are remarkably honest about their experience, even in the face of obvious personal incentives to make it seem like they knew what they were doing all along.
As they tell it, some were just solving a problem they themselves had and accidentally found that other people had the same problem - Yahoo, Delicious, Hotmail. Others started out doing something they thought was a winner but were forced by people’s interest in a trivial sideline of what they were doing to do that other thing instead. Others seem to have found their place by sheer persistence and determination in the face of a lot of events that should have made them give up (Evan Williams and Blogger). Almost none of them set out to be rich or understood the scale of what they were doing.
I thought of all this when I saw the 2005 Mark Zuckerberg interview that resurfaced this week. In it, he really does come across as a clumsy happy geeky guy who isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing but seems to be enjoying doing it. He doesn’t understand what Facebook can become even though it is already pretty big. He doesn’t have a masterplan to take over the world. But that isn’t how history will tell his story. The image of Zuckerberg will never recover from being portrayed as a conniving hyper-smart genius in the film Social Network. That’s a pity.
None of this is an attempt to belittle the smarts of the entrepreneurs who made it big. Luck is impotent without intelligence and hard work. But I think what I’ve learned in doing Hearsay so far is that determination, patience, naivety and self-confidence mixed with the ability to see when you are wrong and a willingness to adapt can get you a long way. Entrepreneurship is a messy business that no one who isn’t doing it truly understands.
Oddly, I find that comforting. I’m not a genius (sorry mom). But I’m determined that when a bit of luck comes Hearsay’s way, we’ll still be here, we’ll be smart enough to spot it and we’ll be determined enough to take advantage.
(Of course, you can help that moment come a little quicker by trying out the site and telling us what you think…)
Definitely probably.
Anything that offers a spot for trialling ideas from your brightest people and letting your most enthusiastic users take them for a spin is a good idea. The most discouraging thing about working in a big company is the politics and bureaucracy required to get anything done and the number of people who have the right to say no. If beta620 gives internal developers a way of getting things done and gathering data to blast past nervous news execs then it’s a good thing.
The flip side of this is that these sorts of ring-fenced experimental zones can become a dead pool, where good and bad ideas get sent to die, with very few people paying any attention to them. In fact a Labs concept can allow projects that should be explored and iterated upon in the mainstream of the paper’s decision-making process to be easily sidelined and ignored. What happens is that no one says “no” to an idea any more, they just say “let’s put it in Labs and see what happens”. As a result no viable project wants to be seen dead there.
The grumpy but talented designer Andy Rutledge wrote a fine post last week about how bad the design of news websites is. For anyone who has labored to get good design principles implemented in a news organization, it’s a familiar story. News pages contain too much stuff, aren’t well organized and don’t help the reader understand what is what. His post gets a heartfelt well argued thumbs down from Nieman Journalism Labs Joshua Benton today, who argues that news site architecture is difficult, which it is.
But the need to simplify the architecture of news sites is something that news organizations have been told this for the past five years or more. My colleague Mario Garcia jr, the best news website designer I’ve worked with, has been banging this drum for even longer than that.
I used to work with Mario’s clients on what we called Predesign. The idea of Predesign is to make sure that we get a full picture of a business, its users, its politics, its context, its revenue stream, its capabilities, before we ever thought about changing a pixel of the home page. It worked well and a lot of clients found it a useful business strategy exercise ahead of a design change.
After the Predesign stage, my job was to try and represent those voices in client meetings. That was when my job got really hard. Every step towards a completed design seemed to involve a series of changes that little by little abandoned the insights we had gathered from around the business and the market in favor of things that served an internal purpose or prevented a change that someone somewhere said they didn’t like. I sat in client meetings and watched as small change after small change undermined the very design principles that the company had enthusiastically bought into when they hired Mario. I’m sad to say that the end result was never as good for the user as it could have been - if the only person representing the voice of the user is an outside consultant the user is screwed. So why are legacy news organizations so bad at what should be a core competence - the presentation of news.
- News organizations have a print mindset. In the days of print, your importance was judged by the prominence in the paper. Now there is no concrete restriction on what can be on the most prominent page. Ergo, everyone wants to have a piece of it. So you end up with every editor and writer feeling that if they aren’t on the home page that they are being disrespected. It’s hard to say no to. You haven’t got the easy excuse of space limitations. And it takes determination because no matter how much you tell them about how users navigate to their section or story nothing will ever convince them that they don’t have to be on the home page somewhere. Because….
- News organizations aren’t run on data. Again this is a legacy problem, and it’s a hard habit to break, but I haven’t met a single news organization that has anything resembling a truly data-driven approach to what they do. This isn’t to say that they should all become clickbaiters. What I mean is that they don’t work hard enough to find insights that are sitting there in the middle of their own user data and then do something different based on what they see. News orgs aren’t experimenters they are debaters. Data in some news executive circles is just a tool to prove that what you already think is right. Data is great when it supports a brilliant insight, and obviously flawed when it doesn’t. Data is not a starting point for innovation, it’s the end-point of a discussion about what someone has already decided to do and the opinion of one or two people remains the basis on which most decisions in news orgs are made. The data to support it is wheeled out like a chained performing bear to do its dance and then goes sullenly back to the data dungeon.
- News organizations don’t understand their users’ needs any more. We used to understand them well and meet reader needs perfectly. We understood that their readers had limited time and that because of restrictions on paper, the newspaper’s job was to find the most interesting stories, put them in the right order and present them engagingly within a limited space. News orgs made confident editorial decisions for users because that was what the restrictions of the medium required. With an abundance of content however, newspapers have lost their courage and given up on making difficult decisions because they don’t think they need to. “Look,” they say, “we don’t have to make decisions on what to show you, we can show you it all!” But there isn’t any evidence that users want that. In fact the growth of HuffPo et al seems to suggest that users are crying out for imaginative story selection rather than volume. Users appear to still want the news org to find a manageable amount of interesting content and present it engagingly in ways that are only possible with well-funded professional resources. I have never heard anyone complain that they don’t visit a news site because it doesn’t have enough stories to choose from.
- News organizations want to be perfect for as many people as possible. This superficially sounds like a noble goal, but in fact it’s deadly to doing anything differently. You can never make everyone happy. Every good thing you do will be met with disgust by some section of your audience. The news orgs job nowadays isn’t to make corrections every time someone writes in and says they don’t like something. It’s to detect patterns of usage that indicate a real problem - not one that affects only a few weird people - what the tech guys call the edge cases. If you listen to the edge cases in news you will design your pages for a narrowing and highly conservative group of people who don’t want change in an era where the world is changing very quickly. That’s a bad idea.
And how then should news organizations change? Here’s a random and hopelessly incomplete list of places to start …
- Hire more science grads. As a graduate in International Relations my training was to look at confusing pre-existing facts and opinion and craft my own view as confidently as possible. It was a good preparation for life in managing newspapers. But it isn’t as useful in online news. A few more people with science backgrounds where hypothesis, experimentation and data rule might help tip the balance towards data a little.
- Learn to love A-B tests and betas. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to test out designs for news websites with live audiences reading live stories and watch how their behavior differed. News orgs are too worried about “giving away” their new design to do it now, but it’s the most viable way of getting the confidence to try new things I can think of. News orgs don’t use them enough.
- Dramatically reduce story output. Put more energy into fewer stories. Use your data to work out how to package stories in ways that people tell other people about. Listen when people’s behavior tells you they don’t care about something.
- Set out some metrics for the site that help you kill bad ideas. If you measure how often a form of navigation is used and set a standard for what you regard as a waste of space, you can kill things that don’t work. If no one clicks on something, stop putting it there.
- Keep the CEO and head of ad sales away from design. Not that the CEO shouldn’t have a role in setting the objectives of a design, but they shouldn’t be micromanaging it. Let the people in charge take responsibility for its success or failure. Set them targets that drive their decisions during the redesign. Tell them you want a 20% growth in traffic and 20% increase in revenue and fire them if they don’t deliver it. The same for the sales chief. Let them define what they need to be able to sell their ads, talk long and hard about the ad market and what advertisers want and then let the design team deliver that to them. Just don’t let the sales guy tell you which ad slots he needs. Every sales person would like every page to be covered in every conceivable ad shape even though their own data tells them that they never sell 90% of it. They get what they want because everyone is frightened of losing revenue in the short term. Overbearing ad requirements are too often a speed bump to usability and usability is a big part of what keeps the ad audience coming back. Play the long game.
Hmmm, what have I missed out…?
