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Would you consider this Twitter account SPAM?

Or the deeper question here: how do you define SPAM?

It can’t be left to a completely relativistic definition because it becomes impossible to make laws to protect against it (ie. the one guy that happened to be wanting to buy viagra this morning finds the SPAM email to be very timely and useful, but that doesn’t justify the annoyance for the rest of us). On the other side of the continuum, it can’t be boiled down to specific practices because that’s what Bruce Schneier would call “the futility of defending the targets.” Here’s my position on the matter:

I monitor key phrases on Twitter, certain sequences of words that indicate a user has a problem that one of our free JumpBoxes could solve. I skim hundreds of these tweets and select the few that we can help and respond to them individually introducing them to our product. I documented this technique here awhile back. I’d say all but two of the 68 responses I’ve gotten from reaching out to people in this way have been received with appreciation. Two people have responded calling foul.

According to the Twitter TOS the account above clearly violates the “If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates” rule. But that could be satisfied by peppering it with personal updates and fluff. The reason I don’t do this out of my personal account or our JumpBox account is because doing so would inundate the followers of those with a bunch of repetitive info that’s uninteresting to them. But I digress. The point is there are ways to satisfy the TOS requirements but that just feels shady. I can see someone making the argument that this technique is not the “personal updates” spirit of use of what Twitter intended. I get that.

But here’s what I don’t understand:

• Making a freeware product recommendation for someone else’s product on a mailing list in response to a need that a participant expresses. Completely 100% kosher and expected.
• Making a freeware product recommendation that’s your own on a mailing list when appropriate… cheesy maybe but still completely appropriate.
• Making a freeware product recommendation of your own product in a distributed micro-blogging environment like Twitter where you single out a recipient who expresses a need your free product solves and you direct a thoughtful reply to that person… sorry but I see that as a legitimate way of reaching out to people. It’s not like you’re cluttering their inbox- it’s a message that appears on their @replies page in Twitter.

If you were tying to sell them something- okay, I agree. If you were repeatedly harassing the same person- gotcha. But a one-time message that makes them aware of a solution that’s free and completely unique such that they would never know to search for it in the first place, I don’t see the SPAMiness in that. Anyways I’m probably going to be discontinuing this practice not because I think it’s spammy but because the return isn’t there time-wise.

What do you think about this practice and the bigger question of how do we define what constitutes SPAM in the evolving world of social media?

A large top-tier law firm in New York was hiring a new attorney. They had taken hundreds of applications from recent law school graduates and had narrowed the search to three candidates, all of whom had first-rate GPA’s, achievements and LSAT’s. The firm flew the three candidates out over the weekend for an interview during which they were to present a mock brief to all the partners. The presentations would be the deciding factor of which candidate was selected.

The candidates arrived on Friday evening and were given a tour of the office. The next morning they returned and gathered in the conference room where all the firm’s partners had assembled to hear the presentations. One by one they gave their 30-minute talks. Each one had done thorough research on the subject matter and had prepared compelling powerpoint slides. The first two candidates demonstrated supreme lawyering skills and “Perry Mason-like” courtroom demeanor. When the third candidate took the podium and it was immediately clear that he lacked the charisma of the other two.

About halfway through his talk a gunshot rang out interrupting his presentation. Turns out it was actually the projector bulb on the conference table that had exploded. Given that it was the weekend there were no maintenance people on duty to replace the bulb. It seemed he would have to continue his presentation without slides. At this point however the candidate did something interesting – he calmly opened his briefcase and withdrew a spare projector bulb of the correct size and wattage. Within minutes he had replaced it and resumed his talk with his slides.

Apparently during the tour the previous evening he had surveyed the conference room, noted the projector model and gone out that night and purchased a spare bulb as a contingency plan.

All three presentations demonstrated thorough preparedness and while the third candidate lacked the superior speaking skills, his “meta-preparedness” sold the partners that he was someone who covered every base. The following week the third candidate received an offer to join the firm.

Normally I believe LESS government is a good thing. We’re better off when we let the free market forces work uninhibited and keep the role of government to the most minimal scaffolding necessary to keep life civil. But as it stands now we already use taxation to deal with substances that have harmful effects on our bodies. We realized at some point that the tobacco companies were extracting massive wealth from the population and leaving behind polluted, illness-prone bodies, the cost of which was borne by the public. So we shifted some of that financial burden to them in the form of tobacco taxes, and in so doing, not only generated revenue to cope with the problem (cure) but also deterred consumption through higher prices (prevention).

If we determine that eating a Big Mac every day has similar health consequences to smoking a pack of cigarettes per day why would we not use economic incentives to address it?

So far the hurdles and objections I can fathom are:

1. Aversion to more regulation: People don’t want government to tell them what to eat. It’s a personal choice. And agreed that it’s little odd to think about assigning this almost parental-type role to government.
2. Aversion to more taxation: Most people don’t want more taxes of any kind.
3. Different opinions on nutrition: The FDA got the food pyramid exactly upside down the first time around so it’s hard to see them getting a more complex program such as this right.
4. Lobbying: MacDonald’s would be none too happy about this and they would surely put up a fight. The “healthy eating” lobby (if one exists) wields nowhere near the political power of the major fast food chains – it would be a tough battle to turn this into law.
5. Socioeconomic bias: It could be easily argued that this tax would be paid disproportionately more by the lower class, the very ones who can’t afford it.

But if we could:
a) realize that we’re already using this exact strategy with tobacco.
b) recognize that we’re already bearing the costs of others’ poor eating choices through a Medicare deduction on every paycheck and funding a program that spends a good amount on illnesses caused by bad eating habits.
c) get a panel of independent nutritionists and economists to architect a plan that taxes based on saturated fat or some other measure of a food’s detrimental health effects.
d) slice through the lobbying issue by putting this up for a popular vote. Put the plan itself on a wiki for max transparency and solicit the collaborative input of many.
e) set up a program whereby food stamps count double on vegetables, fruits and other non-processed items so the lower class has an immediate healthy and affordable food option.

…that would be a step in the right direction. Tax revenues from the program would be split between educational campaigns on nutrition and paying down the single largest debt obligation we have, Medicare. You’d start to see menus at fast food restaurants naturally gravitate towards less-processed foods. Instead of letting large fast food chains get away with strip mining our nation’s largest natural resource (millions of people) while leaving behind diseased bodies for someone else to deal with, they would be forced to either start serving healthier foods or to bear the true costs of their business.

Would you vote for such a tax if it were on a ballot? If not, explain your rationale. How could it be modified to be more effective AND more palatable to voters?

I’m about 1/3rd of the way through a book on improving conversions through landing page optimization. So far it’s been focused on demonstrating the importance of this practice by showing how minor improvements in conversion can have multiplier effects on profits. While I understand the strategy of firmly embedding the “why” in readers first this isn’t what I’m seeking from the book.

Skimming ahead through the remaining chapters I’ve noticed it’s almost entirely text with no pictures of landing pages. On a subject that is so visually-oriented as this I want to see:

• screenshots of landing pages
• real data from A/B and multivariate testing
• hypotheses on what changes are expected improve conversion and why
• more pics showing the evolution of these pages
• analysis of resultant data confirming or disproving the hypotheses

Basically I don’t want theory, I want empirical data from experience and it appears I’m out of luck for getting that in this book.

This void got me thinking that there is an opportunity for someone to write that book. But then the more I stewed on it, the more it became clear that the real opportunity isn’t for another landing page book at all (that’s thinking way too small). The opportunity is this:

Create a member’s only site that consists of user-submitted info on what works. Whether it’s landing page optimizations, changes to product packaging, homepage design, business model tweaks, marketing strategies – whatever. The point is that the content would be the pure extract that comes from iterating on one’s business and improving it. And for the revenue model: the buy-in to be a member is either to earn access by uploading one’s own lessons or to purchase access.

In the same way that The Funded had a service whereby entrepreneurs could gain access to review others’ term sheets by uploading their own term sheet, this service would build its own content out over time. As the repository of lessons grows more valuable, some percentage of people would choose to purchase access to get the information either out of lack of experience or lack of time. They would trade money for both.

I believe The Experts Exchange site had a similar model for gaining access to a bank of technical questions and answers. The distinction here is that this service would be based around insights. There would need to be a way to peer-rate the value of the lessons submitted. The more valuable the lessons, the more privileges they earned you. There would be some kind of credit system where credits could be purchased or earned via submitting valuable insights. The challenge would be in seeding it with enough useful insights to attract initial participation from smart people.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our business is the discovery & experimentation of coming up with ideas, testing them, iterating and finding out what works. We learn a ton from working in our own little petri dish but imagine if it were possible to barter these insights to buy into a larger body of shared knowledge across other petri dishes? This service would be worth it for the value of those insights alone but think about the other byproducts:

• having input from other smart people to sanity check your efforts
• making personal connections with other entrepreneurs through constructive interaction
• exposure to funding sources in a setting where they can see how you think and operate
• an objective measure of the value of your input

Thoughts? Who wants to go out and build this?

This mini project spawned from two frustrations: 1) my dissatisfaction with the interface for reading the site 2) a desire to have an atomic project that I could complete and be done with in a weekend.

I check HN periodically throughout the day in between tasks. But rather than reading every headline I skim the site to find the posts that are most important (as indicated by a high number of comments and points). Unfortunately there’s no easy way to find those gem posts, you end up having to sift through each post. So in the spirit of the site itself (ie. hacking stuff to make it work they way you want) I wrote a different interface for it. For anyone interested in the details I’ll explain below how the app works and the backstory on how I made it.

The backstory

The main goal was to get a convenient way to quickly find the gems on Hacker News without having to manually skim through each story. Ideally I wanted something that would work both on my computer as well as my iPhone. And as a bonus I thought it would be neat to expose it so others could use it, and in so doing provide us some cheap, targeted advertising for JumpBox to an audience that would appreciate it. I knew given the nature of the app that it would probably do well on HN itself.

I looked briefly into what it would take to write a Greasemonkey FF extension but my javascript skills are wretched and even if I were able to make that work, it wouldn’t help for reading on the iPhone nor would there be any promo benefit to JumpBox. So I concluded it would need to be a mashup that was accessible via the web.

There is no public API to HN so the first step was to create one using Dapper. This was the easiest part of the whole project. Their wizard makes it ridiculously easy to turn any webpage into a feed of XML, JSON, RSS, whatever you need. It took all of five minutes to make this dapp to produce a real-time XML feed of stories off their homepage. So far so good.

The next thing I tried was to head over to Mindtouch and fire up a free express account and use their Mindtouch Core product to render the results in a sortable table. Again this took all of five minutes to produce this result which was promising but lacked the sorting capability. Unfortunately adding the sorting feature would prove to be significantly more difficult. After a few hours of tinkering with Dekiscript (their proprietary scripting language) I eventually gave up – I’m sure there is a way to iterate over an XML result set using Dekiscript but I certainly couldn’t figure it out even with a ton of good documentation.

At this point I tried one last gasp effort to solve this using a free pre-made tool: I knew Google Spreadsheets had the ability to import XML and JSON feeds. And a Google Spreadsheet can be sorted six ways from Sunday so all good there. Hopeful about this avenue, I went and tinkered for about an hour trying to get the import to work per the Google documentation but sadly had to give up. Apparently Google just didn’t like the XML feed. Sigh.

Having run out of options I decided at this point to dust off the Coldfusion skills and try to code this thing from scratch. What would have been ideal at this point would have been a JumpBox for Railo or BlueDragon. Instead I futzed around trying to find an online sandbox where I could develop without having to install anything on my Mac. I opened an account here but sadly the CFHTTP tag I needed to use was malfunctioning on their system. I then opened up a $5/mo hosting account with Hostek only to learn that they disable the CFDUMP tag which is key when developing with nested structures and result sets. I ended up installing the standalone developer CF server from Adobe on my Mac and making the site there.

After a few hours of tinkering I had it consuming and displaying the results in a table. There was another hour of scrubbing and transforming the data so all the numbers were sortable. The last step was to add in the Tablesorter jQuery plugin. And the final result was exactly what I wanted: a simple HTML spreadsheet of all the articles on the homepage of HN. For you coders here’s the single page of code that handles everything.

Granted this ended up occupying most of my weekend but it was a great exercise in learning about a bunch of different technologies. I submitted the page to Hacker News and it rose to #3 on the homepage last night with significant momentum. Sadly when I woke up this morning my provider had experienced a DNS outage rendering the site unreachable since last night and therefore cutting it down while it was in its prime. You only get one shot at the homepage of HN so I have no idea how people will find it now :-(

But all in all a good learning experience with an output that I can (and will) use from now on for reading that site. At $5/mo it’s worth it to me for my personal use alone. And the good news is that it even works on the iPhone. If you’re a fan of HN try it for reading that site and tell me what you think.

Groups like Nerds, Geek ‘N Eat, Gangplank activities and Reopen Phoenix are badly needed to compensate in metro areas like Phoenix that suffer from massive urban sprawl and fragmented communities. If you’re here and know a fellow techie that hasn’t been to one of these group events, follow the action on Eventification and bring that person out to the next event. Help the nerds prevail.
We. Are. SpartaaAAAAAA!

Any other worthy local tech groups I failed to mention?

The Good

Couple this app (a “music vetting” tool) with other discovery-focused apps like Last.fm and Pandora and you have an easy way to find and test new music. The 30sec samples you get from iTunes just aren’t enough to decide whether you want to buy an album. I’ve found that I typically need to live with the songs for a few days for them to grow on me. With Grooveshark you can listen to an entire album on demand and and then share a URL that instantly plays an album or specific track. They’ve made it so the service doesn’t require any registration to use and works within a couple seconds of the first page load. The advantages of registering appear to be the ability to save playlists, love tracks and sync recommendations with networks like Facebook and StumbleUpon. So far I’ve been using it without registration and it delivers exactly what I want.

What needs fixing

I only have two minor gripes about the app so far:
1. Duplicates: As well done as the interface is they should add a little bit of intelligence to the queueing so it removes duplicate tracks. For some reason there seems to be quite a few duplicates even within the same album sometimes. I would think they could default it to recognize when the name of the track is identical and have it weed out the duplicates.
2. Auto track ordering: The tracks on an album are intended to be listened to in a certain order however Grooveshark jumbles the ordering for some reason. It would seem trivial to hit an external service like Amazon or iTunes to order the tracks properly so clicking the play button on the album yields the same experience as playing the tracks sequentially in iTunes.

Both of these issues are miniscule in relation to how good (and free) the service is and both can be corrected by manually tinkering with the playlist once it’s created. But these two tiny improvements would make the service flawless IMHO.

My concern

So at this point my only real concern is: “how can they possibly be making enough money to sustain it?” This is a service for which I would happily pay $5-10/mo. They have to be paying the ASCAP royalties on every song they stream. Given that there are no audio interruptions and that I typically listen to it with the interface minimized anyways (plus when I AM looking at it, the ad displayed is so unobtrusive I don’t notice it) I wonder how they can be covering the bandwidth charges and streaming royalties. It would be a shame to see this disappear. Kudos to them if they have a different model in mind and are just grabbing eardrums right now. Their Compete traffic graph certainly indicates that they’re doing something right. I just hope the service doesn’t go away as I’ve vowed to never give Rhapsody another dime and this is currently filling that void.

What music discovery and vetting apps do you use?

Travel agents. I’m looking at you and then at sites like Orbitz, Kayak, Expedia, Priceline and Tripit and wondering about the viability of your profession. Is there still room in this world for your career and if so, how must it morph to continue? Remember back in the day it used to require proficiency with the SABRE booking system? Your travel agent would call you and say “I can save you $20 if you’re willing to go an hour earlier and do a stop in Newark.” How times have changed… Today your average 12-yr-old child armed with a web browser can deliver a better travel service.

How about arial photography? It used to cost big bucks to pay a pilot to in a cessna to fly over a site with a high-quality camera and snap a few photos. Now you stitch a few screen grabs together from Google Earth and you have a higher res image in five minutes time without leaving your computer.

What about realtors? I realize this one might draw criticism from those who have invested the time to get a real estate license but seriously. It made sense as a profession before we had sites like Zillow and Realtor.com with the whole MLS exposed via the Web but how is this still a viable profession?

Car salesmen? You can go to cars.com and have a window into the Reynolds & Reynolds inventory systems of every dealership within a 50mi radius of your zipcode, sortable by make, model, year and color. You can grab the VIN’s of your top 5 prospects and five minutes later have CARFAX reports on each vehicle. Go to LendingTree.com and have 5 offers for financing. Sell your vehicle via eBay in 3 days and walk onto the dealership knowing exactly what price you’re going to pay for the car you found. The car salesman’s duties are reduced to essentially a greeter. And yet somehow there’s still guys in ties drinking coffee and shooting the breeze out there waiting to pounce when you drive into a dealership…

So let’s not dis on all these professions- they were viable and noble at one point. What do we need to do to morph each of these roles to make them important, indeed essential again? What traits will never go out of style?

• Travel Agent: get to know me, go find and research non-mainstream, undiscovered travel destinations and play matchmaker. Monitor deal anomalies for hotel and travel fares to these places and drop me a thoughtful note with a travel recommendation. In fact, monitor any one of my various social media channels to know when I need to take a vacation and then suggest it ;-)
• Arial photographer: This one’s tough because this service truly has been obviated for all but niche needs like photographing classified areas or getting super hi-res images. Pilot: provided you still want to fly, consider partnering up with other pilots and make a business like Dayjet whereby you pair up strangers looking to travel short distances and deliver affordable, ad hoc charter flights. (okay that’s a bit of a stretch- what else could former arial photographers do?)
• Realtor: Get intimate knowledge of neighborhoods, school systems, pricing trends. Don’t recommend specific houses- send me Zillow searches referenced in Google Docs and complete with your notes. Listen to my goals, know my budget constraints and advise me on home purchasing heuristics I should be thinking about. Make sure I’m not making a mistake in neighborhood selection given foreclosure trends.
• Car salesman: Forget all “4-square” negotiating tactics because the price is no longer negotiable. Rather than be an expert on every car of a certain make, limit yourself to a class of vehicle and know all makes and models within that class. Make yourself a recommendation expert across makes- an advocate for the buyer. Learn my needs, constraints, etc and help me pick the right vehicle. I’ll pay you to plug and chug on eBay, Cars.com, Craigslist and Carfax to get me the best deal. Advise me on vehicle selection and then do the legwork of actual acquisition so I don’t have to.

*BONUS Profession: Personal Internet Sherpa – there’s still a portion of the population that either refuses to use the Internet, or more likely, doesn’t know all the tricks. How about marketing yourself the person who can avail yourself weekly to understand their imminent challenges and put your knowledge of the various services to work helping them save money. Take a commission on the money you save them.

The takeaways here:
Some things will always be valued: personal treatment, understanding customer needs more thoroughly, having mastery over a problem domain and being able to match their unique likes more closely with the available options. Save me time and money, substantiate it and I’ll pay you commission on that savings.

Disrupted professions don’t evaporate, they morph to continue to yield value in the changed environment. People cling to what was once familiar but the real answer is to think from the perspective of the customers, deliver value and charge for a proportionate amount of the value delivered.

Can you think of other lessons here? What are some other jobs I missed that have become antiquated and are in need of fundamental rethinking?

I learned a lot from this process and I’m happy with the results so far (nothing ends today – I’ll be continuing the training and the diet without a doubt). I did miss my goals of single-digit body fat and doubling the weight I can lift but I was able to move the needle from 18%BF to 14% and I can lift an average of 40% more now than when I started. Another twelve weeks and I’m confident I can attain both of those goals.

I figured I’d share some of the things I’ve learned that were non-obvious and that could be helpful to others considering the program. And let me preface everything by saying I have zero affiliation with Bill Phillips or his company. I just like his philosophy on eating and exercise and the motivational and instructional value of his book. In no particular order here’s a braindump to round out my last post of commentary from the halfway mark.

The Workbook

As I mentioned previously, the iPhone apps for tracking food and exercise are impractical as they add too much friction to the process of recording stats.  While they are better in that they give you nifty progress graphs, you’re not optimizing for viewing, you’re optimizing for ease of capture. It’s ultimately about how much weight you put up next time and even the best app I found still required too much effort to enter stats. Print out the booklet in a combed binder at Kinko’s for $15 and use that instead. I had them do the first and last pages as cardstock because your book will weather its abuse better that way. And a combed binder works best of any binding because it makes a handy place to store a writing instrument.

You live with this book for 12-weeks. It becomes an irreplaceable, authoritative archive of how/when/what you lifted and ate. Do yourself a favor and in big permanent marker put your name, phone, email and a nice note asking people to return it if found.  

I found the “actual vs. planned” distinction to be overkill. I think I only planned my meals and workout on the first day.  Realistically if you belong to a big gym and go at highly trafficked times you won’t dictate which machines you can use so you end up playing it by ear.  Same thing on meal preparation – it’s pretty unrealistic to plan out your meals for the week. You’ll end up getting a bunch of stuff at the store and deciding “at runtime” what to prepare. Lastly, I found his notation of tracking water consumption as a meal line item to be cumbersome. I just put hashmarks in the margins as a rough guess of how many glasses and at what point throughout the day I had them.

Customize the routines to your accommodate your goals

I found the program to be slanted towards fat loss as opposed to muscle gain. If I were to have followed the orthodox program I’d have only one upper body workout on alternating weeks – I found that unacceptable. Instead I altered the program to better fit my goal of muscle gain and would rotate pulling one muscle group out of the upper body day and focusing on it intensely on an adjacent cardio day.  This seemed to work well especially since 20min for cardio leaves a lot of room for doing other exercises. 

Google doc for streamlining grocery shopping

I’m not a big fan of grocery shopping (or any shopping for that matter). I find it tedious and almost always end up ping-ponging back and forth across the store because I forget an item in produce and then realize I needed some random cleaning product, oh and then the banannas, oh and then a toothbrush, etc.  I did come up with a simple way to streamline things: make a google spreadsheet with all the items you could possibly need ordered by physical location right to left in the grocery store.  Here’s my ordered list. Of course I didn’t need everything on each visit but it’s way easier to skip items you don’t need rather than to forget the ones you do. 

Value of removing decision making

Much in the same way that Getting Things Done alleviates the burden of decision making and turns your todo list into a set of executable units, the BFL program does the same for eating and working out.  You know exactly what to do each day when it gets to a meal or workout- simply refer to the relevant page in the book and build upon what you did before. I believe this accounts for 50% of the magic of the program. The other 50% are the motivating stories from the book and Bill’s somewhat-cheesy but clearly genuine interest in helping people get over the hump and achieve their fitness improvement goals. 

Certain exercises can be done everyday

I found that abs and pull-ups are exercises that can be done everyday. I hung a wide-lat pull-up bar on my back patio and made a habit of doing a set when I woke up and before I went to bed. It cost a total of $50 for all the materials and took about an hour to set it up. Basically I drilled a hole through the beam and fitted it with a chain that held up the bar via a c-clamp. Doing a set of pull-ups and situps every morning and evening has become a habit.

Tupperware + cut fruits & veggies = awesome

I used to pay $7 for the pre-cut bowl of cantaloupe slices- what a waste. You can pay $.80 for a fresh whole cantaloupe and spend 10min cutting it up and have more and fresher slices that you save in a tupperware container for the rest of the week. This works with fresh veggies as well. I still buy packs of frozen but typically buy a fresh vegetable and then cut it up and store a few servings in the fridge for the rest of the week.

Burn your boats

I’m a fan of publicizing goals. I believe when you make a goal privately to yourself it’s very easy to blow it off and fall short. Posting them in a conspicuous place however puts the power of peer pressure in your favor: you know that people will be reading it and will hold you to it.  A number of times I was on the fence about blowing off the gym or having a dessert and I thought about the idea of posting a before an after pic that looked identical. I posted a set of goals on my bathroom mirror when I started and I don’t mind posting them here because I know my friends that read my blog will help hold me to them. Ultimately it’s about doing whatever you need to to get motivated and stick to your commitment. 

Well tihat’s about all the observations I have.  To be clear I did this using no supplements other than protein shakes and power bars. The majority of the change manifests towards the last part of the 12wks but if you stick to the plan a transformative change is possible in a short time.  I encourage anyone considering a diet / exercise program to check this one out. I’m very happy with the results and plan to continue the regimen of eating and exercise indefinitely. If you’re local in Phx and want to borrow the book, I have a very dog-eared and chewed up copy that I’m willing to lend anyone who asks.