#fourthsegment

[fourthsegment]

Social Media is exploding, and it's only going to get hotter

A few weeks ago, Boston Innovation released an infographic called Social Media is NOT as Popular as You Think.  The point of the article is to remind people not to get lost in the bubble of thinking everyone in the country is a Facebook & Twitter expert.  This is very true.  If you're a technical person, it's important to remember that most people are not you.  If you run a business and use social media, it's important to remember that you are probably not your customer.

While it's important to keep that in mind, I couldn't help but laugh when I read the article's assertion that ONLY 52% of Americans have a profile on a social media site; that ONLY 30% of companies use Facebook.

ONLY?

Facebook is 7 years old.  Twitter is 5.  Can you think of any other technology in human history that has been adopted so quickly?

It took almost 90 years for the telephone to go from the labs of Antonio Meucci to having a 30% market penetration in households. [1]

Social media is exploding, and it's application to personal relationships, business processes, and the intersection of the two is just barely beginning to be understood.  Those who keep their pulse on this intersection, and pay attention to how to effectively leverage social media to understand and engage with consumers authentically have a big pay day ahead of them.

[1] http://www.hamill.co.uk/pdfs/dwompa__.pdf

[fourthsegment]

Networks to focus on when building atop social communication

When designing a product that sits atop the social communication layer, it's tempting to "pull an AddThis" and support every network.  Facebook & Twitter are obvious players, but with incremental effort an application could easily support LinkedIn, Quora, MySpace, Orkut, Beebo, Reddit, QQ, Tumblr, Buzz, and so on....

You should be careful though.  While "pulling an AddThis" is fine if you are AddThis, recent research suggests it probably won't help you all that much.

The Social Habit 2011 by Edison Research

This slideshow from Edison Research -- specifically slide 13 -- indicates that while 51% of Americans over the age of 12 use Facebook, only 1/3 of that (17%) use MySpace, and only 8% use Twitter.

When it comes to designing on top of the social communication layer, Facebook is King, and everything you do should be optimized for that experience first.

[fourthsegment]

Why FourthSegment went to Gluecon

Last Sunday, Jonathan saw Brad Feld retweet this:

It didn't take us long to respond.  Glue is a 2 day technology conference.

Glue is about all of the bits and pieces, APIs and meta-data, standards and connectors that will help us to glue together the varying applications of a post-cloud world. If you're a developer, architect, designer or implementer that's living in this world, or just new to exploring it, Gluecon is the place for you.

To some people, it may seem odd that FourthSegment -- a company that is on the surface all about social media and e-commerce -- is spending time at a conference that deals with web infrastructure and APIs. But the issues we deal with under the covers at FourthSegment put the Gluecon topics right in our wheelhouse.

Social media is very much a part of the next generation of web infrastructure.  There is a world of technology hidden under the facade of tweets and Facebook posts that appear so easily in our streams and feeds. To be a real player in this new world, companies in the 'social media' space need to go beyond simply reading and writing statues from and to Facebook & Twitter.  They are going to need to take advantage of -- and innovate in -- the latest technology in fields like:

graph databases for understanding relationships

high volume real time event storage and processing

open APIs for allowing others to innovate on their technology

Now that the problems of large scale social network messaging have been virtually solved, our next challenge as technologists is to make social media more useful.  There are lots of people building on top of social media, but I think at its core the idea of making social media more useful can be distilled down to a simple idea: helping people find what they need, whatever it may be.

At times, this tenant can be at odds with itself.  For example, an advertiser getting what they want might mean finding out every webpage a consumer visits; while a consumer getting what they want might mean being able to browse the web without such privacy violations.  In both cases, however, the idea of sharing the right information at the right time to allow all parties to find what they need in an efficient manner is the key.

Finding a middle ground in this world is going to be the great challenge of the next five years on the internet.

FourthSegment is working to help build this world.  And we're wicked psyched about it.

[angilly]

Low barriers to entry are awesome

I attended Gluecon last week.  It was awesome.  I had a phenomenal time talking to some really smart people.  While I was talking to someone at one of the demo booths about FourthSegment, one of my all-time favorite lines came up: "Yeah but it sounds like there's a low barrier to entry there."

I smiled.  "Hell yeah there is."

"But what if someone copies your idea?" said my new buddy.

"Then that means I'm on to something" I replied with a huge smile on my face.

Let me very clear: I love low barriers to entry.

At it's core, the idea for FourthSegment is a straightforward idea.  You can go to our homepage, see what we're doing, and if you're really good you can probably code up a tech demo in a few days.  If you're average, you can probably do it in 2 weeks.

But if you think for one second that FourthSegment is just a website - that you can just go copy our functionality and make money - then you're not getting it.

FourthSegment, like all ideas with apparent 'low barriers to entry' came out of the collective intelligence of a couple founders who were searching for an idea for years, scores of meetings with hundreds of people, and some really difficult realizations along the way.

Every single inclusion and omission in what is about to be the first version of FourthSegment is the result of these discussions.

Why do we only let people share on Twitter and Facebook and not over email?  You would have had to have listened in on a 2 hour conversation Jonathan and I had at 2am a few weeks back.

Why are we going to be charging right out of the gate?  That's something I've thought about for years.  Another 100 hours of conversations, reading, and thinking over past several years, combined with the mistakes I made at MessageSling.

Why aren't we providing any kind of dashboard to visitors?  That something that could actually be pretty valuable.  There are times where I've wanted it for myself.  The decision to ditch that came from some experiences that Jonathan and I had while working on our last idea.

And a 80 other things.

The bottom line is that a low barrier to entry means that the product is streamlined -- optimized.  Copying functionality might get some dollars in your pocket, but they'll never make you a market leader.

So if you think there's a low barrier to entry when it comes to any product, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and try to compete.  It's never as easy as you think.

[fourthsegment]

Announcing the FourthSegment Bookmarklet

A couple days ago, we released our bookmarklet.  You should go use it.

"What's a bookmarklet?" you say?  A bookmarklet looks like a plain old bookmark in your browser, but when you click it, instead of taking you to a page, it does special things.

Bookmarklets are used by companies like Instapaper, Bnter, Read It Later & Let's Freckle to help people like you use the internet better.

So what does our bookmarklet do?  Well, FourthSegment is all about helping businesses gain consumer insights and discover leads via social media.  A website will (eventually) put our widget on their pages.  You'll click it, ask a question, and get responses from your friends on social networks.

One day we thought to ourselves: "This is pretty neat.  But why should the ability to quickly ask a question across all your social networks w/ a short URL be limited to specific websites?"

So we took a few hours to adapt our widget technology into a bookmarklet.  The bookmarklet will sit in your bookmarks bar like any other bookmark.  It will always be there, no matter what page you go to.  It doesn't track what sites you visit.  It sits there dormant until you click it.

Let's say you're browsing the net and you come across a page that you want to ask a question about.  As an example, lets say you want to know what people think of this Threadless t-shirt.  With the bookmarklet, it's easy.  You just click the bookmarklet.  A popup window will appear.  You type in a question, select which social networks to share on, click 'Ask!', and you're done.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know!

[angilly]

New world meets old world

My buddy Brian asking about my 1st startup with a tool from my current one.  Hilarious.

[fourthsegment]

Come get your socks knocked off at BoulderBeta 3.0

Word is officially out: We'll be demoing at Boulder Beta 3.0!

BoulderBeta 3.0 – 8 demos to knock your socks off!

We’re back just in time for a summer edition of BoulderBeta, and we can’t wait to show you the companies our great community has to offer this time around…

In case you've somehow missed the first two, BoulderBeta is a fantastic event put on by Tim Falls — take eight parts local companies, one part trade-show atmosphere, two parts live demos, shake well in a cocktail mixer, and you've got BoulderBeta.

BoulderBeta 3.0 will be at Absinthe House on June 14th. Register for the event here, and drop by our booth to see what we've got brewing at FourthSegment.

[angilly]

Seeing the country for the forests

"...we were struggling to make sense of the bubble and its aftermath, what it meant for technology and what it meant for venture capital."

-Fred Wilson

This quote from a recent Fred Wilson blog post reminded me of something I've been going through lately.

I'm out in the world.  I have a "neat idea."  I talk to a lot of people about it.  I get lots of wide eyes and "whoas" and great feedback.  After months of searching for a great idea, it's easy for Jonathan and I to rest on our laurels and think "well that was hard, but we worked hard and talked to a lot of people and did a lot of research and we finally got it."

Not so fast.

Now that we have a product, Jonathan and I have to figure out what it really means in the grander context.  Where does it go?  What is the future of the product and the brand?  These are questions similar to what Fred was talking about in his blog post: what do we go from here?

When I first saw Square, I thought to myself: "Thank you, Jack!"  But I also thought to myself "hrm that's nice... buuut is that it?"  I wondered what would be next for them.  What's next for them is Card Case, and while the fantastic design of Card Case is a shining example of seeing the forest for the trees, the evolution of the Square payment platform from 'just' Square to Square + Card Case is a level higher: it's seeing the country for the forests.

Square is not just building a product.  They're building a company with a greater hunger and vision.  That's something I am looking forward to doing with FourthSegment.  I'm looking forward to reminding myself constantly to never stop thinking about the bigger picture; to never stop seeing the country for the forests.

Now hopefully this blog post will do its job and help me remember that ;)