Day Two – 24th April 2008
The morning began with more keynote addresses… the first two disappointed, but then came Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh (full first name: Aristotle! Hercu, are you reading?) who talked about “opening up the social graph” through Y! OS – Open Yahoo. Interestingly, of all the content Yahoo has, he called out Yahoo Sports as a key area where the web can add an additional dimension – context. He promised that Y! OS would add another dimension at Yahoo – a developer’s platform that is socially driven and open (get the deets here.
After that, it was on to Current TV‘s Chief Architect Ofer Shaked discussing “What Current Knows About Viewers.” What I found interesting:
- They define themselves as a “participatory media company.”
- Their audience is young adults looking for user-generated content.
Some data:
- Current is carried in 56 million US homes.
- They have 1.5 million hits to their site per month.
- Users are defined as 20-somethings who are educated, skew male and more than two-thirds have a laptop working and TV on at the same time.
In Oct. they launched a “2.0” version of their site. They tweaked it at the beginning of April – adding an incentive to get users face / content onto an hourly news program. They wanted to find out what this would do for their existing user base. What they found was that by using this incentive, they had 5 times the commentary and contributions they had before the “tweak.”
Their top ten types of clips include:
- Lo-fi funny clips
- More thoughtful pieces
- Controversial / thought-provoking
- Hard-to-watch, sometimes violent or disturbing
Their community favors the following content categories:
- Culture
- Music
- Art
A piece on their site represents how much time users spend watching various categories. Watch here.
On to Steve Peerman, Vice President of Strategic Products at MySpace, who talked about the need to listen to users (What MySpace Knows). Peerman said he’d been at MySpace for 4 years – starting out as a product manager. He says the story of MySpace is one of growth and scale. Take a look at some of their data:
- They have 117 million unique visitors per month (more than the population of Japan and less than Mexico).
- They have 100 billion rows of data.
- They have 5 million simultaneous users.
- 000-400,000 new users per day.
Because of these figures, he says MySpace cannot afford to be 90% right. Using their user population as scale, “being 10% wrong means we’ve pissed off Ireland and New Zealand.”
- Their goal is user experiences that users find interesting.
- Users are best at self-organizing and self-regulating.
- They, “live and die by the goodwill and determination of community and you’ll never be as smart as they are.”
- Their users love “Tom” – everyone’s first friend on MySpace.
- The “most productive roadmap is directed by asking users.”
- They’re using “Tom’s blog” to try-out new navigation.
- MySpace is driven by “richness, engagement, privacy…” and spam deference.
- He left after saying, “users are 1,000% times smarter than you’ll ever be… you have to check your ego at the door.”
