Colin Charles Agenda

Here are my thoughts on messenger applications, and if you read beyond, there’s an idea worth thinking about.

Dramatis Personnae:

• Beluga: Free, Private group messaging on your mobile (with Facebook integration). Works on iOS and Android. Created by ex-Googler’s. Recently acquired by Facebook.
• Foound: A fun and easy way to organise hangouts with friends and follow their activities. Works on iOS only. Funded, round probably led by Neoteny Labs (a Joi Ito firm). Based in Singapore.
• WhatsApp Messenger: Cross-platform mobile messaging app, works on iOS, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia. Group chat included. Costs money on some platforms (USD$0.99 on iOS, free trial for a year on BlackBerry/Android, etc.). Started by a couple of ex-Yahoo! chaps.
• Kik Messenger: Text. Photos. Groups. Its like BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). I’ve not used it extensively, but its brought to you by some ex-RIM chaps, folk that worked on BBM. Just took USD$8 million in Series A funding, including from interesting firms like Union Square Ventures (and Fred Wilson joins the board).
• PingChat! – Similar to WhatsApp and Kik, it works on iOS, BlackBerry and Android. Has support for video and voice notes, but I have not played with it much.
• TalkBox – text is boring, why not use voice. Its basically push-to-talk in software. iOS only.

Today I use BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) a lot. I carry an Android and BlackBerry device in my pocket most of the time. If friends have a BlackBerry, we’re usually chatting on it via BBM, and we’ve given up the idea of sending a SMS. BBM also supports group chats, which means you can coordinate things amongst groups of people quite easily. The only “downside” to BBM is that I have to pay for the BIS service on a monthly basis (it enables push email for 10+1 email accounts, plus gives me BBM). BBM allows me to message friends all around the world, with zero cost. I tend not to use BBM when I’m roaming because data charges are ridiculous.

Which now brings me to discuss messenger apps like WhatsApp and Kik. I’ve been using WhatsApp for quite some time now, on my BlackBerry and my Android device. I also happen to have it running on test Symbian devices as well as know heaps of people running it on iOS devices. Its got traction. It uses my unlimited data plan which I pay for monthly, but when I’m roaming, again I do not use WhatsApp. Kik is the new kid on the block, received funding, and is backed by a serious team of ex-RIM folk. In my phonebook, I don’t see it gaining much traction, as WhatsApp seems to still be prime. Kik is free, so I wonder what their plans are to make money. Maybe Kik has solid management, which is what the VCs looked for. Kik is however not on the BlackBerry platform, and RIM is suing the company.

Foound and Beluga. Foound has been around for about a year, and I think it was myopic of the team to just focus on iOS. Yes, the iOS is popular in Singapore, but to gain traction you have to grow beyond just that market. Not focusing on Android and BlackBerry were probably huge mistakes; maybe its time for the company to pivot? Beluga is kind of like Foound, works on more than just iOS, and it seems its more integrated, with its Facebook logins. Of course, Facebook acquired them (team of three folk); their team is much smaller/leaner than the Foound team.

An idea worth implementing

Here is a suggestion for differentiation. What annoys me the most with BBM is that I use it to chat with friends and groups of friends while I’m on the move. When I’m chained to my desk, I would rather not use my BlackBerry to respond to messages. Its all data anyway, so why not offer a desktop client?

Google does this kind of well with Google Chat. It runs on my mobile with data enabled, and when I’m on my desktop, I just fire up Adium or Pidgin and I can still chat with folk. It does not handle group chat though.

WhatsApp is tied to my mobile number, for example. It works over IP. Why not allow me to login with my username (phone number, unique identifier) and password on my laptop, so I can write/reply to messages via my keyboard? It would improve my productivity tremendously, and it is a service I would be willing to pay for.

Finishing thoughts

Where does PingChat! and TalkBox fit in? They all do group chat. TalkBox focuses on the voice aspects of it. Are messenger apps the new group buying sites? This is becoming a crowded space, and WhatsApp looks like it is the most-cross platform at the moment.

The future is with messenger apps, but I doubt it’s going to bust any SMS profit cartel. It will make a huge dent, but frequent travellers will generally not be using data when travelling. And without data, all these apps are dead (unless you want to support the data profit cartel). When will we see unlimited data (and roaming data) become cheaper?

Best wishes to Team Beluga, Foound, WhatsApp, Kik, PingChat! and Talkbox. I see an exciting 24 months ahead in this space.

Congratulations to Khailee for getting GroupsMore sold to Groupon (in a record five months since its inception!). He tells me they’re now Groupon Malaysia and Joel (his partner, co-founder of YouthSays) is going to be CEO of Groupon Malaysia. A lot of people instantly said that since Groupon is now in Malaysia, all the other deal sites can go the way of the dodo.

I don’t think so. For a site that does group purchases to be successful, people need to know it exists. Savvy Malaysians have always been into group purchases because a) our currency generally sucks, b) its difficult to get cool stuff shipped to Malaysia. Of course the currency is improving now, and there are virtual postboxes that ship stuff to Malaysia for a small fee.

But I digress. Group purchasing has been happening for years, heck over a decade. I remember when PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant’s, in case you’ve forgotten) were starting to become cool, there were many forums for PDA owners to hang out at. PDAs require accessories and since it was not mainstream yet, the best place to buy accessories was on the forums with other forum members. Someone would collect the money and negotiate to get a deal done to bring in the items for cheap. Most of these forums probably don’t exist any longer, but the LowYat.Net forums are still kicking. I’ve seen this applied to other niches like photography as well; and I’m probably missing out a whole bunch of other industries where people gather together on a forum and choose to grab something at a better value.

This is why I’ve generally not been too excited by group buying sites. I see it as an old idea being rehashed, except this time the target is the masses. For a group buying site to be successful, I think a few rules hold true:

1. you need to successfully get the word out to buyers
2. you need excellent (convincing) copywriting
3. you need to find good deals that your audience will want to purchase

Am I missing some rules?

Now to address some of the rules. How do you gain critical mass and get the word out to buyers? I focus on buyers because you may have a community, but if your community is only focused on making money rather than spending money, you’re not reaching the right audience. Depending on your target market, you will have to look at ads in the newspapers, radio, television, Google Ads, Facebook ads, and so on.

Malaysia is a melting pot. People generally don’t speak the same language, though English and Bahasa Malaysia are widely spoken. Copywriting needs to be spot on. If you target only the English-speaking audience, it will affect where you target buyers and it also affects the deals the audience are after. No point having great copy (in English), putting up ads in The Edge Daily, and having deals on products from Zaitun, right?

Audience, target and language all play a role for a successful general group buying site. We have to celebrate our diversity. In other words, there’s market for plenty of group buying sites. Do you think forum group buying will disappear? I don’t.

If you happen to run a group buying site, think of your niche and pivot. Why for example, have we not seen people focused on getting good daily (or weekly like GroupsMore does) deals on fashion items? Would a site that said “first 50 people to buy this model Coach handbag gets it at RM1,800 and the deal takes place, and if the number breaches 51, the bag becomes a mere RM1,500 for everyone” be successful? I think it will, if you’ve got the correct target market (people that buy luxury goods very rarely want to pay full price for them — if you’ve worked for your money, you’ll want to save ever penny).

We’ve just seen that in the UK, Facebook has launched Deals. From a cursory inspection, this looks like a cross between Foursquare and Groupon, i.e. it finally makes using a location based service useful. Not that its impossible to do with Foursquare — they sell custom badges to corporations. What I think Facebook will do is decentralise it, just like they currently have done with their ads — let anyone run one. Google Offers will work for anyone that has a Places page — you create a Places page (helping make a better location database, quite unlike Foursquare’s) and you give an offer to people (no check-in’s required). Very decentralised.

Tie group buying dynamics with social shopping aspects, provide useful bargains, and you may just have a very profitable business, that also helps spur the economy!

I have now been a Foursquare user for over a year, basically since they opened it up for international users earlier last year. Here are some quick thoughts on the service.

To the uninitiated, Foursquare is a location based service that allows you to “check-in” to a place, so your friends can know where you are. Every-time you check-in to a place, you are awarded points (if it is your first check-in, you’re +5, for example). If you meet certain check-in criteria, you may also get a badge (for example, if you check-in, shout a message like “happy halloween”, you get a new badge). It also allows you to inform your friends on Twitter and Facebook, though this option is turned off by default (it can get pretty noisy otherwise). It is ideally used through an app, and they have them for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and many more platforms. If you’re on a phone that lacks an app, never fear, as they have a mobile site available for checking in (but not earning mayorship — fake check-in’s exist, even though there’s generally nothing to be gained from it).

Its nice to become a mayor of a place. Its also rather nice to get a new badge. These things work really well for Foursquare. There’s an element of game mechanics throughout the application. For example, if you are at an event with over 50 people, you’ll get a swarm badge. Or if you are a coffee snob, there’s a badge for that too.

Some smarter establishments are giving the mayors of the location a special or a deal for loyalty. Some say if you check-in after five times, you get a free cup of coffee. Its all geolocation based, so if I check-in at a Muji, I might see a special nearby at a Topshop which may entice me to pay it a visit.

Naturally, this has led to spammers showing up. I’ve seen job adverts, private banking adverts and lots more, all of which, generally get annoying.

The game mechanics behind a check-in is such that you are given points for discovering a new venue, checking into a venue for the first time, and how many times you’ve checked in all day. The problem with giving points for creating a new venue (discovering it) is that you tend to get people creating duplicate venues all the time. To be fair, sometimes the database is down so people do end up having to create a new venue, but most of the time its done to game the system.

Why? There’s a leaderboard. It shows where you stand amongst your friends, and where you stand in your city of choice. It gets reset weekly. It seems nothing more than a temporary high, but the problem of dirty data is amazingly bad. I’ve seen dirty data in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City, Istanbul, Bangalore and more. There are “data cleansers”, also known as Super User Level 2’s. Level 1’s can propose merge requests. In KL, there’s a movement called #4sqKLCleanup just to curate the dirty user generated content.

After a year of checking-in, I’ve asked myself what exactly is it I still like about Foursquare that makes me check-in?

1. I occasionally bump into people that I’d like to see if we happen to be at the same mall or location. This has happened twice in a period of twelve months.
2. I like reading the tips and todo’s left by users, especially if they’re my friends (because I then put more trust in what they’re telling me). If people say things that are generally negative about a place, I’ll probably not visit it. Businesses beware.

The badges and the mayorships mean nothing to me. I think deals might make sense, but there are so few of these in Asia, its almost negligible to even mention. I have yet to cash in on a Foursquare multi-check-in deal.

Third-party tools are making Foursquare (and other location-based check-in services) more useful. For example, I’ve seen DontEat.at which gives you a text message whenever you check into a NYC restaurant that is at risk of being closed down for health code violations. I’d love to know if the place I’m about to eat at is at risk of giving me diarrhea. I wish this was available everywhere, but I presume there’s an open data issue here.

I enjoy using Topguest. I travel a bit, and when you check-in at one of their partner locations (be it hotels, airport lounges and so on) you’re given like 50 points for a check-in. While 50 points in my mileage accrual probably means nothing, I do know that after 20 check-in’s at the ICH Group, I get 1,000 points from Topguest, which has a dollar value of about USD$13.50 or so.

People need to find a reason to check-in, and I’ve got basically three – bumping into folk, reading tips, and using Topguest. Are there other uses for a location based service? My friend Bernard Leong started up Chalkboard which aims to answer this dilemma, in where they provide deals based on location. It’s currently very Singapore-centric, and it is getting more use in Malaysia. Chalkboard helps me save money, and who doesn’t want that? They are currently growing though — I believe they just passed their ten-millionth ad impression.

I once thought that Foursquare could replace loyalty cards. The service however is not reliable enough, and fake-check-in’s are not good business.

Where will Foursquare go? It has competition from Facebook Places (not rolled out everywhere yet). I’ve never used Gowalla. In Malaysia, we’re starting to see the coming of Wootfood, which is checking in food items as opposed to just a place (Malaysians love to eat — exploit a niche!). Yelp has basically decided to ignore this market (notice how I usually only care about the tips, from friends?). Google has Places, Latitude and Maps which I think could be useful if Google understood social a little better and tied it together.

I guess the most important thing about Foursquare is its data. Is it big after a year of being available outside of the US? Let’s just say that after two to three check-in’s, I’ve become mayors of places that are in locations that I do not live at! I sincerely hope the focus is more on creating useful tips (give points for that, allow people to vote), rather than just simply checking in or adding locations that already exist in the database.

People are saying RSS is dying/dead. Dave Winer believes in the Open Web, and does not like corporate blogging silos. This started of as a reply to his post, but became too lengthy so it has become a blog post. I posit geeks/news junkies love RSS, but the average user does not care. After all RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

I dig RSS. I’ve been using it for years. I converted my HTML only journal to a blog some seven years ago because it provided a RSS feed. I’ve consumed RSS for probably longer than that, switching between many clients over the years (some on Linux, some on Mac OS X, some on the web, some on the iPad – the winner really is Google Reader for me). I have participated in making some Planets, and using RSS in various other ways.

I am also a geek. I cannot fathom a better way to consume news, blogs, etc. I can read several hundred sites a day by skimming through things – I would physically never do this in a browser. I cringe when people only expose partial RSS feeds, because the click-through ensures people get a view in a browser and the ads start showing up. Google solved this problem a tad bit by providing AdSense for Feeds, but that assumes the content creator is not a lifestyle blogger.

Earlier today afternoon, while I was ending on a conference call and just about to get back into the groove of getting some work done, I noticed Dave Winer’s Twitter feed, in what seemed to be him going all defensive about RSS and baiting several folk. He then wrote this piece: What I mean by “the open web”.

Now, when people state “RSS is dying/dead”, they are not taking a potshot at Dave Winer. Technologies come and go, some evolve, and some die. As much as a group of people like something, if it lacks critical mass, it does not keep going on.

A few days back, I read: RSS is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried. The author points to the Firefox Heatmap, which show that less than 7% of the people that use Firefox, use the built-in RSS reader. In fact, in Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button by default. Chrome already has no RSS reader. Heck, I never click on the RSS button in Firefox, because I have my own RSS reader of choice (Google Reader).

I digress. How many normal users know RSS? How many normal users use RSS?

We are a consumption economy. It seems people rather bookmark sites and visit them on a daily basis, than read RSS feeds. Heck, I would not be surprised that people have forgotten how to bookmark – they just use the location toolbar to find things (AwesomeBar, etc. help in this respect). Besides, how many people need to visit a hundred sites to get their daily news fix? Not everyone is a news junkie.

In 2010, Facebook overtook Google in terms of traffic (in North America at least). People are getting their information via their friends. I see more and more people post links on Facebook, pictures on Facebook, and more. Twitter seems to have overtaken blogging – how many events do you see get live-blogged any longer? They get live tweets which you can follow via a hashtag.

Do I like this? Hell no. The dependance on silos is terrible because these services may not be around forever. In 2010 alone, we saw the demise of drop.io (Facebook acquisition). We probably saw the demise of delicious (Yahoo! claims its alive but is ready for acquisition). What will be next? Bit.ly? Flickr? Worse, live-tweeting an event is useless in the following year – Twitter’s archives don’t go far back, and a blog (HTML) is a lot more permanent.

TechCrunch is a publication, Dave. They are not going to keep all their content on Facebook, Twitter and Quora. They make money through advertising dollars, and none of these silos is going to help them make money. I do not know how much TechCrunch earns via RSS advertising, but they sure as heck earn a lot more from advertising on their website. And for their niche (tech news reporting, some may say), their stats don’t lie. Even the geeks are finding TechCrunch articles via Hacker News or Reddit (for example). Of course, Google News and TechMeme both in TechCrunch’s Top 10 referrer list, probably get articles via RSS :)

Since RSS is dead, according to them, the web must also be dead. I just don’t see how RSS could be dead and HTML would be thriving. They’re really different faces of the same thing.

RSS and HTML are not the same thing Dave. HTML is read in a web-browser, something most Internet-capable devices come pre-loaded with. RSS is useful for geeks who “pipe” things, or people that consume a lot of information. It is however not usually done in a web browser, but another client or piece of software (that is not pre-installed).

Understand that RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

This blog, in December 2010, had a 8:1 ratio of serving HTML:RSS. This month, when I published nothing yet (first post for the new year – Happy New Year folk!), we’re looking at a 13:1 ratio.

Will RSS die? I doubt it. It does not cost a publisher anything to publish a feed. It might be stifled by “excerpt” feeds (partial RSS feeds), and that could eventually kill it, but I doubt its going to be gone anytime soon. Will people consume information via different sources? Definitely. They already are. Flipboard does scraping, and thats a good workaround from partial feeds. Safari has a Reader option.

Follow the user. Follow how they are consuming things. Tablets are becoming more popular. How will that change user behaviour?

Google recently launched a Chrome Web Store. The web browser has always had an “appstore” model, considering you could have extensions and plugins. Firefox popularised this.

What the Firefox add-on‘s appstore does not have yet, is paid apps. You can donate to applications, but you can’t buy applications. The Chrome Web Store allows purchasing applications, as evidenced by their top paid apps page. We’re generally already used to buying desktop apps (I write this using MarsEdit which I purchased, and on my toolbar I can already see OmniOutliner and TextMate). If the future is living in your web browser, you will end up buying apps within your web browser. Google is pushing this lifestyle with their ChromeOS Cr-48 notebook.

You get everything you need for the Chrome browser in the web store. Apps (extension of web pages), Extensions (your add-ons), Themes and they also have curated collections (holidays, students, et al).

In other news, go download WOT. You don’t even have to restart Chrome to have it working. This is a bonus over installing stuff on Firefox (though I hear, Firefox 4 will allow you to install extensions without restarting the browser too). I also installed Chrome for a Cause during the one week where the more tabs you opened up, the more you could donate for a cause.

Do you have a favourite Chrome extension/app? Anything I must try?

There are two search engines that have promise that made themselves public in 2010: DuckDuckGo and Blekko. DuckDuckGo has active search spam removal, you can access it via secure HTTP (HTTPS), and is a search engine that also relies on crowd sourced data.

Web of Trust has reputation ratings of over millions of websites, and has an active community of about 15 million users now. Best of all, there’s no bots doing these ratings, but community members (trust metrics are crowd sourced).

DuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a partnership now, so you can simply change the settings to display WoT ratings instead of the favicons when a search is done using DuckDuckGo. Visit your settings page and look for Site Icons. Change it from the default of favicons to WoT and you’ll get trust ratings in your search instantly! While you’re there, look at other ways of customising your search experience with DuckDuckGo.

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo is looking for ideas on how he can further integrate the WoT data, and has a thread at the DuckDuckGo community. Feel free to chime in on that, and lets see more search engines implement such data (even though you can already get such data if you have the browser plugin installed).