garry’s subposthaven

MSN usability researchers were stumped. Their usability lab had tested just about every aspect of its MSN portal and had been pleased to find that it consistently scored higher than its competitors. Yet a user base didn't flock to MSN -- they simply could not attract and retain as many users as they wanted. Then Clay Shirky relayed the million-dollar question: Were these tasks that users actually wanted to do? Or were these highly usable aspects of the site going to remain unused because nobody wanted to use them? There was a gaping hole between usability and usefulness.

Spam is a way of thinking. It’s an impersonal, imprecise, inexact approach. You’re merely throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. You’re harassing thousands of people hoping that a couple will respond...

Spam is basically a half-ass way of getting someone’s attention. It’s insulting, really.

A much better route: Be personal. Call someone. Or write a note. If you read a story about a similar company or product, contact the journalist who wrote it and pitch them with some passion. If you want a job, write an amazing cover letter that explains why you’d love to work there.

Don’t rely on the shotgun approach of spam though. If you invest nothing in your interactions, you probably won’t get much back.

The latest numbers from Chitika.com seem to confirm the obvious. Dumb people click ads. Smarties don't.

This is also why in general MSN, Ask.com and other ads tend to yield much better clickthrough rate and ROI for advertisers. Unfortunately, you just can't get enough search volume there to put enough money in.

Funniest example I've heard lately: Wordpress shows ads to users who are on Internet Explorer, but not to anyone else. That sounds like a hell of an intelligent hack for content providers.

When the movie's over, and you take your glasses off, your brain is still ignoring all those depth perception cues. It'll come back to normal, eventually. Some people will snap right back. In others, it might take a few hours. This condition, known as 'binocular dysphoria', is the price you pay for cheating your brain into believing the illusion of 3D. Until someone invents some other form of 3D projection (many have tried, no one has really succeeded), binocular dysphoria will be part of the experience.

This doesn't matter too much if you're going to see a movie in the theatre - though it could lead to a few prangs in the parking lot afterward - but it does matter hugely if it's something you'll be exposed to for hours a day, every day, via your television set. Your brain is likely to become so confused about depth cues that you'll be suffering from a persistent form of binocular dysphoria. That's what the testers told Sega, and that's why the Sega VR system - which had been announced with great fanfare - never made it to market.

Video games are one of the great distractions of youth. Children can play them for hours every day, and our testers realized that children - with their highly malleable nervous systems - could potentially suffer permanent damage from regular and extensive exposure to a system which created binocular dysphoria in its users.

Did not know that. That's scary.

One of the biggest reasons people don't do startups is because they are scared - they like to sit around and talk about them at the watercooler, or circlejerk on startup blogs, but ultimately, for whatever reason, they don't actually sit down and make a plan - perfect it through careful, honest introspection and analysis, and then do it.

Amen.

Also enjoyed the quote: "Founding a tech startup is the most fun you never want to have again. But then a few years later...you do it again because something is wrong with you..."