Recent Articles at 20bits
20bits by Jesse Farmer
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Latest posts
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Keith Olbermann Thinks I'm an Idiot
This story ends with Keith Olbermann dismissing me as "another idiot" on national television, but it begins on a Monday morning with me sitting on my brown leather IKEA couch in Palo Alto , two blocks from Facebook's then-new College Terrace office. Five months earlier I started…
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Getting Ahead: A Letter to Myself
All the pulses of the world, Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat, Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O pioneers! I moved to Silicon Valley the summer of 2006, as soon as I graduated from the University of…
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The Value of a Social Commerce Referral
At Everlane we recently shut down a side-project of ours, Indie Cases , where we were selling some pretty sweet iPhone cases. Over the month and a half that the store was live we saw some good traffic from up-and-coming social commerce sites like Svpply and Pinterest . I thought…
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Click Hacking for Fun and Profit
A friend IMed me the other day, asking, "You know how to make people click on things. I'm submitting something to Reddit — can you help me title the post?" A stark description of my skills, certainly, but it made me laugh and inspired me to write an article about the art of…
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Speed vs. Certainty in A/B Testing
A/B testing is a great tactical tool for studying customer behavior on the web. But like any randomized trial there's some chance that the improvement we measure is just statistical noise. How worried should we be that the feature we thought improved our product actually does…
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8 Tips for Crafting Metrics That Matter
Metrics are the marketer's microscope. They show him what his customers are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they are doing or intend to do. With proper metrics he can make decisions faster and more accurately. You can decide to measure anything, but what metrics…
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Building a Social Network, Island by Island
A necessary condition for building a self-sustaining social network is density. We understand this intuitively. After all, a network of one person is hardly a "network" at all. Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of the…
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What Verna Taught Me
When I was student at the University of Chicago I worked for Residential Computing, or ResCom. ResCom was responsible for maintaining all the computer labs and IT systems in the residential dorms. I had two jobs. The first was to help manage the dorm computer labs. If a new…
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Notification Strategies for Social Networks
You've built a social application and launched a new feature. The number of notifications you can send out is constrained. Which set of users should you notify to guarantee the most people start using this new feature? This problem might seem artificial. Why not put up an ad on…
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Why hi5 Might Have an Edge on Facebook
Facebook has been trying hard to find a business model. Their Beacon advertising product is probably the most infamous example. So far they've been left empty handed and have been forced to look outside the company for money, first from Microsoft Microsoft acquires equity stake…
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Behavior Adoption on Social Networks
Why and how do people adopt new behaviors? Why do they start using new products? Did you sign up for Facebook because all of your friends were on it, or because a specific friend recommended it to you? Or do you refuse to sign up at all? In this article I'm going to outline two…
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Almost Viral: A Hybrid Acquisition Strategy
Two common acquisition strategies for a new application are a paid acquisition strategy and a viral acquisition strategy. The former involves acquiring users at a cost less than the revenue they generate. The latter involves users inviting their friends to the application.…
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Social Applications are Social Networks
Are all social applications also social networks? Dave McClure made a passing reference to this a little over a year ago, saying "RockYou & Slide [are] arguably social networks of their own." Google Open Social + Friends vs. Facebook Platform I want to make the stronger claim:…
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Where the iTunes Store Fails: Community
You don't need me to tell you that the iTunes Store has changed the face of music distribution, digital or otherwise. In April of 2008 it became the top music retailer in the US iTunes Store Top Music Retailer in the US and passed 6 billion songs downloaded earlier this year…
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When in Rome: Newcomers on Facebook
A teammate of mine recently sent me a link to a paper called " Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites " and I thought it was worth discussing. The paper was jointly authored by Moira Burke , a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Cameron Marlow and…
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The $0.99 (App) Store
I was going to hold off writing this article, but after reading this open letter to Steve Jobs from an iPhone developer I just couldn't. Mr. Hockenberry isn't the first to argue that iPhone apps are too cheap . So, what gives? Marketing v. Distribution The problem is that the…
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The Dangers of Genetic Optimization
The guys at Weebly just had a round of press for their latest product, SnapAds , an ad optimization platform that uses genetic algorithms. The technology is very cool, so check it out. John Resig then posted a link to Genetify , the previous incarnation of this technology, which…
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The Cult of the Product
In the movies you can build a baseball stadium in an Iowa cornfield and get millions of people to show up. Who wouldn't want to see the ghost of Mickey Mantle play another game? In real life there are millions of details that go into constructing a baseball stadium, not the…
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Three Myths of Viral Growth
Myth 1: Viral Growth is Exponential Growth Viral growth isn't exponential growth. Your web product has a maximum audience, for example, but an exponential curve grows forever. Instead viral growth follows a logistic curve. The logistic curve comes from population biology where…
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Statistical Analysis and A/B Testing
In this article we're going to talk about how hypothesis testing can tell you whether your A/B tests actually effect user behavior, or whether the variations you see are due to random chance. First, if you haven't yet, read my previous introductory article on hypothesis testing…