Tim Gregory » Facebook

So you think you can multitask?

Tim — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:41:22 +0000

We all try to juggle a dozen or more things at once, but sometimes I get to the stage where I feel like I’ve taken on too much and I’m just not finishing things off properly.

Same thing applies when I’m trying to focus on something important and I get people walking up to my desk, and my phone is ringing, and my email and IM are flashing… it’s really tough to complete a task in the midst of the distractions.

I was pleased to discover a link today to recent research from Stanford University that supports the idea that humans are just not that good at multitasking.

In fact, we really suck at it, and those amongs us who try to do it perform poorly.

The Stanford researchers call these people “suckers for irrelevancy”.

This supports 2 related ideas I have…

The first is, technical people really need to be given a quiet space to work without interuption if they are to perform at their best.

It can take 30 minutes or more for a developer working on a complex problem to put the necessary mental scaffolding in place and enter a productive ‘zone’, and it takes only a few seconds to interupt them and bring their mental model and focus crashing down.

My personal rule is that if I’m walking towards a developers desk and I see code in their IDE, I turn around and wait until later to speak to them.

Of course, Facebook, Youtube, FML and others all get interupted.

The second related point is the prevalence of openplan office layouts for tech teams.

In my opinion, we’re packing the devs in too tightly, and we would get more productivity out of them by allowing more space, privacy and sound insulation.

What do you think? Can you multi-task effectively or are you more productive with a tighter focus?

Should developers be sitting closely together in an open-plan environment to promote communication and collaboration, or are do they end up drowning out the ‘collaboration’ with headphones so they can get serious work done?

No related posts.

LinkedIn profitable, Facebook not so much

Tim — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:26:51 +0000

Spotted two interesting links today.

In the first, The Guardian says that Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.

The premise is that in spite of having a massive userbase, one that is now larger than the population of the USA, Facebook is struggling to extract financial value from their audience.

The second link is a Silicon Valley Insider interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in which he claims that LinkedIn is still profitable with ad revenues up 50%.

LinkedIn has 3 main revenue streams, with online advertising being only one of them.

Weiner doesn’t give any breakdown, but implies that a significant portion of LinkedIn revenues are generated by their premium subscription business and corporate recruitment solutions.

I blogged this week with a throw-away thought that LinkedIn could possibly be built today as a Facebook application, but now I’m not so sure… it’s clear that LinkedIn have managed to build a profitable business quite different to the type of business that could be created inside Facebook’s ecosystem.

What do you think? Will Facebook become super-profitable?

What if LinkedIn was a Facebook app?

Tim — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:00:26 +0000

Facebook has seen extraordinary growth in the last year, and now boasts over 350 million users, with 50% of their active users logging in every day.

It’s clear that their platform strategy is paying off, with more than 350,000 active applications deployed on the Facebook platform, and more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications implementing Facebook Connect in the past year.

Some applications have managed to build massive audiences, with Farmville clocking up 69 million+ active users, Causes attracting 34 million users, and Cafe World serving in excess of 30 million users.

After 6 years of investment and growth, LinkedIn has managed to grow to somewhere north of 50 million users.

This raises a question for me – if LinkedIn were to launch today, with the benefit of seeing how the Facebook Platform has grown to dominate the social networking space, would they create a new service, or would LinkedIn be a business networking and recruitment app built on top of the Facebook platform?

I’d love to hear your thoughts – drop me a comment below…

Farm Farmville Faster

Tim — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:56:08 +0000

This is a refined version of a tip I saw somewhere….

If you are playing too much Farmville (like me) and get tired of waiting for your slow-poke farmer to walk around the screen to get things done, here’s a tip: immobilise him to speed up the whole game.

First, buy or scrounge 12 hay bales, and leave them somewhere on your farm. We’ll come back to them.

Now visit someone else’s farm, then return to your own.

Your farmer will be standing on a square in the center of your farm.

Click on the delete tool (red spade) and dig up the square he is standing on.

Grab the hay bales you collected earlier, and build a little hay-bale prison around him.

See image below showing how it’s done -

Now you can plow, plant, and collect much faster than if your farmer was allowed to walk around on the farm.

The game seems to understand that he is trapped and still allows you to play without him needing to be on the square you are working on.

And by choosing the center square, he will always land back in the trap after visiting other farms and returning.

Yes, spending time optimising my Farmville gameplay is a little sad, but you can’t say I don’t try optimise and improve everything I tackle

And I’m researching Social Gaming for my work with the 24.com Games team.

I’ll think up some more excuses later.

Farmville vs. Twitter

Tim — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:35:43 +0000

Being a bit of a Twitter skeptic in spite of trying to use it daily for a while, I enjoyed seeing this post on Mashable showing that Farmville is bigger than Twitter.

I find it really funny that a fairly pointless farm simulation game has had much more rapid growth than the service that the founders thought would grow to 1 billion users and become the pulse of the planet.

They went as far as asking whether they were “building a new internet”.
I don’t think anyone playing Farmville thinks they are building a new agricultural industry.

SEO and your personal brand

Tim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:13:56 +0000

I am currently studying for my MBA through Henley Business School, attached to the University of Reading in the UK.
Right now I’m working through the ‘Strategic Marketing’ module. During the course of our module workshop, Professor David James spoke a bit about ‘Personal Branding’, the process of marketing people and careers as brands.
He got a mixed response from the group… some thought it was a practice bordering on deception. His pitch was that it’s important to present the elements of your professional and personal life that were most important in a consistent, understandable and marketable way.

It struck a chord for me, and I started to look more critically at my own personal brand online.

To date, I’ve done a terrible job… I’ve been online for 14 years, a professional in the Internet and Web Publishing industry for 12 years, and yet a Google search on Tim Gregory turns up:

Tim Gregory the actor on IMDB
Tim J Gregory on Facebook
Tim Gregory, the New Spaces host from Ohio
Tim Gregory ,the Associate Director at the Catholic University of America
Tim Gregory, the amateur photographer from the UK

And so on….
You get the picture – despite the opportunity I’ve had, I’ve not tried to ensure that I own my name online and shape the content associated with it.
An even more alarming case than my own of an individual who failed to actively manage his personal brand comes from RJ van Spaandonk, of the Core Group.

Now the Core Group has recently been under fire for their high prices and their public attacks on parallel imports of Apple products through their ‘stopgrey.co.za’ website. Instead of engaging meaningfully with his customers, RJ van Spaandonk launched a bizarre campaign of Twitter posts that made him look like a raving lunatic.

This campaign backfired horribly – his posts were picked up and reposted throughout Twitter and blogs, and further entrenched his reputation as an arrogant monopolist out of touch with his customers. It seems he thought social media was somehow still a one-to-many medium, and he could actively manage his convoluted campaign without anyone responding to the conversation he had started online before he was finished speaking. You can see his actual Twitter posts preserved at The Mac Blog
The result was predictable… the prolific bloggers and SEO experts that he “sought to engage with on their own territory” simply had to repeat his misguided utterances, and now a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns his regrettable statements in all their glory.

Google search for RJ van Spaandonk on 5 July 2009

Perhaps his first mistake was assuming that “journalists” were somehow different from “bloggers and twitterers”? RJ, a tip – as I’m sure you’re learning, it’s all the same thing on the internet.

In case I have to spell it out for you, Mr van Spaandonk has lost control of his personal brand online, and he’s going to have a tough time reclaiming it. And instead of showing some humility and seeking to open the conversation with his critics on more positive terms, he chooses to alienate them further, claiming that he “overestimated the wit and sense of humour” of his audience. Poor RJ.
For examples of people doing an excellent job of creating and maintaining their personal brands take a look at Google searches for my colleagues Brendan McNulty and Matthew Buckland. Most of the first page of results for these guys is all about them. Brendan goes as far as buying Google Adwords for his own name, which I imagine costs him very little as I suspect the bidding activity around the search term ‘Brendan McNulty’ is pretty low.

Moving on… So what am I doing about my own poor showing online?

Registered a vanity domain (tim-gregory.com)
Started blogging again. It’s about time I stood by my own thoughts and utterances
Applied some basic SEO techniques, like using dashes in my domain name to show the search engines that those are separate words
Leverage online profiles and social tools – follow Tim Gregory on Twitter, view the Tim Gregory professional profile on LinkedIn and the Facebook profile for Tim Gregory.
Continue to build a strong network of relevant industry professionals through LinkedIn
Start contributing across the ‘blogosphere’, leaving relevant comments against articles for blog posts where I have some industry expertise – most of them allow you to link your own site when you enter your name and email address against a comment. (Can get you some traffic, but not great for SEO because of the ‘nofollow’ command usually given to the search engines in comments)
Set SEO targets – it’s my ambition to knock the actor, host, and amateur photography off the top positions for MY name online
Look for media mentions where possible

If you have any interest in this SEO and personal branding experience, and would like to see whether an outsider can overtake established personal brands in search engine results, please link to my blog using my name, or simple post a link to this article. Feel free to drop comments about your experience maintaining your personal brand online.

If you have a website and would like to help me claim my name, please insert this into your site somewhere:

Tim Gregory Blog

Thanks!

Updated: Marcia Netto sent me a good link – Searcher Behaviour Research Update – “What about the branding aspect? The study found that 36% believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field.” Can we can infer from this behaviour that the top-ranked individual for a given name/term is regarded as a leader?

Misconceptions you might have about blogging (wsioms.co.za)

Hot topics for 2009 – Realtime Web

Tim Gregory — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:11:55 +0000

Ok, this one is pretty obvious… you would have to be living in a cave high in the mountains and out of earshot of any internet-using humans to have missed the seismic shift from ‘kinda fresh’ to real-time on the internet.
This is big, really big, and it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s an area that seems to be a bit of a weak spot for Google and until recently some of the other giants like Facebook.
I’d go as far as saying that Twitter is not that interesting by itself, and it is really riding the realtime meme.
Twitter was in the right place at the right time, and pitched itself in the right way -the technology is not particularly interesting, and has existed in various forms for years.

Take a look at this timeline of the spread of news regarding Michael Jackson’s death from SEOMoz.

It took over an hour for a large entertainment site to break the news of the cardiac arrest (TMZ.com).
Another 42 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up.
A further 18 minutes before CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital (meanwhile, TMZ had posted news of his death)
15 minutes after the CNNbrk tweet, Wikipedia freezes the Michael Jackson page after a flurry of edits.
A total of 2 hours after the 911 call, the TMZ story goes big on Digg
By this stage, there are over 2000 mentions per minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
At 22:40, a full 3 hours after the 911 call, the first mention of Michael Jackson’s death make it onto Google News.

Not hard to see a pattern here… Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg… mainstream news and the mighty Google were slow out of the blocks compared to the social sites.

I won’t bore you with too many links and details, but here’s a quick scan over the topic…

The realtime web is being built on XMPP, the ‘jabber’ protocol.

Everyone is starting to use XMPP, including Google (for Wave), Apple (for iPhone push notification), Twitter (for feeds to Twitter search and a couple of others) and Facebook (promised soon for their chat).

The major IM networks are starting to ‘get it’, and AOL now talks XMPP.

XMPP has loads of great stuff built in, like presence, personal eventing, multi-user chat, federated authentication, publish/subscribe functionality and loads more.

The bridge between the web and XMPP is BOSH.

The development pattern is called Comet , and typically uses the long-polling technique. Holding connections open is better than polling – the latency is lower, and total overhead is lighter.

BOSH and XMPP are typically used in web-based IM clients, but some clever engineers are re-purposing XMPP for multi-player games at sites like Chesspark.

Realtime search is becoming a hot topic, particularly at Techcrunch.

Realtime search is the beginning – I can see us using this at 24.com for content syndication, real-time Sport scoring, multi-player games and a couple of other (top sikrit) apps.

In fact, one of my greatest fears for our organisation right now is that we wake up too late and find ourselves in a 2D Roger Rabbit version of the internet that is NOT realtime.