good vs. perfect?
Reading a friend’s blog post on throwing perfect parties (or not), i came across:
the gap between “good” and “perfect” isn’t much. One flawed particular, qualification, or requirement is enough to make a perfect thing, a good one.
If you want to succeed in most competitive challenges of today’s world, good is not enough. Usain Bolt wouldn’t capture the imagination of millions if he was just good. Beethoven’s piano sonatas wouldn’t last for centuries if they were just good.
So does this mean that we all need to be perfectionists?
Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that perfection can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At such levels, this is considered an unhealthy belief, and psychologists typically refer to such individuals as maladaptive perfectionists. (wikipedia)
Not very healthy to be a perfectionists! so now what?
But let’s step back. What does it mean to be prefect? Is that a relative judgment or an absolute one? Can something that was prefect 100 years ago still be considered perfect? Is there really no room for the gymnast who scored a perfect 10 in past Olympics to do better?
I really think perfection is a moving target that is affected by our understanding of the space in which the work exists, the time it was produced, and even the resources/constraints that the performer had at the time of production. Of course, the efforts of other actors in the same era affect the perfection judgment significantly.
So how can we hit this moving target and join the greats? I think the healthy balance here is to strive for the perfect work or output (whatever it means to us at the time) but not to deem anything less unacceptable. Put the work out there. Get feedback and improve upon it. And repeat…. Just be conscious that there is always room for improvement, even if you can’t see it now.
This is one of the reasons why I love working in technology so much. The meaning of perfect in this field changes so quickly that you can’t escape seeing the moving target. What was a perfect web application 10 years ago now would seem so broken! And I am sure what we see as perfect today will feel broken in a couple of years. The challenge is to keep up with moving target and try to stay as close to it as possible all the time.
Now back to perfecting that simple web form!
Blogging from WP on iPhone!
I am testing blogging from the wordpress application on iphone 2.0. So far it’s pretty smooth. I wonder if I can post a photo snapped by the phone directly into a post. That’s the best feature of the Facebook app if you ask me.
So, let’s see how this test turns out 
Aha! I just figured out the photo stuff! Pretty neat and intuitive. Attaching a photo I snapped yesterday of first Zoosk roof get together. Now let’s see how it posts…
Back to Urban Life
After living in suburbia for 285 days, I am proud to announce that I have landed in urban life again (aah, it feels good ). If I skip the show (or long depending on how you look at it) time I have spent in east bay, I have upgraded from Seattle to San Francisco and I couldn’t be happier about my latest move.
Although I should day that moving a house plus an office in the same week is not something I will look forward to again! It was overwhelming to say the least. But it’s beyond me now and I am looking forward to a great time in SF.
Again, I have a place I can call home. Hello San Francisco!
View from new Place
Facebook VP: our platform is $RICH$
Recently vice president of product marketing at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, spoke about the Facebook developer platform at the TieCon conference. Some of the figures what were quotes by the attending press caught my attention.
And about 33 percent of Facebook application makers reported profits of up to $500,000 a month. Finally, at least one-quarter of the applications running on Facebook have 100,000 active daily users.
Looking at adonomics or other Facebook application trackers, you can see that only 50 Facebook applications boost 100,000 and above daily active users. By Chamath’s math, Facebook only has 200 applications! I guess MySpace platform is not doing too bad in retrospect.
In reality, Facebook has some 25,000 applications on it’s platform. and only 0.2% of those have more than 100K daily visitors. I am just hoping that Chamath was miss-quoted, and that he and his team don’t really think every application on their platform is thriving.
And imagine if 33% of Facebook applications were making half a million in profits every month. That would put the profit of just this 1/3 of applications at around $50 million dollars a year! That should put their revenue in the $150 million range, exactly how much Facebook made in 2007!
Simply AMAZING 
Facebook Apps, Another Perspective
If you are following social media development, then you probably have seen or heard of the O’Reilly Research analysis published here and analyzed here (among many other places). Ben Lorica’s post on Radar provides a very interesting glimpse into the Facebook ecosystem and highlights some industries that are doing well through an in-house categorization of applications and comparing the corresponding number of active users.
As this chart from the research highlights, the biggest category on Facebook is applications that are ‘just for fun’. Obviously the assessment that the most successful applications on Facebook are those that have marginal value and are time wasters resulted in extensive coverage of the report in the blogosphere and ended in headlines such as: On Facebook, Girls And Boys Just Want To Have Fun.
I think the categorization of the applications by the research team has a lot to do with this assessment. I have been looking at the same question from a different angle for a while which might be useful in structuring a discussion around the topic.
Facebook was a social network way before it became a platform. It had millions of users that were active on the site way before any of these applications existed. When the platform was introduced last year, from a user’s perspective, all of a sudden new functionalities became available. Some of the functionalities were improved versions of the existing features (think SuperWall) and some opened completely new opportunities (such as iLike for music).
So what happens if you look at the Facebook universe in terms of activities that were facilitated before and after the platform launch. Below i have tried to summarize the main activities of a typical Facebook user (please comment if I have missed major areas). I have also included (a very subjective) assessment of how Facebook was doing in facilitating each category before the platform launched by using different font sizes.
In the right most column I have included some of the applications that have emerged to improve the user experience for each activity plus the total daily active users of all such applications in the top 20 facebook applications (in terms of daily actives). Please note that the active numbers are based on back-of-envelope calculation on a random day and only for top 20 applications. In the O’Reilly report, they summed all applications up which takes the tail into account as well.
I think this perspective highlights a couple of trends/questions
- What’s up with Photo Sharing? Is Facebook Photo application so perfect that nobody can provide value beyond it? This seems like an excellent opportunity for a brand new application to come out of no where and take over.
- Improving existing functionality/purpose has the least barrier to user adoption. This is especially true in case of sub-perfect existing experiences. Facebook wall was boring and text only when FunWall and SuperWall exploded in popularity. People discovery still sucks on Facebook which is a great opportunity for Zoosk and others innovating in this area.
- Media consumption has always been a part of most successful social networks except for Facebook. To this day I don’t understand why Facebook is so bad when it comes to media discovry and sharing. But this was a known winner and iLike and Flixter capitalized on the opportunity very well.
- Social gaming seems to be the only truly new activity category when it comes to successful applications. It was basically ignored by (or unknown to) social networks until Scrabulous and Friends for Sale came into the picture on Facebook. This category now is rightly so getting plenty of attention from the venture community and entrepreneurs.
What does this mean for applications not in these categories? Is this the extent of utility that application developers can provide on social networks? I don’t think so. Social gaming didn’t really realize it’s potential until early February this year, full 9 months after the platform opened up. What is the next big emerging activity category? That being said, I believe it is much more natural to grow on social networks if you are enhancing or extending existing user bahaviors.
I should also highlight that this analysis is only looking at very large applications. If your application does not benefit from network effects then you don’t need to be huge in order to be able to provide utility. One more thing to keep in mind is that monetization potential is completely left out of this discussion. Even though having a large active user base helps with monetization opportunities, it does not guarantee the way to profit.
Is this trend going to hold up on other social networks that are opening up? It’s too early to tell. But the initial indications suggest it might hold true on MySpace and Bebo as well.
PS: Obviously a large contributor to the success of applications is the viral engineering of applications. For each of the successful applications in these categories there are hundreds of tiny copies. Just because you pick a hot category does not mean you will have a huge user base. It might just make it a little bit easier to do so. Follow Dave or Andrew’s blog if you want some viral wisdom.
Green Card Bliss
My close friends (and loyal readers here) know that I have been in the process of becoming a permanent resident in United States for a few years now. Well, this past February I finally got through all the hoops! It took 2 years to get a labor certificate (i.e., convince the government that my skills are in demand), 4 months for I-140 (this used to be 2 years so I am thankful for this part), and 2 years of FBI background check.
I don’t think I would have gotten the nod, had I not expressed my dissatisfaction with the process with my congressman, my senator, and most of all with First Lady’s office! Yes, you heard it right. The only way to get FBI to do anti-terrorism checks in a timely manner is to write to Laura Bush. Her staff got the FBI director in charge or my case to answer a letter I sent out last summer and 6 months later they got my security check done!
Going through this process has been extremely painful, but I am happy now that it’s over. Many friends who have gone through the same used to tell me that once you get it, you won’t think about it. I disagree, at least for now. Every time I remember how much free-er I am now to go about my life without thinking about stupid restrictions, it makes me very happy. Freedom is sweet and should not be taken it for granted.
Now, I can travel around the world without going through extremely unnecessary hassle. It’s not 100% pain-free yet having an Iranian passport, but much improved. If only I had more time, I would exercise this freedom right now. But it looks like my inner traveler has to wait a while longer, at least until I get Zoosk flying very high
Thanks Lady Bush!
Late to the party: twitter
Last year around the same time I decided to join Facebook after reading an article I read in Wall Street Journal. I had no idea a year later I will be super busy building a business that is based on ideas first materialized by Facebook. When I joined Facebook it was by no means a new phenomenon in the web community which was strange for me because I am usually and early adopter when it comes to technology.
I have been having similar feelings about Twitter. Twitter has been the tech community’s darling for over a year now after their SBSW breakout last winter. I honestly can’t see what the excitement is about but I can’t ignore so much appreciation by the community for much longer. So, I finally gave in and signed up. You can “follow me” here if you are interested.
You never know, maybe history repeats itself and I will be building a business on Twitter next year. Oh wait, maybe i will mix Facebook and Twitter and do something on that…
Happy Nourouz
Happy New Year to all Kurds, Persians, and everybody else who celebrates Nourouz! Happy Spring to everybody!
