Others Online Blog

Say Goodbye to the Others Online Toolbar

We've made the decision to turn off the Others Online toolbar, and no longer offer it to consumer/individual users. We've already begun de-listing the toolbar from a few download sources, will notify current users via email, and then pull the plug.

It wasn't a very difficult decision actually. The core of Others Online has always been affinity profiling, and the toolbar was an experiment to see if a consumer product connecting people by their affinity would get enough usage to (a) seed our initial affinity profiling algorithms with lots of good data, and (b) develop into a successful business model. The former very much happened while the latter never did. And we never intended to spend a lot of time/money to "push" toolbar distribution, only to see if we could create "pull" (meaning lots and lots of people download it via word-of-mouth rather than our marketing).

Given the current state of the economy, we knew we had to get that "eye of the tiger", be fleet of foot, and cut unnecessary costs. The toolbar services were a dog -- we didn't have enough users or earn enough toolbar-only revenue to justify the toolbar-only costs. And at the same time, we're seeing great early results offering our Affinity Profiling Platform directly to medium/large publishers and networks.

 

Sending Email to Registered Users

It is with much trepidation that I just recently sent an email announcement to registered Others Online [consumer] members on our new free analytics tool for publishers.

Not that I think it's news they don't want to know about -- analytics is interesting to people running ANY Web site. I just get really uneasy sending mass emails, because personally I feel that many companies do this too often (despite the fact that I registered for their service).

But I did it because I think this is something our users would like to know about. We follow all the rules, and try to be as respectful as possible. And FYI to all -- here's how often you can expect to get emails like this:

• Weekly welcome email to new users -- we send a welcome email to all new users each week.
• Product announcements -- when we've done something significant, we let our users know. But we very much lean towards infrequency -- for instance, the last time I sent an email to all users was September 2007. So it's like once (maybe twice) per year.
• Major issues -- we've never had to do this, but if there was some issue affecting a large portion of our users, we'd certainly let them know.

If you have any feedback on our email approach, or a bone to pick, please let us know?

Affinity Analytics Beta Launch

We're pleased to announce the beta launch of our Affinity Analytics service for publishers and networks. This is not like any other Web site analytics you've seen.

Traditional web site analytics tell you about visits, page views, sources, etc. but nothing about your visitors. Our free Affinity Analytics service tell you about your audience and the topics/interests they care most about, based on how they browse not only your site but our whole network.

It takes seconds to sign up. Once you're approved, we'll provide you with simple HTML (Javascript) to copy and paste within your Web pages. That's it -- we then provide you with web-based reports (we also offer a data feed and API service) which show you the topics that your audience cares most about, and for each topic your audience's level of interest (average affinity strength score of 0-100), the commercial value of that topic in the advertising world, and how much of your audience cares about that topic. Here's a screen shot ...

You can also click on any of the topics to see trending data/graphs over the past 7 or 30 days. This helps you understand total unique visitors and page views for any given audience segment, allowing you to target them by their interests and affinity strength.

Updated Web Site Launched!

Now that we've posted the video on our site, it's official -- we've launched our updated Web site. The launch reflects a shift in our business strategy from B2C to B2B. Whereas we still have the consumer-facing products and features, we are now primarily focused on helping medium/large Web sites and networks better understand, target and monetize their audience.

In my opinion, one of the most difficult things to do in a technology startup is to communicate clearly what you do. It's so easy to communicate too much information, explain the technology aspects too deeply, or make it too complex. "Simple and effective" communication is not easy.

We knew at Others Online that we were hitting a pain point in the market, and also knew our Web site was in desperate need of an update -- to better communicate what we did. In order to (a) communicate what we do very simply and effectively, and (b) convey a warm, consumer-friendly feel (instead of a cold technologist-friendly feel) to what we did, we chose to use a video.

What do you think of the video!?

Blog Post Catch Up!

For the millions that visit this blog, thought I'd confess that we just added 6 blog posts -- all back-dated to make our blog look less stale! These are cross-postings from my blog actually. (This has to violate some sorta blog etiquette, yes?)

We're just about to release a major update to our Web site, reflecting a shift in our market strategy. Over the last 6 months, we've achieved quite a bit of traction deploying our technology with online media companies. So we're updating our messaging to convey our shift to B2B from B2C.

Just Increased Approved Keywords 143%

Serendipity: unexpected and fortunate discoveries.

Our users are now 143% more likely to connect serendipitously across the Web, because we just increased our approved keyword count by 143%.

For obvious reasons, we don't just connect people around any ole' keyword or phrase -- we can't connect people around the topic Christmas or Harry Potter for instance until those been approved. The keywords and phrases have been organically harvested and approved, by users themselves and also through our proprietary "scrubbing" process. Every day our approved keyword/phrase count increases. But Neal just increased it quite a bit.

We've long since had the standard interest keywords in there ("music, hiking, photography, etc."). We're primarily focusing now on adding (and connecting people now) around much more narrow keywords, such as "virgin coconut oil, xm satellite radio, pierre cardin, blue man group, pet health insurance, etc.".

Last month we doubled the size of our keyword count and it increased the depth of people matches 25%. This should provide even better results! Please let us know what you think ...

Welcome New Firefox Toolbar Users!

Mozilla was nice enough to add the Others Online toolbar to their add-ons page yesterday and since then we've had a ton of new users. Please show them some love, everyone!

Welcome to all of you new users, and if there's anything we can do to improve your experience please let us know!

Widget Changes (Not Due to Halloween)

You might have noticed that our widget started looking a little different today. No, it's not dressed up for halloween (despite the horror therein), we're just playing around with different things to say on it and seeing what works best. For instance:

• Instead of our logo up top, we're displaying "Related People". To me it feels more appropriate to say "Relevant People" but then we've been seeing "Related Posts" in different blogs so maybe people understand "related" better than "relevant"?
• Below that title is "(hover over profiles)", just in case viewers don't realize all the fly-out goodness that exists when you hover your mouse over a profile.
• Instead of "Tag yourself. Be found." at the bottom, we have "Join now. Show here." Clever, huh?
• Oh yeah, and sometime last week you may have noticed the "Powered by Others Online" way down at the bottom.

Since we measure widget interaction (fly-outs, profile views and clicks) in order to report that info to our cherished users, we'll be able to see if this helps better drive traffic to users' profiles and sites. Expect to see small changes to these text areas over the coming weeks -- advertisers call this A-B testing. We're also playing around with different widget designs, but still not happy with anything.

Any ideas? Any feedback? Let fly.

New Toolbar Releases. Please update!

A couple weeks ago, we made some pretty big changes to the user registration process and user profile pages. We just released another set of updates with the goal of integrating these changes within the toolbar.

As a result, toolbar users will now automatically receive a notification/request to update their toolbars. Please update your toolbar when asked to do so!  Here are the features/fixes we added (inclusive of toolbar features):

• Within the updated toolbar, selecting the option Manage Profile now sends you to the new profile management pages which show you how to increase your visibility, allow you to manage auto-tags, and display charts on your visibility and click-thru.
• Looking at user profiles from the toolbar now sends you to the updated user pages.
• If you reach/view a user page from our search page, or via a widget, you can now chat, email and add to favorites.
• When a user registers, we attempt to help them complete their profile faster by importing information from the Web site they indicated. In this release, we're improved support for blogspot, typepad, wordpress, myspace and livejournal.
• We've doubled the list of keywords and phrases by which users can connect with each other. This also greatly improves our auto-tagging abilities, and should make user connections more relevant as well.

Please let us know your feedback and suggestions!

We Got Clicks! Get your Clicks Here!

Just as advertisers track impressions, clicks and any other interest/engagement metric, we're now tracking how much we're advertising our users across the web, and the number of mini-profile views (mouseovers), profile views and clicks.

We've helped users get thousands of clicks so far! Our users are achieving an average 6% click-through rate, meaning for every 100 times their face/image is being shown to others across the Web, they're getting 6 visits to their blog or Web site.

Check it out for yourself. On every profile you click on, you can now see that user's stats (and get a little taste of the stats you'll find when you manage your profile).