I like few things more than talking about music. In college, I spent ten times more time listening to records and discussing them with friends than I did doing work (sorry Mom and Dad). In my experience, music is inherently social and the experience of consuming it is best when done with others or at the suggestion of others.

Which is why I am so disappointed with the social music offerings on the web. Tons of startups have tried and failed to offer a good experience to music fans like me. But I think they are all getting it wrong from the start. While streaming services and online music lockers are neat, what I really want is a way to bring conversations into my every day listening experience. I want my music to come with meta-data that includes every comment my friends have ever made about that song, that band, that album.  Further, I want my music to come with album and song reviews and historical context.

Here is what I envision: I leave the house with my iPod/iPad/Android/netbook and put on the first Pretenders album.  As it starts, I see that a friend says that Kid is his favorite song.  Another says that the second album is better.  I also read AllMusic.com’s review of the album and I type out that they are reuniting soon.  These comments would be made either online, in iTunes, or on our phones.  That wouldn’t matter.  The important thing is that every song I listened to would have a social context.

This idea could also have commercial implications (besides raising customer captivity for Apple if they embedded this in the iTunes platform) if music publications bundled songs with liner notes and reviews.  In fact, I started thinking about this idea when I left my house this morning and put on the Pitchfork 500 playlist.  I found myself wishing I could read song reviews as I listened to the songs.  That’s something I would pay for. I also find myself unwilling to pay for classical music but if I could buy a classical album that came with liner notes that were embedded into the song so I could read them as I listened on the go, I would definitely shell out a few bucks to expand my musical tastes.

What do you think?  Am I just a total music nerd or would any one else pay for such a service?

Related articles

• The New Era of Music Apps: Subscription Services (readwriteweb.com)
• Sony expands its iTunes rival across Europe (news.cnet.com)
• Music Diary Notes: Spotify Hands-On … Yeah, It IS That Good! (geardiary.com)

Last night I saw David Fincher‘s “The Social Network” and this morning I finished reading David Kirkpatrick‘s “The Facebook Effect.” For two accounts that ostensibly tell the same story, you couldn’t imagine two wildly different narratives, with vastly different characters with nearly opposite motivations.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in tech circles, talking to developers, and reading and thinking about technology and Facebook in particular, it is impossible not to come away from the movie feeling deeply disappointed. What an opportunity to dramatize the rise of the geek! Geeks are the new rock stars – geeky bands, geeky actors, geeky movies and geeky web servcies are now hip. And so how cool would it be to see Zuckerberg as a college kid with a ridiculously big vision trying to create the future? And how cool would it be to see him going from the immature sophomore who built Facemash while drunk to becoming the self-assured CEO who is the envy of most every other entrepreneur and executive in the country? Even better would be to see how the youthful Mark Zuckerberg made stupid, careless mistakes that led his best friend to sue him for millions of dollars and then to see whether or not he is that same person.  That is a story worth telling.

Unfortunately, however, the film panders to everyone who disdains the new geek movement and yet secretly feels inferior. Mark Z., according to the film, may be a billionaire genius, but at least he isn’t smooth with girls and can’t carry a conversation.   Scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin would have us believe that Mark created Facebook to be cool.  However, that thinking ignores the fact that MySpace was seen as more cool in 2004-2005 while Facebook was seen as more useful, which was how Zuckerberg intended it.  The movie also suggests that Zuckerberg was motivated largely by a desire to join a Harvard Final Club, yet doesn’t bother to go into why he dropped out of school never to return to Harvard once Facebook began to take off.  Additionally, the movie does not even touch on how such a socially inept asshole would be able to create the most addictive social site in history.  Those are the kinds of frustrating inconsistencies that made “The Social Network” hard to enjoy even on a fictional level.  I suppose it is unfair to criticize a movie for not sticking to facts, but if Sorkin and Fincher wanted to make up a story, why not go the extra mile and make up names?

While Kirkpatrick’s book, on the other hand, has been somewhat unfairly criticized as being more hagiography than unbiased retelling, it does go a long way to capture the thinking that drives Facebook.  It unfortunately glosses a bit over what happened with Saverin.  For that account, see Business Insider‘s coverage here.  The book does a great job of coherently presenting the characters, flaws and all, against the backdrop of the rise of social networking.  Unfortunately, the book does lag when it devotes page after page to describing features that nearly every reader already knows and uses.  Overall, it is a quick, fun read that more than once reminded me of John Battelle’s fantastic “The Search,” which chronicled the rise of Google.

A SkillSlate profile provides detailed professional and personal information including pictures, fees, and reviews, all highlighting not only what the person does, but who the person is. Finally, SkillSlate puts these profiles together into a searchable, sortable directory where consumers can find service providers that fit their specific needs.

When you are looking for someone like a personal trainer in Brooklyn, or a handyman in queens, SkillSlate provides the tools to make this process simple and dependable. I’m very excited for Brian and Bartek and look forward to seeing the site grow.

Online personals may be a strong platform business for the dominant players like eHarmony but the market is certainly not winner take all.  For one, it is not a natural monopoly.  The fixed costs of running a dating site are low and do not prevent newcomers from entering the market.  As evidence, roughly 850 new dating sites launch per year.   For us to consider online personals a winner take all market, it would have to have strong and positive network effects, high multi-homing costs, and low demand for differentiated features.  The network effects, which will be discussed in more depth below, are indeed strong and positive.  However, there is little evidence that users perceive the multi-homing costs to be high since paying members of dating sites belong to at least three other personals sites.  Additionally, there are a number of free sites that provide nearly all of the features of the pay sites.  While one might assume that all users are simply looking to meet other singles and that the simplest set of dating site features would suffice for all sites, it is not so.  Daters looking for hookups those looking for future spouses would obviously require vastly different privacy, matching and profile elements.  Proof lies in the difference between Craigslist.org’s sparse photo-less random encounters ads and eHarmony’s roughly 250 question personality profiles.  Thus, we can safely determine that there is room for a number of players in the online personals market.

Since men and women can be thought of as separate sets of users looking to connect exclusively with members of the other group, we can view the online personals market as a two-sided market with strong and positive cross-sided network effects.  There are obvious exceptions for homosexual users of dating sites but we will limit our discussion to the heterosexual market that eHarmony addresses.  In its market, there are both indirect and direct network effects:

Negative Direct: The more men there are, the more competition each man faces for women’s attention

Positive Direct: The more men there are, the more attractive the site is for women and the more potential dates each man can find

Negative Indirect/Cross-sided: None

Positive Indirect/Cross-sided: As suggested above, the more women join the site, the better the chances for each man to meet someone special

(The effects are identical but reversed for women.)

Looked at through the lens of Porter’s Five Forces, the online industry can be seen as very attractive from a structural perspective.  As an attractive industry without a winner take all structure, there is a high level of competitive intensity.  New entrants pose a large threat, so much so that 850 new dating sites launch per year, as mentioned above.  However, most of these fail quickly because of the strong network effects wielded by the dominant sites in the market.  While there are a number of services to choose from, buyers are extremely fragmented (in fact, their fragmentation is exactly why they are joining a dating site!) and are therefore in a weak bargaining position. Additionally, buyers place a large value on finding dates and/or potential mates.  Relative to the cost of dates themselves and other monthly expenses that singles have, the costs of dating sites are quite low.  Further proof lays in the fact that professional matchmakers charge up to $10,000 for their services.  The threat of substitutes looms large in the online dating industry.  Companies in this market must compete with bars, friend introductions, church functions and work place meetings.  Indeed, exhibit 7 in the case shows that only 4% of internet users in committed relationships met their partners online.  Thankfully, online dating service providers do not have to deal with powerful suppliers.  In fact, there are no suppliers that sell anything other than commoditized products and services such as servers, web hosting, marketing, etc.  While there are a number of niches that allow companies in the web dating market to stake out different segments, the final force in Porter’s framework, rivalry among existing competitors, is the largest hindrance to each firm’s success.  eHarmony faces competition from both more casual dating sites like Match and OkCupid.com, which were typically free or charged lower monthly fees to members, and newer long term relationship focused sites like Chemistry.  These mass market services wield a lot of power and contain large networks of their own.  Additionally, there are niche sites like JDate.com seeking to carve out a portion of the market that only wanted to date within a small semi-exclusive community.  While this competition limited each player’s profitability, its effect is mitigated by the fact that price competition has not played an adverse role in the market.  Conversely, excluding the free sites, prices of eHarmony’s competitors have been on an upward swing in recent years while its have remained constant.

To gain a strong position in the market, competitors must first gain a large enough user footprint to provide users with numerous potential partners.  Potential strategies to gain users would include: giving away free memberships, providing high quality matches or focusing on a niche.  Next, since there is a limited shelf life to dating site customers [a happy customer will no longer need a dating site by definition], companies must primarily compete on reputation and brand once a sizeable audience is built.  To further any advantage competitors gain through branding they will need to extend themselves as platform businesses.  At least one of two strategies will lead to a sustainable platform advantage: raise multi-homing costs so users are confined to their network; or increase the switching costs from one network to the other.  It is unclear how difficult these two can be accomplished since increased multi homing costs will likely only come from inflated prices which bring with them inherent disadvantages.  Furthermore, switching costs entail filling out new profiles and surveys which are usually not high barriers.

With prices that have historically loomed above its competitors, eHarmony enjoys a differentiation advantage.  Contributing factors to this strong competitive advantage are superior matching technology, strong network effects enabled by a large userbase of marriage-minded singles, and a strong reputation and brand earned through the algorithm’s success.  These all originate in the company’s initial focus on the underserved marriage market and the skills of its founders in creating an accurate way of identifying potential matches and allowing customers to easily and safely work their way towards meeting suitable mates.  On top of these strong resources that differentiate it from most of its competitors, it avoids the negative network effects that many of its competitors suffer from by maintaining some exclusivity to its membership and directing users to matches rather than letting them sift through millions of undifferentiated profiles.

The company creates value, in short, by delivering the exact value that is sought out by a large previously underserved market, singles who need help finding a spouse.  In the past 40 years, American singles have come to see spouses an “experience good” that make them feel good.  Therefore, they demand compatibility and shared values.  In the offline world, a single adult may spend thousands of dollars and months if not years to discover whether a potential mate is compatible.  On top of all that, this process often results in a broken heart!  eHarmony uses proprietary algorithms and a unique user interface to help users avoid that long and costly process.  Even if the service didn’t have a large success rate (which is does), the resulting financial, time and emotional savings represent a significant value proposition to its users.  It then extracts some of that value with its monthly subscription revenues.

The type of customers that derives the most value from eHarmony are slightly different than the typical dating website visitor.  Web users who visit dating sites skew slightly young, male, and urban.  In contrast, 60% of eHarmony users are female and less populous areas are overrepresented among its userbase.  eHarmony’s target customers and those that reap the highest rewards are those that are actively seeking future spouses.  Additionally, they are most likely avoiding men who use dating sites to arrange affairs and random hookups.  Therefore, they are willing to pay extra for an environment where that use is limited and discouraged.

To calculate eHarmony’s competitive advantage, we can subtract cost from WTP for it and its most similar competitor, Chemistry.  We will use the monthly fee as the WTP.  To calculate cost, we will use monthly ad spend per paying subscriber because as eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf said, “For the generalists, it is basically a customer acquisition story.”

* Number derived from facts in case: eHarmony had roughly half of Match’s 1.3M paying subscribers.  Therefore, 1.3M/2 = 650K paying members.

**Chemistry had 2M registered users and I’m assuming a industry standard 5% conversion rate from registered users to paying subscribers.  Therefore, .05x2M = 100K paying members.

As we can see eHarmony’s competitive advantage is 49.69 – 41.62 = $8.07 per user per month.

Now we must assess whether this advantage is sustainable by turning to Grant’s resource based theory of competitive advantage.  Grant says that an advantage’s sustainability depends on the durability, transparency, transferability and replicability of the resource/capability behind it.  eHarmony’s advantage is clearly based on a small set of resources and capabilities including its algorithm, reputation and network.  These are clearly durable because as some of its customers leave the site, having found happiness with a mate, new singles will decide to get serious about finding a spouse.  Their customer base is ever renewing.  The resources and capabilities are transparent, which is not a good thing.  eHarmony’s competitors clearly understand what is at work in its success.  However, these resources and capabilities are not easily transferable.  It will be very difficult for competitors to establish a base of users looking for marriage.  Additionally, eHarmony’s reputation for setting up future marriages is unparalleled – it is, so to speak, firm-specific.  And their algorithm is proprietary, though many industry insiders doubt how effective its patent will be in court.  There is also a large amount of private information and knowledge that eHarmony’s management team possesses, including the components of the algorithm, the travails of designing such an algorithm, and the determinants of successful relationships, that other firms do not have access to.  The replicability of eHarmony’s key resources and capabilities are less clear.  If a firm had an existing network of daters, an internally developed algorithm for matches and a strong brand in the dating world, it could potentially replicate eHarmony’s success.  However, the marriage-specific reputation that eHarmony has developed over the past years will continue to give it an advantage of any firms replicating its strategy in the near future.  Lastly, to increase the sustainability of its advantage, eHarmony could pursue a strategy that George Day added to Grant’s framework.  That is, it could signal retaliation against any company that directly competes in the online marriage matching market.  It could offer temporary price deals to undercut competition, or it could compete against the core product of a larger competitor that introduced an eHarmony rival.  Or it could preempt any marketing and advertising plans by its competitors.  This might instill fear into any potential entrants.

Match’s 2006 launch of its serious relationship spinoff Chemistry.com presented the first serious threat to eHarmony’s core business.   Feature-wise, Chemistry closely matched the user experience of eHarmony.  It also targeted the serious relationship segment and charged premium prices over Match’s flagship offering.  It sought to differentiate itself from eHarmony by matching users on different types of personality traits, claiming to deliver matches based on whether the users will experience “chemistry” upon meeting.

This new competitor was backed by the considerable resources of Match and IAC, ensuring that it could advertise heavily to attract new users.  Depending on how Match marketed Chemistry, the new site also might be able to grow quickly by drawing upon the enormous network of Match’s daters.  In this scenario, Match could use Chemistry to envelop eHarmony’s market by targeting Match members who have become frustrated with casual dating and are ready to seek a spouse.  Match would then up-sell these users to memberships on Chemistry.  These two methods of quickly acquiring new members, paired with its slightly differentiated positioning, put Chemistry in place to seriously threaten the powerful network effects that eHarmony relies on to grow its userbase and drive its bottom line.  If Chemistry was able to claim users that would have otherwise gone to eHarmony, the inflow of new users that keeps eHarmony alive would slow down and its current users would slowly leave the site.  This would cause the site to begin a contraction that would have serious negative impacts on its indirect network effects.  Since typical dating sites, and presumably Match, already have a male skew, Chemistry could focus on up-selling Match’s marriage-ready male users.  There might be some firm-specific knowledge within Match that would allow the company to predict when men were ready for such a solicitation by taking into account their messaging activity with other female members.  A reduction in new male eHarmony members would further increase the female skew on eHarmony, thus reducing the indirect network effects for females, which might in turn cause a migration to Chemistry.

In evaluating eHarmony’s strategic options to deal with the threat from its competitors, especially Chemistry, I would prioritize paths that do nothing to diminish the value of its key resources and capabilities and that extend or improve these assets, rather than creating entirely new capabilities.  Using these two bedrocks, I will analyze the options from the least to the most attractive;

• New Business: This option does fulfill the requirement of exploiting one of eHarmony’s core resources – deep knowledge about human relationships – however, it suffers from other flaws.  There are a huge number of entrenched information and community sites catering to those interested in wedding, life change, parenting, etc. advice.  Making a dent in these markets will require a lot of marketing and may provoke competitive responses.  Launching an advice site also would be entering into entirely new territory for eHarmony, which presumably knows little about advertising and less about content.  Additionally, this content strategy would not even fuel growth to eHarmony’s dating site because people interested in these areas are presumably already married! 
• Increasing Userbase: While this goal sounds promising, the means to get there may involve several costly tradeoffs.  Increasing advertising may yield decreasing marginal returns and may push the company away from its successful track record with direct response marketing.  Furthermore, Match has recently shown that it is willing to spend heavily on advertising as well.  A move by eHarmony might be matched by Chemistry leading to an ad spending frenzy with low returns for both parties.   Additionally, pursuing the goal of drastically increasing membership might lead to price reductions and even a price war.    This could damage the reputation and profit generating ability of eHarmony forever.  Other plans floated by management, which include reducing membership barriers, will lead to changing key assets that have made eHarmony a hit.  While it may pay off, the risk is simply too big.  Undesirable members could seriously diminish member WTP and/or tarnish the match-making ability of eHarmony. 
• Expanding to Medium Term Relationships: This strategy is the platform envelopment strategy – eHarmony could move to Match’s market and bundle its serious relationship service with its more casual offering.   This option is also a defensive strategy in that it attacks Match’s core offering in return for Match invading its own.  Turning that sentiment around, this strategy could provoke defensive reactions from other competitors in the medium term/casual dating market including PlentyofFish.com, Yahoo Personals, etc.  On the positive side, research has shown that many online daters are dissatisfied with the experience of web-initiated dates which indicates that there is an unmet market need that could be addressed by eHarmony’s secret sauce, its matching algorithm.  However, we must consider the reputational effect this might have in the perception of eHarmony’s core marriage-minded users.  This strategy also brings to mind many questions regarding its execution.  Would a medium term dating service and eHarmony share users?  Would users get matched with people who wanted different types of relationships?  Would the medium term service be priced at eHarmony’s price point?  Is the WTP of the non-marriage-minded that high?  If the price is lower, will that lower the WTP of eHarmony’s core users?  Will offering the algorithm or a spinoff at a lower price cannibalize eHarmony’s userbase and revenues?
• Going Global: Expanding to English-speaking countries and then to the EU also entails expanding on one of eHarmony’s greatest assets – its matchmaking algorithm.  Furthermore, it would not require intense capital investments upfront.  Match’s ability to generate 30% of its revenues, roughly $100M, abroad speaks wonders about the potential of overseas markets.  It is reasonable to posit that the same unaddressed market segment exists there as it did in the US prior to eHarmony’s launch (more on this below).  Additionally, Match’s presence abroad indicates that Chemistry might go international soon.  If eHarmony does not internationalize, Chemistry might claim these markets and establish strong network effects.  Before tackling any global strategy, eHarmony must first evaluate whether its capabilities can be internationalized.  Do they pass the RAT test, as outlined by Donald Lessard?  Is eHarmony’s match-making relevant abroad?  People get married everywhere.  Additionally, in more traditional cultures, there is a move towards singles picking their own spouse on the basis of compatibility which plays into eHarmony’s advantage.  Is match-making appropriable?  Yes.  Is it transferable?  The answer to this question is unclear.  However, eHarmony’s matchmaking would almost certainly provide better matches than any other service out there, even if overseas users desire different things than American users.  Furthermore, eHarmony’s ability to understand relationships would allow it to quickly develop a knowledge base and an updated algorithm that catered to each local market.  One caveat is that demand forecasting in international expansion is always difficult.  To that point, Canada and European countries have fewer marriages per 1000 people and residents there have more critical views of marriage in general.  However, despite these differences, there are still large numbers of adults who view marriage favorably and who are single who would likely be eHarmony members.

Before launching an international expansion, eHarmony must assess the requirements of a global expansion. In addition to funds and resources to build localized sites, which the company likely has or could acquire quickly and cheaply, the company must commit to a strong marketing push to educate consumers about eHarmony’s differentiated features.  The marketing that worked in the US will need to be tailored and the company will need to go out of house to local advertising agencies to develop appropriate plans.  While Match has pursued a successful partnership strategy both domestically and abroad by partnering with sites such as AOL and MSN, eHarmony has yet to enter into such arrangements.  With its strong differentiation advantage established in the US, it will likely not have to enter into such partnerships unless local conditions demand it.  While eHarmony’s relationship experts have American marriage science down pat, they may need to bring in local experts who can work with the in house R&D teams to develop locally suitable algorithms.  This may not be cheap to develop but it may not need to be ready for the initial launch.

While the global option won’t stop the threat from Chemistry, it will insulate eHarmony from many of its most negative effects.  It will bring in additional revenue streams, promote fast user growth in entirely new markets, and diversify away the risk inherent in selling only one product to only one market.  With its focus on lifelong matches, it is possible that global connections can be offered to members thus increasing eHarmony’s powerful cross sided network effects.  Domestically, if eHarmony can retain focus on improving the algorithm and marketing its continued advantages, it can put its reputation to work to steal new customers in the long term relationship segment that Chemistry up-sold from Match.  Additionally, it will threaten Match’s efforts abroad and force them to invest more overseas.  It is likely that Match will follow eHarmony’s lead and debut global versions of Chemistry.  This is an unavoidable evil but eHarmony cannot be late to the global game and forego the network effects that have made it so powerful in the US.

Google Voice Allows Voicemail Embedding

Here’s an interesting little feature of Google Voice: it allows you to embed voicemails you receive onto other sites.  I’m surprised that this hasn’t raised any privacy concerns yet.

Making private messages easily shareable will inevitably lead to some pretty sticky situations.  Think about email.  We can share emails with the click of a button.  And worse yet, people can forward the emails we send them.  Before email, we would never worry that people would photocopy our letters and share them with the world because that would have been a hassle.  But every business in the world instructs their employees to watch what they write via email because they know that those words could easily get forwarded around (remember this story?) or end up on Consumerist.com.

Before Google Voice, one could certainly make a sound file of a voicemail and put it on the internet, but the process wasn’t simple.  It wasn’t as easy as clicking a few links.  (Let’s all thank God that this woman went through the trouble of posting this voicemail.)  However, now it is.  This newfound ability got me thinking.  Who should own the intellectual property of a voicemail?  Probably the receiver of the voicemail.  But is that the correct legal answer?  I don’t know.  Perhaps leaving someone a voicemail is akin to granting them a temporary license.  Should it be?  When you call a company’s call center, they tell you that the call may be recorded.  Do they do that because they have to or do they do it out of the goodness of their hearts?  I wonder.  If they have a legal obligation to do it, should all Google Voice users tell their contacts that their messages may be posted to the internet?

On a somewhat related note, Google Voice is hilariously terrible at transcribing voicemails.  They are so off the mark that the transcribing service is more of a joke than a service.  Check out GV’s transcription of the voicemail embedded above.  It turns a simple request into a borderline scandalous proposition.  “I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind.”

Hey Mike, It’s knowing how you doing. I am the looking for like an old pair of shoes or sandals for tomorrow and I thought maybe I’d be able to like 5 there, but I can’t find any because I was just order close to go to shopping at 3 o’clock on. That’s it for me and but I’m going to go to rethinking and I thought cross my mind that perhaps you would have an older see that you wouldn’t care about. I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind. Let me give me for a day and I know that’s a lot of the way and that you would actually be at home on Friday night and that I could find a way to stop by my pick it up so I’m making like a lot of group for the about the possibility here, but I’m just trying to think if there’s any way that I can find after 2 for this river to bring thing then I’m going on tomorrow, I’m, and so it’s at at all of these things happen to be true, all at once and you would like to this message. I guess it’s another thing that has to be true if calls. I happen. Let me know and if anything else, so I’ll come tried had take about an event at any of the are not true. I will not be surprised and and or send it at all, so i’m yet so give me a call. Let me know and enjoy your party tomorrow. And sorry I can’t make it alright. Bye.

Helpful? Didn’t think so.

By not customizing your default image size settings in wordpress, you risk having badly sized images.

After I wrote the previous post on this blog, I was very unhappy with the tiny size that I choose for the Reddit screenshots.  Actually, I didn’t choose them at all.  It was the default settings for medium sized images in WordPress 2.7.  I tried using the large image setting but it was too big for my column width.  Sure, I could have manually resized the image but I didn’t.

That’s because default settings are powerful things.  They determine way more of your life than you’d probably like to admit.  I will be posting a short brainstorm in the coming days about the ways that changing common default settings could drastically alter our lives.

For now, I’d like to make a few suggestions about changing your image size default settings in WordPress 2.7.

Step 1: Click on “Media” in the Settings Menu

Step 2: Set the Medium Size width to half of the width of your main column and the Large Size width to a few pixels less than the full width of your main column.

Changing default image sizes saves time and makes your blog look better.

By having the large size correspond to your maximum width, you can easily make images take up the entire column.  And by setting medium size to half the width, you can easily insert images that can float to the left or right and have text wrap around them.

Programming, Atheism and Helping Each Other Spread Birthday Wishes?

When most people think of the social link-sharing site Reddit (those people who have heard of Reddit, at least), they think of atheist left-leaning libertarian programmers who have a soft spot for long pun threads.  However, Reddit can be a fascinating place to observe how good causes can rouse a large amount of collective action provided certain conditions are met.

Despite the fact that Reddit is primarily used to share funny, interesting and provocative links about technology and politics, many of Reddit’s most popular links are not even links to content outside of the site.  Reddit was designed to allow users to submit links that point to a comment forum created on Reddit.com.  This ability has created a culture in which users ask the Reddit community to support a cause by up-voting one of these self-referential links.

One of these rallies for support caught my eye last week.  The title was “Today is my dad’s 60th birthday, and he’s a huge fan of reddit. Not sure how far this submission will get. But in case you see this dad: Happy Birthday!“  One might expect a handful of redditors to vote this up…but at the time I saw it, ten hours after it was submitted, more than 4372 people had voted it up.  (I say more because 4372 represents its vote tally of up- and downvotes and it received a number of downvotes.)  That means for ten hours straight, this link received roughly one vote every eight and a half seconds.  Two days after I took this screenshot, the upvote count was well over 6000.

Birthday Wishes On Reddit Attract Thousands of Supporters

This is a fairly startling success for such a small scale, personal cause.  We can look to a few different reasons for its high vote count.

• The low barrier to participation: all it took to help make the user’s dad happy was a simple click.
  
• The goal was clear and attainable: getting this link and happy birthday message to the front page of reddit where the user’s dad would see it was simple and do-able.  Furthermore, each user’s participation was intimately linked to furthering the goal – the more upvotes a link gets, the more likely it is to achieve success.
• Tightness of the community: Reddit is a smaller community than similar sites like Digg.  Furthermore, it has a number of smaller groups called subreddits where people share links about particular niches.  These factors lead people to value their fellow redditors in a way that is a bit different than other larger community sites.

When I took the screenshot above, the story was in the number one spot on Reddit’s front page, but if you have ever used Reddit, you’ll notice  that I still upvoted the birthday wish.  I did so without thinking the very second I read the headline.  Why would I do that when the goal had already been achieved?  One reason might be that the three reasons above worked so fast and were so ingrained in my psyche that I didn’t stop to think about whether or not the goal was achieved.  The very act of voting on things that I support on Reddit might be so second nature that a link’s success or lack thereof doesn’t affect me at all.  Another explanation would be that I wanted to be associated, even in an invisible and meaningless way, with its success.  In this respect, success can lead to further success.  I suspect that my behavior arose out of a combination of all of these factors.

If the voting power of thousands of Reddit users can be leveraged to wish someone a happy birthday, imagine what a cause with real emotional resonance could inspire jaded internet users to do.  To be clear, part of this birthday wish’s success came from its simplicity.  Anyone can get behind a nice wish for a father.  A cause like environmentalism or cancer research is often more complex because one may wonder about the methods, efficiencies and politics of the organization at hand.  And that split second of hesitation will lead to a drastic  drop off in the level of actions taken.

I posit that mass participation is a function of a number of somewhat intangible components:

Level of Mass Participation = Clarity of Goal X Likelihood of Success X Emotional Resonance X Ease of Participation

With that formula in mind, it becomes clear why more emotionally hefty causes receive less upvotes on Reddit. It is most often a small likelihood of success and/or a lack of a clear goal that brings down web campaigns.  How else could you explain the fact that the below cause received fewer upvotes than the birthday wish?

A more serious plea on Reddit receives less support

It is up to marketers to maximize each component of the participation equation to increase the likelihood that their constituents will support and take action on behalf of their cause.

Amazon Brilliantly Leverages Other Users Behavior to Affect Yours

Attempting to draw insight from the titans of user interface design, I have been thinking about how to use technology to motivate the people we love to take better care of themselves.  If Amazon can convince us to buy books that readers with similar tastes have purchased, there must be a way to use that sort of social pressure to encourage us to listen to the warning signs of dangerous diseases.  Facebook made the process of spreading apps so intuitive and fast that many users inexplicably found themselves adding silly applications without deriving any real enjoyment out of the experience.  Can’t we similarly make taking care of ourselves viral?

The same incentive that drives app adoption on Facebook and sales on Amazon would also be effective for a health service.  It’s called peer pressure.  It made you drink beer in high school, stage zombie attacks on Facebook, buy just one more book on Amazon and, if leveraged properly, can lead you to check yourself out.  You may not be willing to take care of yourself at the expense of everything else in your busy schedule, but knowing that your mother or child is worrying about your health could be enough to drive you to get that recurring headache checked out.

The key, as always, with social apps is to make them action focused and keep the minimum amount of action required, i.e. the barrier to entry, extremely low.   With that in mind, here are a few very rough ideas of web services and apps that might help us to pay more attention to the silent screams of our bodies.

1. E-Cards – A very simple old concept revitalized for a new purpose.  We could send our loved ones cards asking them to check out specific ailments that we know bother them.  Incorporating celebrity PSA-type videos could drive the message home further.  Even more effective would be allowing users to record their pleas via their webcams.  That could go a long way to convince their mothers/daughters to check themselves out, especially if the footage was combined in Flash with other uploaded photos, graphics and text to create a simple multimedia presentation.
2. A web quiz app could question you about your own symptoms, give you a list of possible causes in a printable PDF format (that you’d bring to your next doctor visit) and ask you to forward it to your loved ones to remind them to take care of themselves.  iVillage does something similar with their symptom solver.
3. A DonorsChoose type site that lets you create a page with your case why your mom should treat herself better – stop smoking, exercise more, get more regular mammograms, etc.  Your page would be anonymous and visitors to the site could submit advice and stories about similar experiences.  You’d then forward the interesting bits of wisdom and advice you get from the crowd to your mother.  This concept has the benefit of allowing good Samaritans to wander around the site and taking a few seconds to give a bit of wisdom that might prove convincing.   You’d obviously get a ton of bad advice that you’d have to filter out.  But bad or harmful advice and other trollish behavior would be flagged and thus reflected in some sort of reputation rank for that user.  And when you did send along someone’s thoughts to your loved one, the good Samaritan would get reputation points which would show up next time they offered a suggestion to someone else.   People love giving advice, building good reputations and doing small but helpful tasks that make them feel good about themselves so I think there would be no shortage of advice givers.  As for the intended recipient of all of this unwanted feedback from strangers, they might be turned off and angered but if cleverly constructed and designed, the site would show them just how much their daughter/son/mother/father/brother/sister loved them and worried about them.  And if they got any insight from the crowd on how to get healthier without too much effort, so much the better.

These are merely kernels of ideas and there are obvious and quite major hurdles to services like the ones I’ve outlined above.

• Privacy is the biggest.  We want to protect our medical info from companies and from each other’s prying eyes.
• Fear is another.  People are often afraid to confront their symptoms because doing so makes them more real.  It also means they need to spend money on addressing the problems.

Kiva.org Enables Users to Engage in Micro-Finance

However, with further thought and development, I’m confident that it is possible to leverage social pressure online to encourage our loved ones to pay close attention to their health.  Organizations like Kiva and DonorsChoose have unlocked massive social potential by making it easy, visible and social to do small, granular acts of giving and micro-lending.  The same can be done to address a whole host of humanity’s other problems – like taking care of our bodies.  Kiva and DonorsChoose opened a giant door by pairing the social activities of the web with the social consciousness inside us all.  It’s up to tomorrow’s great social entrepreneurs to walk through that door.