Blog location has changed!

Hey! If you’re still trying to access the Youlicit blog, we’ve moved over to http://blog.youlicit.com/.

So update your bookmarks and head on over to our new site! And apologies for any inconveniences.

Youlicit – Your Personal Discovery Engine!

As we release a new & updated version of the product, the biggest change you will notice is a shift in focus from being an item-based recommendation engine (giving you sites that others have liked based on the site you are on) to a more personalized discovery engine (providing you with relevant and compelling content based on your interest at any given time). We are confident that this is taking Youlicit one step closer towards our goal of connecting users to the information they care about in the most effortless manner.

Among the many improvements and changes included in this release, what I would like to highlight here is the fact that a toolbar download is no longer required to receive Youlicit’s personalized recommedations! You can now link your Youlicit account to your Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, or other social bookmarking account and your Youlicit profile will automatically update itself as you use your other accounts. Your youlicit recommendations can now be accessed in many different forms:

• as an RSS feed that can be seen from your RSS reader
• on your Youlicit page (as it has been traditionally)
• with a “Discover!” bookmarklet that can be dragged onto your browser
• right on your blog using the Youlicit blog widget
• your Facebook profile (as we improve and release an updated Facebook app)

This seemless interaction allows users to receive Youlicit’s recommendations without any additional download or change in behavior. By continuing to use your third party web services of choice, you can receive relevant and compelling web content where your normally go to get their information.

Users who already have the toolbar or don’t have accounts with any of the services supported, can still download and use the Firefox extension and continue to receive and recommend great websites.

We urge you to check out the new site and service and as always welcome any feedback you have.

Scrabulous – an awesome product-market fit

Hey guys (if there are any of you still reading this blog)! Apologies for the very long blogging break but as promised in our New Year’s resolution, we’re back! Today I wanted to do something we rarely do here on this blog, talk about another product. My reason for doing so is because it makes a great case study and allows me show my support for this product.

You may be aware of the Facebook application created by two brothers in India taking an age old board game and putting it on the web. You may even be one of those people who spends half of his or her day flexing those vocab muscles conjuring up every permutation of words one can make from 7 letters. If you do, you know what I am talking about. To those who aren’t, I am referring to the Facebook application, Scrabulous. Could anyone have imagined creating an online scrabble game would have so much success?

Less than eight months old, Scrabulous today, has the 5th highest number of active users (655,781) of all Facebook applications and of that list, the highest ratio of active to total users (25%). It’s even one of the more popular applications among Facebook employees. Its growth has been quite staggering and even more impressive is its ability to engage users and keep users coming back. I myself am guilty of having 3-4 active games at any given time and taking increasingly frequent breaks during the day to put down my “bingo”. With Hasbro’s recent demand to shut down the company, users have flocked together to show unprecedented support to keep the application up. The Facebook group “Save Scrabulous” has over 55,0000 users and over 8500 people have signed a petition asking Hasbro retract their cease and desist letter. A few fans even created a humorous and satirical music video as their way to show their love and support for the application:

To achieve this type of a large, passionate and loyal fan base is the dream of any product developer or marketer.

What’s interesting to note, as many of you are probably already aware, is that Scrabulous is not the first online version of the game. Far from it in fact. A quick search on Google for “online scrabble” will result in a plethora of online and downloadable versions of this classic word game. These have existed for years but none have found as many and passionate a user base as Scrabulous. This begs the question, why?

The answer lies at the crux of what makes a successful product. Marc Andreessen wrote a great bit on this a little while ago that I urge you to read. The key to making a successful product does not mean having a perfect product or an extremely stellar team (not to detract anything from what the creators of Scrabulous have done). What matters most is achieving a harmonious product-market fit. This means shaping your product to fit the current trends, needs and demands of the market. A lot can even be attributed to timing; being at the right place at the right time.

In Scrabulous’s case, the product was nothing revolutionary. On the contrary, it was a plain and simple online adaptation of the board game that had been done numerous times before. It was also far from perfect. Those who remember early iterations of Scrabulous will recall how frustratingly slow and unreliable it was (and to some degree still is). The user interface was (and still is) cluttered with intrusive, to the point annoying, ads that detracted from the overall experience and had much room for improvement (and still does). But all this did not stop users from returning or the application from taking off. Scrabulous’s user base continued to sky rocket thanks to Facebook’s immensely viral platform. So why did users continue to swarm to this application?

The reason becomes clear when we examine the market a little closer. Facebook has been seeing an exponential increase in users. It opens up its platform to allow third party developers to create and distribute applications on the Facebook network. Millions of users, hungry for novel ways to interact and engage with their newly created network of friends, start experimenting and adding these new applications as they are being released. Some of the applications are extremely successful while some fail and get buried in the figurative Facebook dust. In comes Scrabulous, an application that allows users to play the classic board game online with their friends in an asynchronous, turn based manner. The game becomes an instant hit. People love the ease with which they can start and participate in games. It provides a new way to interact with friends and play the game with people who may not be accessible to play face to face. The game itself meshes with the typical Facebook user’s profile: high school, college or recent graduate, educated, smart, with a large network of similar friends. The game finds a core of users and spreads like wildfire, thanks also to Facebook’s ability to promote such applications virally via news feeds, user invitations, etc.

The market therefore, was a perfect fit for what the Agarwalla brothers created. It wasn’t that they built a brand new product that took social networking to the next level or changed the way people interacted. They simply saw an opportunity that was ripe for the plucking and took advantage of it. Kudos to their team and the success they have achieved and I wish them luck in their battle against Hasbro.

Join “The Clique”!

The Youlicit team had created a Google discussion group to use as a channel of communication with our users several months ago. The group has been kept exclusive and open to only Youlicit’s most active/loyal users up until now. We are now opening it up to let anyone join and voice their opinions and concerns to us.

Check it out at The Youlicit Clique. From time to time the team posts discussions, questions, and give-aways to get your input and show our thanks as we continue to work to make Youlicit better. It is also a great way to meet fellow users and communicate with them. We look forward to seeing on there.

Things to look forward to in 2008…

Happy New Year everyone! As we start a fresh calendar year, here are some things to look forward to from the Youlicit Team. There are two main focuses in terms of product development that we are striving towards; one is to continue improving our results & recommendations and the other is to make a more engaging user experience by improving the social aspects of the site.

Better Results:

• an increased coverage of the web as we expand our ability to get recommendations on a larger number of websites and topics
• more relevant and serendipitous recommendations

More engaging user experience:

• ability to tag & comment & discuss on and about sites
• contacting/communicating with users via anonymous emailing (opt-in feature)
• automatically tracking comments and discussions on sites you have posted or commented on or topics that interest you the most

And last but not least, we resolve to be more active on this blog! Heres to a healthy and successful year ahead.

Youlicit – New & Improved! (once again)

So what’s been keeping the Youlicit Team busy until wee hours in the morning for the past few weeks? We’ve been preoccupied with releasing a new version of the website based on much of the feedback we’ve received from you.

The first change you will notice is the new look we’ve given the site. The main goal was to help you find other Youlicit users more easily and improve the level of interaction between you and them. You can now find similar users, users interested in certain topics and users desperately trying to be your friends and keep up with what they are recommending at all times.

The second major change was overhauling our infrastructure to provide you with a faster and more responsive level of service. You no longer have to endure painful seconds of watching the little icon on the top right corner of your browser churn away as your favorite recommendations are now being served up to you faster than you can say “Hey Mom! Check out this new site I found!”.

These are just some of the many surprises we have in store so stay tuned! As always, we’re aching to hear from you, so leave some love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy thanksgiving for all of you in the US!

Search and Social Networking

With Hakia releasing a new social networking feature on their search engine (see entry in Read/Write Web) and Google sponsoring OpenSocial, clear strides are being made to integrate the search and social networking spaces. To many, including us, this almost begs the exclamation “About time!”

Social networking, for the most part, has been built around imitating (and hopefully positively effecting) the physical relationships we already have in the real world (think LinkedIn, Friendster, Facebook). Only very recently has progress being made in linking people based on their interests (think StumbleUpon to a degree and third party applications like uPlayMe, etc) and now with the recent announcement of Google’s OpenSocial we expect this to accelerate the development of a richer, more meaningful social networking experience. There is still significant work that needs to be done in terms of connecting us to people we ought to be connected to. This is why we at Youlicit are excited about the “Meet Others” feature on Hakia which is being called a “peer-to-peer transactional platform” and are further building upon this concept at Youlicit.

Richard McManus poses an almost rhetorical question on his blog entry asking if search and social networking go together. We believe that the purpose of a search tool is to help you find the information you need with the least effort possible (see Relevance/Effort metric). To this end, if there is someone who has, and is willing to share, the information or expertise you are looking for, then what better medium to connect you to him than that in which you already go to find your information. Granted there is a spectrum of modes that different users fall into depending on their personality types (and time constraints) ranging from solitary to the very social (as pointed out by Charles Knight in his blog). In the end everyone can and wants to benefit from accessing the information (and people) they need as quickly as possible. This is why we are including “Related Users” for every query you perform on Youlicit (this feature is soon to come and can currently be seen on your Personalized Recommendations and User pages). We are using this as a base to build out a social networking aspect to our website recommendation service.

As you read this, we are working hard to better determine what users are interested in as well as allow users to share with others what they are recommending on a certain topic. The end goal is to become an enabler of collaboration between users to better facilitate the discovery and sharing of information. Building a social network based on your real world relationships with people you already know can help improve and extract more value out of those relationships but isn’t the most effective means to introduce you to other people you ought to know. A higher value social network connects you to people who share your interests and can help you not only discover the information you need quicker but ultimately increase your productivity and introduce you to more “meaningful” resources in your area of interest (see Expert Systems entry).

This is obviously not an easy feat to accomplish (otherwise it would have already been done!) and there are many hurdles that need to be crossed. How do you learn a user’s interests while safeguarding and protecting his right to privacy? How do you maintain the credibility and quality of such a “transactional platform” (i.e. how do you prevent unwanted information such as spam from diluting the quality of the service)? How do you enable varying levels of collaboration (from direct synchronous communication to asynchronous communication) with minimal distraction and effort from users? How, if possible, do you most optimally monetize such a transactional platform that will incentivize further collaboration?

The creation of such a platform inherently requires the cooperation of users (and of course technology) to make it all happen but we are confident that this is possible and have no doubt that a need for such a platform exists and must be met. As we develop and roll out this platform, we would love to hear your thoughts on this matter and get your feedback on what you would like to see on such a platform.

Facebook flyers experiment – Pt. 2

(See Facebook Flyers Experiment Pt 1 for background info)

After running the facebook flyer campaigns for a week, the results are out. To recap, the five campaigns were:

1. All high school students (ages 13-19) with $0.05 per click.
2. All high school students (ages 13-19) with $0.03 per click
3. All people between the ages of 17-40 who live in the top technology cities as identified by Wired and some others (Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Orlando, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Pittsburgh & Chicago)
4. All college students attending some of the top technical schools (MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, U. Texas, U. Maryland, Georgia Tech, Cal Tech, Berkeley, UCLA & Penn State).
5. All college students majoring in Engineering and otherwise technical majors (engineering disciplines, computer science, web design, etc)

As expected, most impressions occurred in campaigns 1 and 2, high school students, being these were the least specific, hence most probably the largest, user group targeted. What was also interesting to note was that there was a negligible difference in impressions between $0.03 and $0.05 campaigns (6.35% more impressions on the 0.5 cents per click) indicating that the demand for targeting these groups is less than the supply (i.e. number of impressions being demanded are far less than the number of potential impressions). In an ideal world, the number of impressions for the $0.05 per click campaign would be 40% more.

The second most impressions came from college students in technology majors, followed by adults in “the top technology cities” and then college students in the top technology schools. Again these are directly related to the specificity of the groups targeted.

As for the click through rates? They were low, atrociously low. The most clicks for any campaign were a whopping 1 click! The table below breaks down the CTRs for each campaign:

Campaign	Impressions	CTR (%)
1	5,904	0
2	5,551	0.018
3	894	0
4	852	0.117
5	1001	0.0999

Clickthrough rates of 0% to 0.1% were about as low as predicted. No conclusive statements can be made about which campaigns were better targeted due to the incredibly low number of clicks.

Being avid facebook users ourselves, we rarely find ourselves clicking on such flyers. In analyzing our own actions, we hypothesized some possible reasons to explain these poor click through rates:

1. Facebook users are rarely in search for “external” information (information not available within Facebook) as opposed to say when one is searching on Google.
2. Users find Facebook content far too engaging to click on a link that will direct them away from the site.
3. The placement of the Facebook flyers is not at an optimum place on the pages.
4. The flyer we created failed to capture the interest of the audience.

To perform a more rigorous study, one would need to run these campaigns for a much longer time than just a week. However, it is hard to imagine the CTR’s being significantly higher if the campaigns were to be prolonged (see Mashable post). It would be interesting to examine how using more captivating flyer designs (specifically targeted to each user group) would affect the click through rates, if at all. Needless to say, we are exploring other possible ways in which we can tap into the Facebook userbase as a means to generate traffic. The Youlicit team would love to hear from you if you have fared better than us, in terms of CTRs, with Facebook Flyers or are interested in sharing ideas to better target Facebook users.

On a side note, for all campaigns, the highest impressions occurred on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday – on average 86.8% of the total impressions – highly indicative of Facebook usage habits.

Facebook flyers experiment – Pt. 1

Facebook recently launched an updated version of their Flyers product called Flyers Pro. The main difference between this and the now Flyers Basic product is that advertisers can now pay per click instead of paying per impression.

In theory, advertising on Facebook has immense appeal. Given its incredible user base (now over 30 million active users) and extremely high visitor-return frequency (ranking second in visits/visitor) it is an advertiser’s haven. With Facebook’s improved targeting options – you can now filter on keywords (”Beatles”, “Lord of the Rings”, “iPhone”), countries, cities, age, workplace (”Google”, “Goldman Sachs”) and colleges – advertisers can now (theoretically) target their ads much better and reach the exact demographics they are looking for. Social networking sites, however, are infamous for their abysmal click-through rates (ranging from 0.01% to less than 1%). Unheeding these statistics, however, we decided to try out this new platform.

To test out the new Flyers platform, we created several campaigns to see:

1. what demographics get us the most impressions for a given cost per click (CPC), and
2. what demographics have the highest click through rates (CTRs).

The first question is to gauge the current demand of advertising to certain demographics on Facebook (independent of product and creative) and the second question is for us to see which Facebook demographics Youlicit appeals to the most (highly dependent on the ad, the placement of the ad, the product being advertised and the audience). The different demographics we targeted were as follows:

• All high school students (ages 13-19)
• All college students majoring in Engineering and otherwise technical majors (engineering disciplines, computer science, web design, etc)
• All college students attending some of the top technical schools (MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, U. Texas, U. Maryland, Georgia Tech, Cal Tech, Berkeley, UCLA & Penn State). Nothing personal if your school isn’t listed, this was just a random sampling.
• All people between the ages of 17-40 who live in the top technology cities as identified by Wired and some others (Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Orlando, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Pittsburgh & Chicago)

We created this flyer to be used on all the campaigns:

Given our current download rates per visit on Youlicit, we set our maximum costs per click to $0.03 in order to keep our user acquisition costs to under $1/user (however we did set 2 campaigns for the high school demographics to compare number of impressions for CPC’s of $0.05 and $0.03). We launched these campaigns this week for a period of 7 days and will see how each one fares after that. Stay tuned for the results…

(see the results here)