The Metrics Series continues over at the Boxxet blog with…

1. The lesson behind losing 3/4 of interested users

Of the people who came to our front door, 40% signed up and 60% returned when we emailed them. That means 76% of the people who stop by to a closed beta did not immediately return to see Boxxet when we let them in.

2. A rant about Alexa and the scrooge of bad data

Bad data is more than an inconvenience, it can be downright hurtful to a business. Great web sites may be shut out of advertising, business deals may never happen because a company did not pass a fictional Alexa test, potential employees may choose not to join a company b/c of its Alexa numbers, adversaries may aim their resources at the wrong competitors.

Over at the Boxxet corporate blog, where I’ve been blogging more, we’ve started the Metrics Series. In this series, we plan to share some fun and hopefully useful metrics around Boxxet.

Posts that are already up:

* Google’s search share is > 90% ?
* Jennifer Aniston vs Web 2.0

Check it out!

By now, I’ve been part of many dozens of product launches and it hasn’t been boring yet.  It is my pleasure to announce the public availability of Boxxet. Dan and I spent today smashing down a bunch of bugs today, talking with bloggers and press and generally making everything presentable.

You can read more about the launch and the product at the Boxxet blog and you can experience Boxxet yourself, may I suggest: The Amazing Race, Green Day, New York Yankees, The Office, Second Life, Supernatural or Ultimate Fighting.

So the race planning is behind us (product design), warmups are done (beta) and now the marathon has begun.  Thanks for watching.

When we started Boxxet, we built a way to add comments and posts. At one point, we wondered if we needed to host content on Boxxet. But we came to the quick conclusion that if someone wanted to get content into Boxxet, there were plenty of better options to host the content. So we ask that folks put them on a blog (or other content management) platform and then suggest that content to the Boxxet community.

So we are following that idea ourselves. Boxxet announcements will be posted on the Boxxet blog, which is runs on the blog platform WordPress. The Boxxet service then subscribes to our own blog feed and brings it into our own corporate news.

If you are not already into Boxxet, you can see the Boxxet blog at http://blog.boxxet.com/. Note that the really big announcements will likely to be discussed on the Seedround blog as well.

So far, naming the company was one of the hardest things we did.

I enjoy the process very much. I’ve done it before. I’ve read a pretty good book (Wordcraft, by Alex Frankel); I’ve thought hard about them.

For tech companies, the big problem is, of course, URL availability and it is an extreme limiting factor to naming. The naturally limited inventory and the squatters forces unnatural names. (If you are lucky and the URL for your preferred name is not taken, then it is likely that the trademark is open as well, but you can do a quick check on that).  Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has a post about domain name extensions that is worth reading.  Since my blog is named Seedround, I will disagree with his statement that a name is worth $25,000.

So what is the creative process for finding a name? Don’t really have one, sorry. This is one of those “lightning can strike anywhere” projects.

Dan and I named Milktruck while he was keeping me company while I was waiting for a train. I forgot how we can up with Biz360 (but that was a codename that stuck; or more accurately, nothing better was ever suggested). Boxxet was thought of late one night (while I was alone) after weeks and weeks going through hundreds of names. I had to force myself to walk away from the project several times just to regain energy.

There’s no magic for me; lots of ideas (some awful, some great but unavailable, some good); lots of research; then a bit of testing with your inner circle (after all, why share bizarre names with too many people?).

• Can they say it?
• Can they spell it?
• Are they going to, more likely than not, remember it?

Yes to all? Wow! Two of three? Take it.

Does it pass the ridiculous test? Then go. Of course, you can also not pass the ridiculous test and still do very well (see Yahoo and Google).

There will be people who love/hate/like/dislike/don’t care about your name. You will not get agreement; you should not bother to get agreement.

I happen to like names that are descriptive or provoke the images I would like the company’s users/clients to see:

• Milktruck: This was a “push” Web application. So Milktruck automatically brought you fresh stuff every day!
• Biz360: This was an analytic application that analyzed all the news that happened around your company and industry everyday. Biz360 gave you a 360 degree view of your business.
• Boxxet: The image of the “best-of” is reflected in a “box set,” thus the name Boxxet. People who do not like the name right away will often come back and tell me that they later changed their mind.

We went through a LOT of names before we hit Boxxet. Many were awful. Here are some (no snickering, please): Onrego, civicjam, thelotofus, LoveOrHateIt, TheWordFor, REcolon, InRegardTo, ThisIsSwell, RiffWire. I’ll leave it to you to figure them out (at one point or another, they all had some meaning to me).

You may ask: why not go through a naming firm for such an important branding move?  To that, I point to this article that I first saw on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about participation.   Unless there is self-interest involved, which there is in places like social networks like mySpace and LinkedIn, most people are lurkers (me included). 

In an interview, Marc Canter said that “Five percent of the populace (probably even less) can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume.”  So far, I can confirm that.

So far, we’ve let a few hundred people in Boxxet and while our numbers are small, we are seeing about five percent playing a larger role than the others.  Of the rest, about 2/3 read and rest have done a little something (we try to make it very easy to participate).  

The good news is that five percent can really make an impact and we are seeing it in the quality of the information in some of our Boxxets.   And our system learns from the participation so that five percent makes a very large impact. 

For all of us, designing social applications, we should start designing around this number.  And I would assume it to be a ceiling, not a floor or average.

I was planning for a rolling launch for Boxxet.  Talk to a few people, get them in the system, see what they thought.  Talk to more people; have them talk to their friends.  Nice gradual launch. 

Then a story by Celeste Biever from New Scientist on Boxxet was posted on Slashdot.  I’ve heard that the slashdot effect brings joy and fear.  I will confirm that here.

The comments at Slashdot were mostly skeptical.  That’s probably right.  Lots of promises are made in the tech world and most are not kept.  Without giving access to Boxxet so people can decide for sure, what else can we expect?

We will need some time to work through the new users brought in today, but we will get it done. 

Today, I am happy to announce Boxxet. 

Boxxet (pronounced “box set”) brings together the “best of” news, blogs, photos, gear, services and much more on people’s favorite subjects (teams, sports, hobbies, TV shows, schools, etc). Boxxet uses a unique combination of computer automation and community participation to produces the most diverse and complete best-of compilations on even narrow subjects.

Boxxet is open by invitation. We are doing this to make sure we can handle any crowds we hope show and also to make sure everything works well. But if you are in the first few hundred to sign up, you should get an invitation rather quickly.

Dan Gartung and I have been working hard to make this happen and we will be talking about Boxxet at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Wednesday, March 8, 2006.  

A small boom of terrific social applications has appeared in the last few years (and there are more are on the way). I find social applications very interesting because they bring personality to a web service. Compared to completely automated systems, social applications reflect the appealing human qualities of passion, perspective and nuance. These attributes can give social applications have a real leg up on completely automated systems.

However, the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly.

So many social applications will have to introduce methods that allow it to exist and thrive with less and less participation. Perhaps this is focusing on narrower niches, using only automation, or using a bionic system.

What is a bionic system?

Bionics is the study of living systems with the intention of applying their principles to the design of engineering systems. So a bionic system would be an “engineering” system that has the principles of living systems. Some examples of bionic systems:

• recommendation systems through collaborative filtering, which have been around for years, take the personal preferences of many individuals in a group and use them to find new recommendations to the single individual,
• link analysis systems (such as Google’s PageRank, Memeorandum, and Technorati) takes the link information on web pages to uncover relevant or popular content,
• photo-recognition systems, such as Riya, which has machines that takes a few human identifications of a face and then uses that information to identify many others. In an interesting bionic system that goes the other way, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has used humans to tell computers where stores are located in a photo (computers can do wonders with just a little bit of a repeating pattern, but if there is no pattern; it falls apart).
• sentiment analysis: at Biz360 (where I am founder and Chairman), we built a Point-of-View Sentiment engine where we automatically rated news stories and blogs stories as positive, neutral or negative from our client’s point-of-view. Humans rate dozens of articles and the machine learns and rates thousands, even tens of thousands, of articles.
• Content filtering and preference: at Boxxet (where I am founder and CEO), we are working to employ a bionic system to capture a small number of ratings and submissions and amplify it to sort and filter the best content on many subjects, even subjects that may have only a very small community.

In all these cases, the impact of human participation is significantly amplified by the machine. There are downsides to bionic systems; errors can be amplified and machines can make head-scratching decisions (we have all laughed at off-base recommendations). But the upsides are clear: the passion, perspective, nuance and wisdoms of crowds, even a small crowd, is captured and used far beyond the individual contribution. Bionic systems also help cushion the downside of fickleness, fluctuation and distraction—other qualities of the crowd. These benefits will help social applications extend its usefulness and longevity.

Note: I will be talking more about bionic systems Wed, March 8 at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. See you there. Also expect to see deeper thoughts on bionic systems in the upcoming weeks and months. 

If you’re heading out to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, drop by my session on Wednesday, March 8.  We’ll be showing Boxxet publically there.  My topic is called “Bionic Systems.”  Closer to the conference, I will be post my thoughts on this so if you are not attending a conference, you’d get a taste of what I presented.