donnacha's dashboard

Well, the option to make it an idea topic was not obvious to me, I didn't have time to learn this new site's layout, I was simply trying to leave feedback on the ID website and found myself here.

I don't know if you are part of the ID team but, if you are, it seems to me that this was a particularly pedantic and unhelpful response. If anyone wants to move my question to a different section, fine, go ahead, but it is polite to extend people a little latitude when they are new to a system; people should be encouraged to comment, not policed. – donnacha, on December 13, 2008 17:36

I am suggesting something almost identical to your existing WordPress plugin, just streamlined to make it easier and more tempting to use: no login, no ads, just click Record, click Stop and click Save. The service then spits a video code into the comment field, just as the Seesmic, Viddler and Riffly plugins currently do.

Another, even simpler use of the same flash widget would simply allow site visitors to leave a message which isn't tied into a commenting system, the video code is instead emailed to the site owner, who can decide to just watch it or insert it into his site for others to see. Almost a guestbook. I can think of several low-bandwidth, high-utility uses for that i.e. verification that someone submitting a form is who they say they are, or that the person featured in the photo being submitted as their avatar is the same person signing up, video petitions, additional assurance for ebay transactions, contractually-binding video statements etc. Simpler, more specific uses, not an attempt to initiate a grand conversation or network effect, but immediate usefulness worth paying for .

Again, though, I'm not talking about fancy new code, this is just a different use of your existing "save, store and return a token" technology; if you offer those building blocks, people will find almost infinite uses.

Pricing is always tricky but you should note that many people, myself included, would rather pay a reasonable amount to a company we trust as having a realistic plan to stay in business, rather than ride for free with an unknown quantity such as Riffly - if they disappear, so do all my users' comments!

Would simple pricing according to bandwidth usage be workable? I'm not sure of the exact price I would be willing to pay, but obviously, to gain traction among the mass of serious website owners (i.e. not teenage bloggers who will never pay for anything but also not businesses with infinite spending power) the pricing should be pitched as a fair service at a fair price, billed according to usage and not charging such a large premium that people simply roll their own Red5-based solutions.

My hunch is that this is quite a large market, I'm honestly surprised that no-one is catering to it, the first company to get it right could probably dominate this niche if they price keenly enough to discourage smaller competitors but still profit handsomely from scale and buying power.

So, if you do decide to offer a product of this type, I will, absolutely, be your first paying guinea pig. – donnacha, on November 26, 2008 17:46

Hello Loic, thanks for the response.

Actually, you're wrong - I would certainly pay and, judging by the amount of people I stumbled across during my search for a suitable service, so would a substantial number of others.

During my own search, I continually found people looking for the same thing, wandering around obscure places online such as the Red5 mailing list or the comment sections of random blog posts.

Attempts to monetize video seems to skew towards either free, ad-based services OR ridiculously expensive "premium" services aimed at corporations - no-one seems to realize that many people would pay for a simple hosted service to collect, store, view and publish webcam messages left on their webcams.

I understand the psychological leap between free and paying even a small amount but, seriously, a lot of website owners would be relieved to pay a reasonable amount for a simple one-click solution that doesn't involve third-party logins, the loss of copyright or ads popping up, with options to white label or co-brand with Seesmic.

I am aware that these are tough times for Seesmic, I sympathize with you and the people you recently lost, I have many friends in similar situations. Perhaps, though, this economic downturn might mark a return to the concept of straight-forward monetization plans, in which people simply pay a fair amount for good services.

I am convinced there is a genuine product opportunity here, one that could be scaled up quite easily as you already have all the necessary skills, experience and reputation. – donnacha, on November 26, 2008 16:36

It says that there are Twitter employees online here but, as this problem has remained unanswered for over a month now, I'm guessing that support is not Twitter's priority.

The sad thing is that this problem would be very easy to solve: when an account is deleted, the system needs to remove the email address from the database, freeing it up to be used in the creation of a new twitter account. This should already be happening and could be fixed with a single line of code.

I have the same problem.

A lot, an awful lot, depends upon whether you choose to create a real platform that properly rewards participation or settle for a strapped down, boutique approach masquerading as a platform.

The question is "What would you do with a Satisfaction API", so, I'll leave the discussion of the relative merits of the two above-mentioned approaches to another thread, and will presume that we are talking, here, about an honest-to-goodness platform.

The answer to what I would do with a true platform: everything.

Let me explain that.

The key advantage of your interface is that is does all it can to encourage participation - I can see a couple of small ways in which the UI could be further improved but, even as it stands, it is probably the most alluring interface to information sharing that I have ever seen and has the potential to fill the space that a lot of us once thought small-scale wikis would occupy.

A few years ago, I was managing a highly active, medium-sized forum, about 15,000 members, focused on a subject of intense interest and our members tended to stick around for years, so, there was an astonishing amount of collective knowledge, experience and expertise on tap. This was great for any newbies who happened by but, of course, they all tended to ask the same questions and, predictably, this annoyed the Hell out of the established members. A universal response to almost every question became "Search It", delivered in varying degrees of politeness and they were quite right: a simple search would throw up thoughtful, well-written answers to almost any question imaginable.

I did everything I could to highlight and underline the usefulness of search, even modifying the forum templates to make it a more alluring option and posting alerts in the posting page but, even so, it became clear that normal users were simply not comfortable with the search facility.

It depressed me to see great posts being contributed only to watch them slip down the front index and into obscurity, often pushed out by less worthy or accurate posts. I realized that forums are not a great way to retain collective knowledge and began looking at alternatives, eventually deciding that wikis were the perfect solution.

With great fanfare, we launched our wiki. This, I assured our old hands, was the solution to disappearing content and endlessly repeated questions; your hard work will remain in place forever, easily found by those who need it, improved upon and added to over time but never forgotten or lost. If a question comes up on the forum, simply whack the best previous answers to that question into shape, stick them onto the wiki and point the questioner to the relevant page.

It was a nice theory. In reality, and despite our best efforts to port over as much knowledge as possible, our forum members simply never took to the idea and stuck with what they knew. To this day, they complain bitterly about newbies asking the same old questions and the wiki is long forgotten.

I believe what the wiki lacked was the forum's addictive social aspect - people who have much more important things to do with their time get sucked in and end up making the perceptual mistake of thinking that their position or standing within their virtual community is of any importance whatsoever. For the most part, forums are just a heavily disguised form of procrastination, and it is that social illusion that keeps people there, sharing knowledge, generating content.

The wiki is a much more logical way to share information but people prefer forums. Likewise, broccoli is better for you than crack but there are very few broccoli whores.

What is great about Satisfaction is that it retains the social element of forums while cutting down on both the frustration of duplicate questions and the loss of posts over time by automatically conducting a search based on the user's question before the user can write the body of his post. Smart, smart, smart.

When I said, above, that I would use a true platform for everything, what I meant was that there is a universe of perfectly useful information out there that has drifted down into the darkness of forums archives, occasionally thrown up by Google but, for the most part, dormant.

Given the more effective front-end that Satisfaction provides, I would focus on certain subject areas and start excavating that dormant wisdom, re-editing the best posts to create FAQ sites full of brilliant, concise answers to questions that have not yet been asked. The aim of each site would be to create a core that was sufficiently useful for a real community to start gathering around it, challenging the monopoly of the entrenched forums in each subject area. This could be done without Satisfaction but I suspect that the added edge of usability could make all the difference in jump-starting each site into a real community. The lack of a normal forum's frustrations would then make it easier for that community to remain active.

I'm not talking here about Web-scraping or plagiarism but, rather, taking general knowledge that has already been freely shared, rewording it and repositioning it so that it may be found more easily. As I say, there is a universe of information out there that should be available but, due to the structural limitations of existing forums, is not. The Satisfaction platform could, just possibly, rewrite the rules and the rewards for getting that right will be huge.

I am SO all over this subject once I get back from the gym!

Well, off the top of my head, I can already think of something that would work beautifully and would very much like to find out more.

Do you maintain a thread or list specific to these developments?

Cameron, it was actually reasonably clear to me that, having entered via Pownce, I was now in Satisfaction's own support area. My use of the wrong name was, as Amy suggests, down to lack of coffee rather than any lack of clarity in your interface.

Slightly different color schemes would be good but would not, in this case, have saved me from my abject self-humiliation.

LOL, sorry for the confusion Amy, I was talking, 100%, about Satisfaction and have edited my post to correct my mistake.

Funnily enough, a few hours ago a friend pointed me towards Pownce as an interesting concept but, somehow, their support service has grabbed my imagination instead!

"It's important to know who we are, what we are"

"... we're an open system ... to a point".

Isn't that a tad contradictory?

Surely it makes sense to abstract out the focus of the site from the underlying technology, allowing you to have a brand/site tightly focused upon this niche (and it is a great , big cavernous niche with tons of potential) but also be free to use the same tech to run other brands/sites with different foci?

Yes, it would require a completely separate team of moderators but the advantages for Satisfaction, apart from building another lucrative brand, would be that it would:

1. Draw off discussion not entirely suited to Satisfaction's focus

2. Provide a sandbox for experimentation that can feedback into Satisfaction, without having to chop and change within Satisfaction itself.

3. Familiarize more people with a Satisfaction-type interface.

4. Escalate awareness of Satisfaction's existence long before users find themselves in need of company-centered support.

As I say, your innovation has created a window - a pretty small ancillary team could collect on that.

Apologies, I was totally confusing Satisfaction with Pownce in one of my replies above - I discovered Satisfaction via Pownce and, clearly, I'm a confused individual right now.

Rmm, I agree, that's why I'm suggesting that they split it off to maintain the main site's clarity of purpose.

Thanks guys.

As it happens, I'm extremely familiar with forums, groups and other forms of collective conversation. What strikes me as Satisfaction's advantage is that it lowers the barrier to participation and intelligently heads off duplicate questions in a way that the alternatives currently do not. Those are big advantages, unfortunately big enough to guarantee that you will see them being duplicated by others in all their AJAX goodness within the next six months.

The focus on companies is smart and I read, in another thread here, a Satisfaction employee's statement that the aim is for Satisfaction to become strongly associated in people's minds as the place to come for that specifc type of support.

Might it not be a good idea, however, to create another brand with its own website, driven by the same tech, to accommodate non-company subject matter? That would do a lot to familiarize people with the general concept while keeping Satisfaction itself even more tightly focused.

Yes, such general conversations can occur at Yahoo or Google groups but, temporarily, your interface is better, your barrier to entry is lower, you should seize the opportunity to draw more users in your direction while you can; your advantage won't last forever.