Saturday, 2 May 2015

Starting a Community: Buzz



Hi friends, welcome to my last blog post for this semester! For this week’s post, I am a community manager for a social platform called Buzz. Buzz is an interactive social community designed for people who are visiting Brisbane or locals who just want to discover more about the city. Buzz offers a list of attraction and activities within close proximity depending on the user’s location where they are able to see and potentially meet Buzzers who are close by.

Buzz provides value to users without being dependent on network effects – discussed in one of my previous blogs “The Network Effect: Tumblr”. The non-social benefits facilitate the adoption of early users when a new platform is going to be released. Therefore, Buzz will not need a significant number of users to add value to the platform.

Stage One Benefits

Buzz is aimed at tourists and locals who are eager to explore more of a particular city around the world. The platform offers appropriate tourist rights with eateries available where they can enjoy alone or with friends. Another non-social aspect of Buzz is that each time a place or activity is completed or visited, a badge is awarded to the user, motivating Buzzers to experience more of the city and getting more out of their visit. These features are not dependent on network effects and adds value to the social platform.

Early Adopter Benefits

There are many applications and platforms similar to Buzz – Urbanspoon, Foursquare, The Urban List, etc. So in order to gain users in the early stages, Buzz needs to rise above these platforms in a different and encouraging way. Therefore, the early adopter benefits that Buzz will provide are discounts and perks to the venues listed just for registered Buzz users. This triggers the network effect as each user that is registered to Buzz is constantly sharing the platform with their friends, increasing the Buzz community.

Increasing Success Expectations 

To increase the success expectation of Buzz is to constantly update the venues and activities available on the social platform. This is a very simple way to encourage more people to register and more businesses and companies to branch out and be apart of Buzz.

Are you interested in using Buzz the next time you travel? 

8 comments
Thursday, 30 April 2015

The Network Effect: Tumblr





This week’s post is on how the four types of network effects: Direct, Indirect, Cross-Network and Local Social Influence, are used to add value to Web 2.0 platforms. I will be discussing how Tumblr generates these four network effects to increase their user base as well as adding value to the service and products.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform owned by Yahoo! Inc where users post multimedia, text and other content all associated with tags to form a blog. Tumblr users can also interact with each other through following one another, reblogging, liking posts and exchange messages through the ‘ask box’. These features, and many more, encourage the Tumblr community to stay active as they gain followers while posting more content to the website.




The Direct Effect is the value of a product or service is increased when the adoption rate is increased. Tumblr’s value is their user base where the larger amount of users, the more content which generates reblogs, likes and follows – which all demonstrates the Network Effect. As Tumblr’s user base grows, content will be more of quality which will engage more users and make already registered users want to post more.

The Indirect Effect is the increase in Tumblr’s user base, there is a potential for an unplanned product or service to be born. As Tumblr has a very wide array of user base, it is easy to make money off the blogging website. Users with a large amount of followers, some as young as 14, are gaining dollars off their personal Tumblr by selling ad space or monetize with ads from Google AdSense or other alternatives on their personal blogs.




As Tumblr’s user base increases, the activity of the website does so as well. Therefore, a cross-network effect occurs because of added value by a second service or product. Tumblr reaches people around the world with different knowledge backgrounds. As for this, the content posted on the website ranging from architectural layouts, programming codes to photography and even math equations. This drives activity on the website with such useful content and provides Tumblr with potential employees for their growing company.




Tumblr is the microblogging and social networking home to 420 million users where they interact socially through tagged posts, reblogging and liking. The posts on tumblr can be tagged that will not disappear unless edited and can be tracked by the 420 million users on the website. Tumblr also provides the user with an option to create a side blog on which could be based around one theme that can solely evolve from one tag.

Tumblr’s numbers are still growing to this day. Have you used Tumblr before? What do you think?


References

https://www.tumblr.com/about
http://monetizepros.com/blog/2014/25-ways-to-make-money-on-tumblr/
http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/tumblr-user-stats-fact/

10 comments
Monday, 6 April 2015

Lightweight Models & Cost Effective Scalability: Pinterest




Web 2.0 is evolving so quickly that it is no surprise that a lot more can be done for less. Through O’Reilly’s lightweight models and cost effective scalability method, I will be discussing how Pinterest implements the pattern to reduce costs while producing effectively and cheaper.


Pinterest is a content sharing service founded by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra in 2010. (Pinterest, n.d.) Users are able to upload, save, sort and manage media content through the pinboards. Pinterest is like a personalised pin board where users can interact with other members through pinning items and creating pin boards. Pinterest is one of the most talked about and used social media websites on the Internet and has the biggest and brightest future in the world of social media.




The growth of Pinterest is phenomenal with a whopping growth of 637% by the performance of the Pin This button. The site currently attracts approximately 2.5 billion monthly page views and five million article pins, daily. Pinterest’s user base is a growing 40 million where the 124 Pinterest employees have 400, 000 users each to themselves. (Cohen, 2012) This is a strong example of doing more with less. Although it is quite obvious that Pinterest is outsourcing whenever possible but still keeping the brand image.




The easy usability of Pinterest engages users and makes it extremely popular among users through word of mouth and allowing them to share their pins through other social media networks. The site’s infinite scrolling ability screams ease of use that encourages the user to browse without the concept of time, allowing rapid data and user growth. Pinterest is also free to sign up, maintaining part of O’Reilly’s method of being low cost, reaching a larger audience. (O'Reilly, 2005)





Pinterest’s usage growth was undoubtedly from combing the two best things: amazing product with an amazing scheme for viral marketing. Every function on Pinterest is linked with Facebook or Twitter that gives the site low-cost marketing and keeps the user and new users engaged. The site is particularly good at attracting new users and is also designed very well for the ordinary human and businesses. What do you think?

References


Cohen, D. (2012). Look Out Facebook's Like Button: Pinterest's Pin This Sees 637 Percent Growth Since February. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/evidon-pinterest-pin-this/402348?red=af

O'Rielly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Pinterest. (n.d.). About.  https://about.pinterest.com/en

1 comment
Thursday, 2 April 2015

Perpetual Beta: Foursquare


Change is what makes the world go ‘round, what advances us as human beings and most importantly, what motivates software updates and new, innovative features. Perpetual beta is the concept of software that leaves behind the boring and bland software release cycle and takes on the exciting Internet to become a service that is always readily available and improves through user activity and participation. (O’Reilly, 2005)  In this week’s post, I’ll be discussing how the pattern of perpetual beta is applied through Foursquare.

Foursquare helps you find places you’ll love, anywhere in the world




Foursquare is a local search and discover application, providing a personalized local search experience for all users. Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai created this service in 2009 and until July 2014, a social networking layer was launched that allowed users to share their location with friends, aiming to provide very personalized recommendations of suitable places to visit based on a user’s current location. Throughout the years, Foursquare has flourished into a phenomenal sensation by creative design, interactive features and engaging users.

Forever Updating and Engaging




Since the launch in 2009, Foursquare was limited to 100 worldwide metro areas. Since then, Foursquare has undergone countless updates and is currently on version 8.0, released in 2014. Each release is jam packed with new features:

  • 2010: Announced a check-in application to let users discover new locations and activities. Foursquare created a list of personal places and activities named to-do’s where it would remind the user where there were to-do items close by. (Siegler, 2010)
  • 2011: Foursquare was released for iPhone and Android users in early 2011. Added a new feature called Radar to notify when three or more friends have checked in nearby.
  • 2012: Foursquare had a redesigned the whole application allowing users to browse by category. They also collaborated with Facebook, allowing users to recruit their Facebook friends. (Scott, 2012)
  • 2013 & 2014: Foursquare 6.0 and 7.0 was released with many updates along with Foursquare 8.0 and Swarm 1.0 in 2014. 


Foursquare engages and recruits new users like no tomorrow. They encourage users to share everything about their location and even places that they’re not at through the to-do’s. This allows Foursquare to keep an eye on usage and information where they can release new features based on the data. Each feature that is designed is cleverly created around the community feedback to improve on the usability of Foursquare.





All I see for Foursquare is happiness and success - As long as they closely follow O’Reilly’s perpetual beta method. What do you think?

References 

Foursquare. (n.d). About https://foursquare.com/about
O'Rielly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Scott, C. (2012) Glancee CEO explains social discover apps at SXSW. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2502396/data-center/glancee-ceo-explains-social-discovery-apps-at-sxsw.html

Siegler, M. (2014) Foursquare goes beyond the check in. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/foursquare-2/



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