"fair enough! I love the "air" terminology. I agree that positioning it more like a positive investment rather than something as hated as "tax" is a good idea." - Andrew Chen
"I think amazon is part inventory management - they are certainly smart at that - but there's also a big component which is the merchandising aspect. I agree with you that it's not clear if it'll be one big distributed player or if one store does it incredibly well - I think it has the potential to be the latter, as Google both operates a destination site and also has an ad network.
As I listed (repeated below), many of the following technologies are non-trivial and also completely merchandising-based (and doesn't relate to inventory management at all):
* Product recommendations
* Price testing
* Product bundling
* Search, browse, and navigational hierarchy
* Reviews, ratings, lists, and metadata
* Affiliate programs
* Ad targeting
* etc." - Andrew Chen
"cool, I really admire IMVU. very cool.
Yep, I think it'll take some time for the category for mature a bit more, which will cause a few companies to start going deeper into the tech. But early on, even simpler implementations do great, so there's less incentive to optimize the revenue streams." - Andrew Chen
"The previous company I was at handled a lot of search logs from the portals... almost all the top queries were navigational in nature, and so I do think that usage correlates with searches, especially aggregate across a state.
Here's cuil's stats:
http://www.google.com/insights......" - Andrew Chen
Yeah, it's surprising how often people use search to navigate. I find myself doing it pretty often too. I remember 5 years ago that someone with access to search logs were surprised to see the same thing, but then they thought through it and realized that searching often required fewer mouse clicks and/or keystrokes for people who had a search engine as their home page. - Erik S
"I noticed your netvibes email - this version "netvibes" not "netvibes.com" is certainly much nicer of a view: http://www.google.com/insights......
I think in particular with netvibes that since it's a start page, perhaps people don't search for it much." - Andrew Chen
"my friend formerly of HotOrNot say a similar thing about their core market... it's all people in rural areas that don't have many options to meet people. AdultFriendFinder is just another variation of a dating site, I think. I would guess a broad swath of dating sites have similar geographic profiles." - Andrew Chen
"Before making this map I also tried queries like "tito ortiz" "jenna jameson" "nascar" and stuff like that. Pretty fun to look at those graphs." - Andrew Chen
"I think there's some normalization happening already... just try searching for "jenna jameson" on google insights and you'll get Montana and Wyoming to light up fine. Same for "adultfriendfinder" - I'm just using the fun queries of course, but there are other ones which work also." - Andrew Chen
"Adam, have you tried playing around with aiderss? It basically takes a blog feed and filters it down to just the "good stuff" as defined by commenting activity, links pointing in, and all that good stuff. You might check it out as a way to stay on top of good blogs...
Here's the aiderss feed for my stuff, for example:
http://www.aiderss.com/best/an......." - Andrew Chen
"i agree with you that the IMVU model is compelling, but my point is that there's still a lot to be done in terms of how they (or any other game I've seen) merchandises, cross-sells, and otherwise quantitatively drives revenue like Amazon.com..." - Andrew Chen
"i like that distinction, and agree that some efforts are more time intensive.
In fact, I'd also add that they take time from specific types of employees - viral and SEO are typically more engineering centric whereas PR/blog outreach can be facilitated by nontechincal types" - Andrew Chen
"i don't know if you can rank the effectiveness of these techniques against each other - too much apples to oranges. I tend to go for scaleable techniques that don't cost any money. In general, only viral, widgets and SEO fall into this camp (which explains why they have all gotten so much attention). I'm pretty anti-blog, PR, techcrunch, etc. as a sole strategy for gaining traction." - Andrew Chen
"nice to meet you Andrew! I think I figured that most of the folks reading my blog are B2C folks, whereas all the B2B people are off reading something with fewer pictures of lolcats and myspace celebs floating around ;-) But perhaps I'm assuming incorrectly" - Andrew Chen
"got it. Plus I think B2B's are different... you can focus on serving thousands of customers, and it's not as important to figure out how to scale into millions of people!" - Andrew Chen
