KCOCCO ~ photo

Ocean City Sunrise

Kevin Cocco — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:39:42 GMT

Ocean City NJ Sunrise Over Atlantic City 8~6~2008

Open Social - Don't build a new community integrate with them

Kevin Cocco — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:14:45 GMT

Rather then trying to build a new MySpace, Facebook, Google Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo,.... the smarter play is to integrate with these communities and leverage their existing mega user bases and their interconnections. I finally found some time to review several of the Open Social Presentations from the Google IO conference in CA this June.

I recommend:
the presentation by Joseph Smarr 'OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My!'. Great over view of all the pieces and how they fit together. The presenter recommending Google's Friend Connect as an easy entry point into open social. Joseph is from Plaxo now owned by Comcast? Weird marriage, good for Comcast maybe if they can control the Plaxo community reaction... check out the comments to their blog post..uhg

'Best Practices for Spreading Your App without Ruining the User Experience' Kevin Marks has some great ways to look at growth of networks. Highly promoting Organic growth verse Viral growth ...."If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system". Viral growth spikes and user retention drops off just as quickly. Vivian Li talks about Usage Loops being more powerful than Invite Loops. Again bringing up that direct invite to a community tends to provide poor retention rates.

'Monetizing Application Traffic On Social Networks'
Excellent overview of the Social Media Applications and SocailMedia.com's ad capabilities. 'FriendRank' modeling to determine what friend data to integrate into a specific users ad...wild!

Groove Squeeze'n atop Lone Peak

Kevin Cocco — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:55:34 GMT

Alex Lemieux of GearLoopTopo.com documenting climbs and taking pictures of me on climbing route Open Book. The climb tops out on the crown of the granite-like/quartz monzonite cirque the Lone Peak 11,253'. After hiking the Alpine and Jacobs Ladder approaches, I recommend Jacobs. But, 5 1/2 miles of hiking with 5,650 elevation gain is no easy way up... my body is worked!

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Fannie Mae Freddie Mac Implicit Guarantee

Kevin Cocco — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:15:54 GMT

"The implicit guarantee" of the government backing/bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has given the USA "government's potential obligations which currently stand at about $9 trillion, would rise by an additional $5 trillion."
Wonderful graphics from NYTimes, ugly message!

Cocco nearly hit by plane climbing in Tuolumne

Kevin Cocco — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:53:47 GMT

Mozilla Firefox 3 or Adobe Flash the world record for most downloads in a day?

Kevin Cocco — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:31:45 GMT

Mozilla has 8,290,545 downloads of the new Firefox 3. Congrats!
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/18 ... way-to-go/

But, Ben Forta Abobe ColdFusion Guru reminds us that Adobe Flash has publicly stated they have had over 10 million downloads within one day..?
http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/200 ... ny-Records
Note, Ben's post was before the Mozilla launch..

Either way, nice work Firefox 3 team!

Net Promoter Score & the Ultimate Question

Kevin Cocco — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:58:39 GMT

I just read the The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by: Fred Reichheld. After being involved in technical implementations of several large customer satisfaction measurement projects I find Reichheld's model pragmatic and effective. Here are few of the basic highlights:

- The Ultimate Question is to ask customers would you promote/recommend the company.

- Great example of the ultimate survey question: "How likely is it that you would recommend company X to a friend or colleague?"

- "Extremely Likely"- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0- "Not at All likely"

- Reichheld recommends survey scales 10 - 0 verse 10 to 1 as the 1 is often confused with wrong end of scale.

- The scoring is:
10 & 9 - Promoters
8 & 7 - Passive
6 to 0 - Detractors

- The primary measurement is NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

- Less questions the better.. should help response rate and prevent customer aggravation. If you add another question Reichheld had the example 2nd followup question "What is the most important reason for the score you gave?". This would likely provide insight to areas of focus that would help move customers to become promoters.

- Goal should be to get a 65%(wow) response rate to get truly accurate measurements. Also do not give gimic/incentive for answers as this has proven to skew the results.

Google Real Estate Search displays Housing Search

Kevin Cocco — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:28:01 GMT

Noticed Google presented me with their Housing Search interface today when searching for the broad term 'Real Estate'... actually I intended on searching for Real Estate Gadgets.
This Housing search is combing through Google Base data. The Google house screen does not have any ads? This search tool is diluting their ad clicks on a spendy keyword "Real Estate". I am guessing the push is to get some more user demographic data (see remember this location check box was default opt-in) and kick the tires on their Google base housing search for a future goal..?..

No Name Peak White Pine

Kevin Cocco — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:00:31 GMT

Justin.tv Live Hot Tub and Crane

Kevin Cocco — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:35:07 GMT

Testing Justin.tv a little more... goal is to stream the crane dropping my new hot tub in the back yard... 8:30am May 1st.
Here is another article about Amazon and "cloud computing" http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazin ... /mf_amazon

Watch live video from kcocco's channel on Justin.tv