Friday reading

Futuristic Play: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics! "As a rough estimate, I've found that it takes between 25-40% of your resources to do analytics REALLY well. So for every 3 engineers working on product features, you'd want to put 1 just on analytics. This may seem like a ton (and it is), but it throws off indispensible knowledge that you can't get elsewhere, like:

* Validating your assumptions
* Pinpointing bottlenecks and key problems
* Creating the ability to predict/model your business to make future decisions
* It tells you which features actually are good and what features don't matter"


Master of 500 Hats: Q: What Does Your *PLAY* Button Do? (increasing User Activation thru "Site Animation")
: "Q: what if you created a PLAY button that automated the action you want the user to take, and just act like the user hit PLAY after 3-5 seconds if they don't do anything?"

Lightspeed Venture Partners: Is Social Media a business? "There is an interesting parallel to search advertising here. In 2000, search inventory was monetized like every other form of online inventory, through banner ads. It wasn’t until Overture, and later Google, adopted the text ad-CPC standard that the distinctive thing about search inventory, user intent, was appropriately monetized. This created a new category of advertising that is now larger than banner advertising. Although some might disagree, I believe that a similar opportunity will eventually be unlocked by social media once the right ad unit standards emerge"