Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Wait, before you show me yet another longtail business plan, have you done the math to know how long the tail really is in your market really is? Don’t assume that in every business that the long tail is created equally.

The Long Tail meme is a great one and story you’ll be hearing even more about (if that’s possible) now that the book is out. The long tail is a wonderfully evocative name for a certain type of business model that’s springing up everywhere in the web2.0 and especially the content industry. The basic premise being that technology has now made it possible to reduce the frictions of serving even the tiniest of niche markets – which in aggregate could add up to big business – if the latent demand in these markets actually exist.

This post stems a conversation I was having with Rob Paterson over on his blog here about the (so called) 1% rule. And why I think it’s dangerous to apply a fixed rule of thumb (such as the 80/20 rule or the idea postulated that most of the content of any socialmedia community will be produced by 1% of the participants)

Now it’s certainly true that great many markets (from blogosphere traffic to record sales) follow a declining powerlaw or long tail curve.

However, the concavity of that curve is affected by many factors including, for instance, the nature of the community, the design and/or intrinsic properties of the interaction medium. For example, the fall-off of the curve is much different for some markets or communities than for others even if they both follow a long tail curve.

look at the shape of the curve, for example of the most popular tracks of the Proclaimers (classic one hit wonder with “i would walk 500 miles”
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Proclaimers/+charts

vs steepness of the curve of the rolling stones (flatter)
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Rolling+Stones

vs Beatles (even more flat)
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles

What is the moral of this story? To use these two extreme examples, If you had the chance to go in to business marketing, say the long tail of the Beatles Catalogue I would go for it. But the Proclaimers Catalogue? Now matter how many tracks you’re willing offer, the public is only ever going to buy one of them.

Some tails are longer than others Caveat marketer.

As with all businesses, it pays to know your market. The power law curve follows the equation y=x^-n where the greater the n the steeper the curve. Plot out the curve of your customer base in excel and see what curve fits. Eyeball (or indulge in a little integral math) to see where the bulk of the area under your curve really is.

We have Demo’s on tap tonight:

1. WildApricot
2. JobLoft.com – Google maps-powered job board
3. Filemobile Power tools for bloggers, letting users videoblog and moblog with ease. Democamptoronto account setup at Filemobile (democamptor, password), so upload your stuff to: [email protected], or login and upload.
4. Languify A not-yet-released tool from the Nuvvo team & NicolaasHandojo to manage translating your user interface to new languages. (For more information see DemoCampToronto8Languify.)
5. Mike McDerment (FreshBooks.com) – How to Measure the Success of Your Web Service

sign up here

location is at no regrets (lets hope there’s a mic this time?)

Jevon sent this link my way today about wiki’s rivaling Microsoft Office in the workplace.

A wiki in its simplest terms is a web page with a big “Edit this page” button at the top that gives (up to) any web surfer the ability to edit the page’s contents. If you’ve signed up for democamp or casecamp or Enterprise2.0 night, you’ve used a wiki. Wiki’s hold a lot of promise as shared workspaces and dynamic and responsive repositories of information such as the great wikipedia itself.

In the working world, wiki’s are quite commonly used by the likes of software developers and engineers. Interestingly though, in the rest of the world, wiki’s are used by what could be described, to a statistically reasonable degree of accuracy, as absolutely nobody at all. Why is this? Is it that engineers are more accustomed to sharing and collaborative work modes? are they just more savvy? or is it that the technology itself that has this troublesome property of seeming utterly intimidating at first only revealing its utter simplicity after you’ve had sufficient experience with it. [I have often felt that any good product in search of adoption should be the opposite – seem utterly simple at first and only reveal it’s layers of complexity and subtlety as your experience grows]. Anyway, my argument is that MSOffice really shouldn’t lose too much sleep to wiki’s as they stand.

but then, there is recent word that Microsoft itself is adopting wiki’s in it’s upcoming version of Sharepoint. Should current wiki’s be worrying about microsoft?

Now some of my friends in local the tech sphere have already been fairly dismissive to me about the Microsoft “wiki”. This on the grounds that Microsoft is offering far from a pure wiki, that the sharepoint version doesn’t even support certain fundamental and “proper” behaviors of a wiki.

The prospect, i wonder, though if these poo poo-ers have properly considered is this… perhaps that any substantial deviations from pure canonical wiki can’t help but be anything but an improvement?