The application is actually built around the principle of Dunbar’s number and beckons you to invite your closest personal relationships so that you can have the most meaningful experiences. I recently sat down with Path CEO, Dave Morin to ask what people should do when someone that is not an intimate person friend wants to be a part of their social graph. Dave believes that you are doing people a favor if you ignore their request. Path is supposed to only be the content that you care about and that you want to see from the people that you care the most about. It is your personal journal and so you should not have anyone reading it that you would not want to share the fact that your kid scored the game winning goal in the soccer game.

Dave Morin's epic table is not their secret sauce, but I bet it helps.

I hear from people all the time that Path is incredibly cool looking, but that it is not for them because their friends are not on the application. I have a bit of a different philosophy. Users who like the concept of Path should just start using it to do their life journaling. The app is incredibly versatile and can be your means to publish content to twitter, Facebook, foursquare and even Tumblr and it makes a very cool timeline that can quickly remind you of all of your adventures. Create all of your mobile content on Path, push it to other networks when you feel it is appropriate, but make Path the hub of your mobile content universe. Do this even if you do not have any friends on Path. If you need help getting people on to Path, ask them to take the Path Challenge.

When you have an epic construct like the Path emoticons, you put it on a shirt.

If you journal, when you start to work on your friends and family, you can show them how beautiful the app is with a lot of your own data. You can take them through the fun creation process, show them how quickly it uploads video and how easy it is to look back over time on the things that you did. Dave tells me that people love to take pictures of food, menus and other artifacts that give them clues as to how the experience was at a restaurants, bar or other awesome place. I believe that Path is what Gowalla wanted to be. It’s your personal log of not only your adventures but of your life in general. And it’s going to get better with the Nike Fuelband integration which will export data to Path via bluetooth.

Remember, Path is an intimate social network. You are supposed to only be friends with people who you are close enough to to care about all of the content they create. This is what makes Path awesome. I am using my Path to get to interact with the startup scene, share with allen & gerritsen people and with some very close friends like my book co-author, Aaron Strout. I am actively trying to recruit my family, but they are still resisting, yet they seem to almost be coming around. And I will not rest until they do.

red is love

The new Path user interface is gorgeous. Dave Morin’s team has come up with a user experience that will change the way that people think about application design.  Path abandons the standard bottom toolbar that most consumer behavior oriented applications have for 2 buttons in the sticky header and a red plus sign that looms on the bottom left hand of the screen. Clicking the plus sign reveals a swiss army knife that allows you to add a new journal entry starting with a photo, a person, location, song, thought or your lucidity state. The last of which would be even cooler if it was integrated with life stats hardware like the Fitbit or Jawbone Up.

the plus sign fans geisha-style to show post options

The new user interface is gorgeous. It is UX pr0n and this version of Path will change or at least challenge the way that every app designer thinks about every consumer app they design moving forward. One of our best designers, Charlie Guerrero picked it up for the first time this morning and was blown away by how fluid and responsive the app is for everything that is going on.

chief ninjas everywhere are intrigued

The application is clearly designed after the Facebook timeline. They have adopted the cover concept as well as the entire timeline concept. What Path does better than any other application is that it tells you who has seen your post. That is really quite bold.

boldly showing exactly who sees your content

Here is the problem. It is still just Path. While I think that the new design pattern will inspire a lot of curiosity, I see more applications adopting this style of design than people actually making Path part of their daily routine. In other words, in spite of the fact that it can post to Facebook, twitter and foursquare it’s not going to replace Facebook mobile unless Facebook acquires Path and decides to replace their mobile experience with Path. Path is decidedly cooler, but people will reject it because 700 million of their closest friends are on Facebook and this is essentially an alternative.  The adoption of many of Facebook timeline’s design patterns coupled by the fact that founder Dave Morin is ex-Facebook and still has strong relationships could be an indication of an exit strategy. Time will tell.

looking a lot like Facebook timeline

Another thought though: It knows where you are, who you are with and it knows if you are sleeping and knows if you’re awake. If they just add an indicator for whether you are bad or good they could have a suitor at the North Pole.

You may recall that Ditto allows users to express their intent in a particular neighborhood and that it does it in such a way that it does not leave much to the imagination. In other words, we KNOW you want coffee, what kind you want and where you are.

Imagine businesses were to begin taking advantage of this and providing a user reasons to come see them. What if businesses could monitor for people who needed them similar to the way that Uber allows black car drivers to see if people need a ride during down time. The example I always use (and I am waiting for this to happen) is that I am in a neighborhood, I say that I want a latte and a coffee show responds with “Hey Mike, come on in. We will save you a spot next to the window and you can use our free wi-fi. Do you like caramel in your latte? What kind of milk?” I would be thrilled and I would act immediately without worrying about whether they were giving me a dollar off.

If businesses could use Ditto similar to how Uber is used, to fill times when they are not full, to attract new customers with or without offers and people could do everything from accept a deal to pay with Ditto (similar to what is now happening with Zaarly) it would open up a great deal of possibilities for interesting data and segmentation. Take a look at this concept of a merchant side ditto application that allows a coffee shop to monitor the area “Bananatown”.

Notice that each of the people who want coffee in Bananatown have a series of stats. These are based on their actions through the Ditto application.

• Probability: This ratio is the amount of times a person has acted versus the number of times they have expressed an intention to act. Below it is also the true number (in this case 48/50). This tells the merchant how likely the person is to act on an offer. Mike is extremely likely.
• Offers: The next number tells how many offers Mike currently has and whether or not he has acted on one.
• Average / Remaining: This tells the merchant on average how long Mike takes to act and how much time has elapsed since then, making it easy for them to tell whether they should act.

I also imagine having ways to tell what kinds of offers that Mike responds to – deals, invitations etc. I see businesses being able to set thresholds based on certain types of activators and automatically pushing an offer within a neighborhood (geo-fence).

How else would you like to see the data segmented? Do you think that this kind of merchant model is the key to Ditto user adoption?

What do you think?

Compact the Content

Problem: Showing the buzz and all the comments (even just 10 – and how are they decided?) is really noisy. Particularly when you follow people who get serious engagement like Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore and “Mr. Noisy” Robert Scoble. Users will decide when they want to read the comments. Result: more content is read. I do not see a decrease in engagement. The people who don’t like to read comments were not going to read them anyway.

Filter Out Channels

Problem: Some people are still using multiple social media tools. They want to continue to use them for what they like to use them for and they are not coming to Buzz to have that content duplicated. OK. Let them remove the content they do not want to see. Caveat: They can’t remove Buzz original content.

Here’s a quick and easy way to remove the content you do not care about.

Clicking “Filter Channels Options” takes your to this screen that allows you to set options globally and also to change your mind if you decide you want the content back. (Yeah, I grabbed the channels from FriendFeed).

Make Buzz Post to Twitter

That’s game over.

excerpt from the #specwork09 discussion

• Sessions begin with definition of business problems. We actually go into them hoping to define a business problem or series of problems to solve. It is not about “we want to design something” yet.
• Audience Intelligence teams learn the needs, size, segments and location of the marketplace.
• Strategists start to define the idea and the brand pillars or align the idea to current brand pillars. Design, Audience Intelligence, Media, and Analytics resources are involved to protect design interests, media availability and possibilities, and success measurement.
• Consensus on ideas is built.
• Campaigns are defined. Briefs are written.
• Analytics teams figure out how to measure success, spot trends and forecast futures.
• Now we design!
• Execute
• Measure
• Rinse
• Repeat

Through this process a connection is built between the agency and the client. The agency treats the client’s brand as their own and takes a level of responsibility for success. The designers are part of the strategy. They understand the process. They can discuss the pillars with the planners and strategists. They get true audience insight in a way that a single specification sheet cannot bring to light. They can talk to the measurement folks about how we define success. They weave themselves into the brand fabric and in some cases they follow a similar process across projects.

Your brand, your campaign, your SUCCESS depend on your experience and your marketing. The way I see it, you can pay a premium [or put together a creative model that allows an agency to be payed based on your success] for any agency that is thoughtfully integrated or you can throw it into the one-off crowdsourcing blender and hope you get a smoothie.

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.

At the end of the day, your segmentation should tell your group or organization exactly how to focus on a particular audience. Keep in mind that an organizational segmentation is typically a pretty intense exercise, but that you might segment campaign audiences or web traffic on the fly and change it to suit your needs as campaign messaging changes or web traffic ebbs and flows.

Just remember that if your segmentation model does not include factors that drive the problem that you are trying to solve, you should not expect it to be highly actionable. I often am asked “Hey, can you do something with this data? How about a segmentation?” and am given Dun and Bradstreet profiles and customer/prospect information and little else. There is a lot of directional information I can derive about the way that you do business from this data, but I’m sort of left licking my finger and holding it in the air when you ask me how to use the segmentation to drive your media. If the segmentation is actionable, I would say that you should focus on your core, growth and niche segments.

To succeed:

• Start with a problem to solve. It can be as simple as not knowing where the company is the most profitable.
• Insist on historical transaction data that includes both demographic and actionable information. For example, profit margins for sales, conversions for campaigns and goal related metrics for web sites.
• Make sure that you understand the segments that were created and that they make sense to your business. There are n ways to look at data sets. They should be easy to understand as well as to act on. Too many segments can be unwieldy and difficult to act on. Too few can leave you without focus.

The awesomeness of your segmentation depends on following the aforementioned. There are other subtleties to this kind of exercise that are learned over time, but these are basics akin to boil water, put tea bag in cup, pour water.

Happy segmenting!

Goats

Johnathan Rosenberg’s Goats is a comic about Johnathan Rosenberg, Phillip, beer, Satan, monkeys, beer, aliens, popes, chickens, Hitler, robots, goats and programming. If that’s not a formula for success, I don’t know what is.

Questionable Content

Jeph Jacques masterpiece is a look at the crunchy world of indie rock with occasional forays into death metal. The characters embody an Amherst collegesque lifestyle, which I suspect comes directly from the author. Jeph’s strips are always accompanied by a transparent and somewhat ego centric look into his mind in the right sidebar. His protagonist, Martin is a nice guy – indie rocker with nearly no aspirations except to play in his band. The hook is Martin’s wierd relationships with a handful of women with social issues that they wear like badges of honor. The tech side of indie is represented by Martin’s small, robotic sidekick, an Anthro PC called Pintsize. Jeph isn’t afraid to mock his own formula through Pintsize, or any of his characters for that matter. The complexity of the relationships alone are good for a belly laugh a week, but don’t stop there. Jeph also has a recommended listening section that is worthy of its OWN site.

Scary Go Round

If I had to rank them, this would probably be my favorite. John Allison fully utilizes the power of his cheeky British utility belt. He writes women better than anybody. Shelley Winters antics, including frequent resurrection, make her one of the most interesting women on the web. Shelley’s interests include adventuring, writing fan fiction including “The Saddest Wookie”, pushing the limits of expense accounts, judge fearing and fair judging. The comic is full of delicious political and corporate satire including insight into how the Tackleford Mayor’s office “works” and its diplomatic relations with Robotania. Shelley’s friends are interesting and range from the King of the Vagabonds to a young inventor with Indiana Jones meets Back to the Future sensibilities. John also periodically changes between analog and digital means of creation which both astound and annoy the pants off of me. I put him on a short list of web personalities that I would like to have a beer with.

Wigu

Wigu is the story of a young boy’s adventures with his family and the characters of a cartoon show that actually exists in a parallel universe. The family is beyond dysfunctional and hilarity ensures. Wigu himself is a genius and creates a spaceship called the Googel Maverick which allows him to meet Topato Potato and his colleague, Sheriff Pony. You can’t explain shit like this. Jeffrey Rowland is ridiculously brilliant, but I suspect he is one of those people who could justify cutting his own ear off and mailing it to a love interest. I pro actively filed a preemptive restraining order against him even though we have never met. In fact, I got the template from his website.

For each of these, I recommend starting at the beginning and reading a week’s worth each day. If you have read any of these, what is your take?

I love the UPS whiteboard campaign.

The ads are mesmerizing they are sticky and the creative does not get in the way of the message.
The timing is impeccable. Andy Azula, the artist in the ads and creative director for The Martin Agency, makes what he is doing look easy. The tongue-in-cheek humor has longevity and is the inspiration for some ridiculous youtube knockoffs.

The Martin Agency got almost everything right. The music is perfect. Nearly. You see, the band is called…

THE POSTAL SERVICE.

Google introduced a new line of googlevative designs for their iGoogle personal portal. They assembled some of the best known designers, artists and musicians to build a series of trendy skins as part of Google’s global effort to allow its users a way to make their experience unique. Bonus they can also express their love for some of their favorite artists.

First movers include hip-hop designer and baseball asterixer Mark Ecko, Oscar de la Renta, world-famous Australian baby photographer, Anne Geddes, global lifestyle brand and female power advocate, Dianne von Furstenberg, Dolce&Gabbanna, Chilean painter, Coldplay, Mario Toal and Korean illustrator 스노우캣, aka Snowcat.

But why stop at iGoogle? These are some of the top creatives in the world. Imagine a combination of their eye (or ear) catching design sensibilities combined with the user experience ninjitsu err barbarianism The Barbarian Group; or … the sky is the limit.