Category: social networking

Time to c—

At lunch today someone related this to me.

In the video game industry there is this expression called, “Time To Crate which is the shortest amount of time it takes for a gamer to reach the first crate (which contains health, ammo, and assorted goodies) in the game. Apparently, the shorter the time, the worse the game.

Because the gaming world is starting to merge with the social networking world, there is a new term out: Time To Cock. This is the time between the release of a user-generated content system and the point where that system is used to create a cock.

Apparently, with the advent of online gaming, both times have reached record lows.

Which explains things like this…and this.

Last year, Tagged relaunched our namesake, in which we allowed users to create their own tags. I won’t tell you what our Time To Cock was, except to say, it’s best measured using this function.

Another friend mentioned that he was doing a search the other day on his old company’s website, eGroups. The top results were all pictures of penises—the exact same problem they had back when he worked there.

The internet never changes. Gotta ❤ it!

Posted on by tychay 0

Always a bigger fish

Alexa revised their ranking system again. Data is now limited to the last six months.

I thought I’d look up my website.

Tagged vs. competitors

Tagged’s traffic (in blue) vs. similar popular social networks: friendster, bebo, and orkut. I got the list of competitors from TradeVibes, excepting Facebook (too large), and Piczo.

As you can see, even in the last six months, we seem to be growing in the face of a declining social networking trend. That’s no surprise. we were the fastest growing social network in the United States last year in all categories (by percentage).

That’s good. But let’s look at the big boys.

Tagged vs. big boys

Tagged vs. the largest social networks. Technically Tagged is larger than hi5 in the U.S. (Nielsen NetRatings: 3rd in users/day, time spent/user, and ad market share). This is worldwide marketshare. Not that I can hold a grudge, hi5 was incubated out of the same offices as Tagged—long before I joined it.

Hmm, not even close (remember the graph is logarithmic). Well, at least with 19 places in the last three months, we’re still growing fast right?

Twitter comes out of nowhere.

What about Twitter? The rank for Twitter is Yesterday: #49; 7 day average: #51, 1 month average: #63, 3 month average: #93, 3 month change: -491(!)

There’s always a bigger fish. Congrats, Twitter. 🙂

Posted on by tychay 4

Ogres Select Consumption Over Networking (OSCON)

It’s weird how worlds intersect. Here is some lobbycon dialog:

“I don’t know, but if you plot the points, there aren’t many intersections. I’ve noticed it on my Facebook: The Open Source world has different geeks, and then the Web 2.0 world is mixed up. Priorities are f’d—people like X, who are big in the Web 2.0 world, nobody knows here.”

“Web 2.0 is…not even geeks really.”

“If it were, every party would be like the Ars Technica/Gizmodo WWDC party.”

“Haha.”

Continue reading about [More OSCON dialog after the jump]

Posted on by tychay 0

The boxes we are

A random post on my stalker feed brings me back of the last party

…

“Are you single?” It’s the second time at the party, Alex has asked that. The internal dialog is now in fine form.

This is San Francisco, shouldn’t you ask if I’m gay first?, “Stop trying to fill out my social networking registration page, Alex”

Somewhat less emphatically: “You are single?!” Then slightly more emphatically: “Terry is single”—as if repetition makes it true.

I’m in a relationship with my Nikon and it’s complicated. “My status is not some box you can check off,” I retort.

“Wait, you are single, aren’t you?” decidedly less emphatically.

That’s thrice! Damn Canon photogs! “You couldn’t even shoot my D3.” I laugh.

“Terry is single,” Alex declares to anyone who was interested. (Nobody was.)

Nelson Muntz voice: “Ha ha!” Maybe if you were a Nikon-toting hottie, I’d have given you a straight answer.

Party photography Q&A tree

Now, in my defense, when it comes to that senseless brand war, I have to represent. But I admit that it was a bit harsh, especially since, as an event photographer himself, he must get asked my most-despised geek-party conversation starter an awful lot: “Who are you with?” (i.e. “Who are you shooting for so I know if I should do a posedown.”)

We hates it, my precious, yes we do.

Coincidentally, just that day, I devised a customer support answer tree to turn this question into a lethal conversation-killer:

Party photography Q&A tree: “Who you with?”

…then give them that dismissive look, like they just said something incredibly stupid.

Continue reading Boxes and banter after the jump

Posted on by tychay 6

Zombie vs. Pirate

OR:

Zombie: What, oh what is this secret that you will never tell? Your status keeps threatening to not tell. It even reads “EVER!”
Zombie: Muuuuuuuust knoooooooooow gosssssip!
Zombie: p.s. Braaaaaaaaaaains

Zombies

Zombies
Z. Cioccolato, North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic DMC-LX1
1//125sec @ f/4, iso 100, 6.7mm (30mm)

Pirate: I could tell you, but then I’d have to, you know, kill you. 😉

Pirate: Do you know what vegetarian zombie’s say?
[More Zombie vs. Pirate after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Egos and assholes

The strange thing about search is it’s a lot like academia: full of assholes. I know, since I’m one of them. So I was trying to figure out why this twitter about my Keynote bothered me so:

“@tychay apparently serving red meat to the faithful at #phptek proving there are language Nazis on both sides.
—tweet from a stream follower

Then it hit me. I act like an asshole, I’m probably an asshole, but never, not once, do I engage in personal attacks that aren’t obvious jokes. I don’t go up there like the founder of Ruby on Rails [Ed: corrected (see comments)] and in every talk say (to me):

“DHH says…” by planetargon

“Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.”
—Wired Magazine

Haha.

No, really!

That’s hilarious!

In my current talk I have a slide that says to the viewer that if they disagree they should give me a big “Fuck Y—.” on their blog. I suppose that’s a bit ironic since this is the same talk where people explicitly create F-bomb counters on IRC and and twitter.

[Ego, assholes, internet architecture, being wrong, and learning after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 17

Advertising in social networking

Because I work in social networking, people often ask me about advertising in social networks. For some reason, they don’t buy the obvious excuse that I’m an engineer, not a business person or entrepreneur. What do I know?

[The problem of advertising in social networking]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3