Charles Hudson's Weblog

After reading a few blog posts, like this one on GigaOm about how difficult the Amazon Appstore has been for developers who have paid applications, I wanted to share a few thoughts I had about why Amazon could eventually become a big distribution source for freemium Android games. In the name of full disclosure, Bionic Panda Games (where I work) did launch on the Amazon Appstore and did encounter a few of the vexing issues that were identified in the article. It’s not perfect yet, but I do see a pretty clear path toward relevance.

I think you need three things to really succeed as an app store, based on what we’ve seen from Apple and Google. And to be clear, success means that you as the app store make money and can drive enough distribution to developers that they too can build a big business on the back of your audience.

Payment-enabled customers + device footprint + well-merchandised store experience = Potential to Win as an App Store

1. Payment-Enabled Customers
One of the (many) things that makes the Apple iOS ecosystem so powerful is that Apple has 200 million hard-won credit cards on file. Having had iTunes prior to the app ecosystem meant that they were able to tap into a large audience of users for whom purchasing apps and in-game items is as simple as a single click.

Perhaps the only company more synonymous with one-click purchase experiences than Apple is Amazon – they did for the web what Apple has done for the iOS ecosystem when it comes to ease of transaction. And Amazon has tens of millions of payment-enabled customers by their own admission. I’m not sure why they haven’t gone through the process of making it easier for freemium game developers to integrate some variant of Amazon Flexible Payments Services as a way to charge for in-app purchases. That seems like a no-brainer way to enable freemium game developers to make real revenue through the Amazon Appstore.

2. Amazon’s Distribution Strategy for the Amazon Appstore
I think Amazon has a pretty clear strategy for how they will get their own Appstore deployed to tens of millions of consumers. This is all my speculation – but I think it makes sense:

Phase I: Give away top-tier games that are usually paid for free in order to get consumers to download and install the Amazon Appstore. This is just a simple quid pro quo. The goal is to give customers something of value (a free or greatly reduced install of a game they covet) in exchange for downloading and using the Amazon Appstore on their Android device. Provided Amazon can continue to find developers who want the exposure for their content, this strategy should help seed things.

Phase 2: Work with carriers to get preload deals so that the Amazon Appstore is on many more devices. Doing preload deals is nothing new. If you have relationships with carriers and can afford the economics required to make those deals interesting to them, that’s one way to get the Amazon Appstore in front of more consumers. This might prove to be trickier than it sounds, given that many carriers and handset makers themselves also have designs of building their own app stores. But this is still a strategy worth pursuing.

Phase 3: Launch an Amazon tablet, powered by Android, with the Amazon Appstore front and center as the primary application discovery method. The last thing Amazon can and should do (and is doing) is to build and sell its own Android tablets. This has less to do with games and more to do with the Kindle business. It’s a good hedge in the whole e-reader vs table debate and should allow Amazon to have a larger footprint for its cloud music and cloud video services. I would fully expect that Amazon will integrate its own Android market front-and-center on that product and will put its considerable marketing muscle behind promoting its table to both Kindle users and people who have yet to have settled on a tablet device.

3. Well-merchandised store
No need to belabor this one. Amazon is one of the world’s premier merchandisers when it comes to selling things online. I’d like to think they could bring some creative muscle to app discovery and recommendation.

It’s clear to me that Amazon is still in the early stages of building out their Amazon Appstore and that to count them out based on their current progress seems premature.

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In my dual roles as a Venture Partner at SoftTech VC and Co-Founder of Bionic Panda Games, I’ve met with a bunch of companies and teams who are focusing on trying to solve the problem of mobile application discovery. Simply put, the problem (as articulated by people trying to solve it) is that there are many more interesting applications out there than the typical consumer can find on his or her own. If you look at the number of apps in the Apple or Android markets, that’s probably true – no consumer can be fully aware of everything out there that could be of interest.

By and large, the teams I’ve met are incredibly smart, clever teams of people who I think will impact the world of mobile applications in positive ways. But after having met with a handful of really great folks working in this space, I’m becoming convinced that application discovery is a bigger problem for those applications looking to get discovered than it is for consumers looking for useful or entertaining applications. Three things I’d like to throw out there for discussion:

1. There is a lot of mobile application discovery that happens face-to-face in the real world and will probably never show up in your application analytics system. If you’ve gone out in a major city lately, I’m sure you’ve seen this happen. Someone pulls out a phone and shows off an application. Someone else at the table says, “Wow, that’s a cool application – I’m going to get it right now.” And that person starts downloading the application. That’s the beauty of the the combination of app stores, smartphones, and reasonably good data connections – if you find a new application you want, you can get it nearly instantly. No more waiting until you get home to have a friend invite you or send you an email. Just grab the app in context and grow. I’m not sure that there’s an opportunity for an app to help facilitate that face-to-face communication.

To most analytics systems, these installs will look largely organic (someone just installed your app and it didn’t come from a trackable link of any sort) even though they aren’t. And, as a developer, it’s kind of hard to know how often this is happening for any given application. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway – lots of people will instantly install applications that their friends are using when this discovery happens face-to-face as your friend can often tell you (in his or her own words) why he or she likes the application and how he or she uses it. That counts for a lot for most people.

2. Most consumers are not actively looking for new applications to download, but will download them in order to get something else or based on the recommendation of a friend. I just don’t think most people sit around thinking about applications to discover. Most people are busy doing other things – reading, playing with the applications they already have, chatting with friends, etc. However, as I mentioned above, I do think that there is value in knowing what applications your social graph is using. For example, if you’re trying to make a decision on installing an app with strong network effects (any social networking or communications application, for example), knowing what your friends use has real value. For example, if most of your friends have standardized on using a particular location-sharing, photo-sharing, social networking, or other social application, knowing that can and probably should influence your choice of application to use.

The other use case is the incentivized install use case. If people are using an application and can get a reward in that application for downloading or installing someone else’s application, it shouldn’t be surprising that they are willing to do so – installing an application doesn’t really cost most users anything (other than the space on the device and the time required to install it) and the act of installing an application is a known behavior.

3. Open question – will consumers fire up an application to help them find other applications? One question I have is around how application discovery is delivered as a product. A number of the products in the space today involve opening or installing an application in order to discover additional applications to use. I am not sure this is the model that consumers want, but it’s still too early to tell.

Despite everything I’ve said above, application discovery is a problem for application developers. It’s really just a subset of the marketing challenge we all face in standing out in a sea of tens of thousands of applications that exist in app stores – being discovered is a good way to grow an application and absolutely essential in the growth plans of many companies.

As always, comments are welcome. And if you like this you can always follow me on Twitter.

I’ve been tracking the progress of Google’s In-App Purchases for awhile. It’s not just academic to me – we’re building Android games over at Bionic Panda Games and the development of that product is pretty important to us. Previously, I worked on the Facebook Platform, which went through its own process in launching Facebook Credits. In watching how Apple, Facebook, and now Google roll out payments on their own platforms, I have a few thoughts and observations to share. In watching these platforms all roll out their own solutions, there are three things I’ve noticed.

Before I jump into the three observations, I think most developers want the same thing from any payment provider. First, you want payment enabled customers – you need to have people who have the capacity and ability to pay. Apple solves that – they have nearly 200 million credit cards on file. Facebook is working to solve that by nudging customers to sign up for Facebook Credits. Mobile providers like Zong, Boku, and BillToMobile solve this by enabling anyone with a mobile phone to use that as a billable identity. PayPal has a ton of payment enabled accounts as well – you get the idea. Second, developers really want to either have a standard, low friction UI (a la iTunes) or the ability to control the payments flow and UI themselves to optimize for conversion. It’s a pretty simple formula – payment enabled customers + low friction UI generally leads to good monetization opportunities.

Now, on to the observations about what happens with platform payments:

1. If you are on a platform provider’s network and they offer a payments, you should assume you will (eventually) have to use their solution. Most payments business require scale to work – it’s generally all about taking a small portion of a large amount of money flowing through the system. And most networks or platforms can only support a small (often) one payments solution at the scale required to make it an interesting business. Whether the payment provider wants to actually be the payment solution or control the payments / wallet experience, it’s generally safe to assume that most platform providers will ultimately want to plug into the money flowing through their platforms.

2. Platforms that let alternative monetization providers on their platform early lose the opportunity to set the rules of the road early. Platforms that attract developers or court them need to have a story on monetization early. In the event that platform providers don’t have a solution, most developers will end up doing something in order to generate revenue. Those publisher / developer chosen solutions might not be in line with what the platform owner would like to see happen. But in the absence of a platform-approved solution, most developers will find some way to make money because they need to do so to stay in business. Convincing (as opposed to requiring) developers to take out things that are making them money can be hard – once those solutions are in they’re sticky.

3. Allowing other payment solutions providers on your platform creates a reference point for developers – this matters when the platform provider’s payment solution comes out. Related to the point above, one of the challenges with launching platform payments after you’ve allowed “rogue” solutions on your platform is that developers already have some sense for how well they are doing with their own solution in terms of total revenue, conversion ratio, and fees paid to their payment provider. This generally changes the nature of the conversation. The conversation inevitably comes down to a conversation about whether the platform’s payment solution will be as good, as cheap, and as effective as what developers are already doing. And that can be an awkward conversation.

At the end of the day, platform owners can do whatever they want with their platforms when it comes to payments. They can mandate or bar usage of certain payment types. They can set their own rates and terms. But I think the cases of Apple and Facebook are interesting as it relates to Google:

Apple – I give Apple a lot of credit for being pretty smart with in-app purchases on iOS. They gave developers a fair warning that they wouldn’t really tolerate alternatives, announced that in-app purchases were coming in 3.x, and then they actually delivered the solution shortly after. That seems pretty fair to me – give developers a working and workable solution on a fairly fast timeline. Having 100-200 million credit cards on file and a super simple UI / UX is a strong offering for developers. That’s part of the reason why it’s working.

Facebook – Facebook took a pretty different approach. They let a lot of other payment options onto the Facebook platform from day one. Gradually they started restricting how developers could monetize with both payments and advertising solutions, culminating in the announcement that Facebook Credits would be mandatory in June 2011. Given the 30% take for Facebook, not all of the developers on the platform are happy about moving to Credits. But for Facebook, it was okay to wait – developers were clearly making money on virtual goods and Facebook had established itself as the only major social network with the scale opportunity of interest to developers interested in building large businesses. So complain as they might, there aren’t a lot of obvious viable alternatives for developers looking to build social games on top of existing graphs. As Facebook Credits roll out and are adopted more broadly by both consumers and developers, reluctant developers might have a change of heart and really both embrace Facebook Credits and see some real benefits from making the switch.

I think it will be really interesting to see how Google progresses. On the one hand, it’s early enough in the life of the Android market that they could move more like Apple and clamp down and stamp out anyone who’s attempting to use anything other than their own in-app billing system. That would be easy to do if there is a good enough UI / UX experience and enough credit cards / payment-enabled users on the Checkout system to make it a seamless experience for the average user. But I’m not sure that’s the current state of the market. Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Network did have an interesting piece on the current state of affairs – read it here if you haven’t already. At the same time, the risk of waiting and taking the Facebook approach is that the payments ecosystem on Android could get out of hand and it will be hard to get the genie back in the bottle. Unlike Facebook, Google does face a very strong competitor in Apple – if developers are unhappy with Android, developing for iOS is a financially viable alternative.

As always, comments are welcome.

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I have been trying to wrap my head around the New York Times new digital subscriber plans. I have been happily paying for the NYT on my Kindle as well as reading it for free from time to time on my iPad(s) and mobile phones. I just don’t get their new pricing scheme. It’s not my place to say what the New York Times should charge – they should figure out what the market will bear. And I am already perfectly willing to pay for their content as I enjoy reading it. The thing I don’t understand is why they want to charge such an aggressive price for me to add a third screen. A few observations and questions:

1. What percentage of people who have iPads / tablets and want to read the New York Times on those devices also own smartphones? My guess is that there is significant overlap between iPad / tablet owners and smartphone owners. Why penalize that audience to the tune of $180 per year for the right to consume the content on two additional devices? It basically doubles the price of the annual subscription on a single device.

2. While I’m willing to pay a bit extra to be able to read the NYT on the tablet and a second device, I’m not willing to pay over $400 a year to read it on my tablet and my iPhone / Android device. That just seems outrageous. If the price increment were on the order of $5 per month, I’d probably opt for the full plan that includes tablet and smartphone access. Paying a small amount for an incremental device makes sense. Paying almost double does not.

The thing is, I don’t actually object to being charged more to read the NYT on multiple screens. But I think of the world in a really simple way – there’s my computer (my Macbook Air) and then there are my smart mobile devices (iPad, Android phone, and iPhone). It feels to me like splitting the tablet and smartphone experiences into two different plans doesn’t match my usage patters. I’m either on my computer or I’m on the go – I’m happy to pay for convenience, but this plan doesn’t nail it for me.

I hope the New York Times reconsiders and drops the price on the “all-in” plan – I’d happily pay for the peace of mind knowing that I can consume everything across all the devices I use for a price I can swallow. Until then, I’m sticking with the iPad plan and I’ll have to just make do on my smartphones.

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I spend a large chunk of my day on my phone and away from my computer, running to and from meetings or pacing around the office. I also travel a lot, so I try to make sure I have a set of mobile communications tools I can use to stay on top of everything. Aside from email on my smartphone, there are three major tools I use today and I’ve been trying to get a handle on how I might want to use Beluga. Kim-Mai Cutler from Inside Mobile Apps has a great summary post on Beluga and it’s recent growth.

I think the Beluga app is beautiful and well done, but I can’t seem to figure out where it fits into my mobile needs. Below are the core mobile tools that I use – if you’re a Beluga user and have some good use cases, do let me know:

Mobile IM (Meebo) – I use Meebo for mobile IM. Mobile IM fills an important gap in my communications life – it gives me the flexibility to extend a service I already use heavily (desktop IM) while on the go and makes use of the buddy lists I’ve already created. And it works on Android and iOS, which is key for me.

Text Messaging – Text is my mobile-only channel of choice. It comes right to my phone. It’s fast. And it’s high-quality signal as I only hear from people who have my phone number. Pretty clear and strong use case for being able to message on the go with text messaging.

Situational Group Texting (GroupMe, Fast Society) – I also get the use case for GroupMe and Fast Society. I travel a decent amount and also have groups of people with with whom I want to communicate for brief periods of time. For example, I’m planning to use one of these services when I’m down in Austin for SXSW to keep up with a group of guys I know. I’ve also used both services for weekend trips with friends where everyone wants to keep in touch and allow everyone to see the what’s going on. These aren’t services that I need to use every day, but they do serve an important purpose.

Overall, I feel like my mobile messaging needs are being pretty well met. I’m not sure where Beluga should fit in my mobile messaging needs, but I also didn’t see how GroupMe and Fast Society would fit either until I had that ah-ha moment.

I’ve been chatting with a lot of people who are working on mobile games with a strong location component. Almost all of them are trying to do some mashup of a game plus check-in data to do something interesting. At its core, the concept sounds intriguing. To date, I don’t think anyone has really cracked the market for true games with a strong location component. I am explicitly excluding foursquare from this analysis as I think they’ve de-emphasized the game elements of the service of late and focused more on the community elements (out with leaderboards and an emphasis on points, in with comments and photos – that’s a subject for a post of its own).

If you stop and think about it, building a mobile game that is heavily reliant on people checking in is a tough challenge. I don’t have access to anyone’s proprietary data, but my hypothesis is that there are millions of people ACTIVELY checking in on a regular basis and tens of millions of people playing games on mobile devices. Games that focus on check-ins as a core activity are up against a core challenge in that there are 10x (roughly) as many people playing games as there are checking in.

I want to be really clear about what I mean by ACTIVELY checking in. People who ACTIVELY check-in are those who do check-ins of their own on at least a monthly basis. The one thing I want to make sure I highlight is that I am certain Facebook Places has many more people who have checked-in than foursquare simply because 1 person on Facebook can check-in multiple people. So it’s entirely possible that there are people who have been checked in on Facebook Places who are not themselves active users of check-in products. So I think you need to apply some discount to the FB Places check-ins if you’re trying to figure out how large the active audience of checking-in people is.

Whenever I look at this stylized image, it’s clear to me that trying to get location-based games to work for a large audience, relying on check-ins won’t work today. There simply aren’t enough people engaging in check-ins today to build a game based solely on that mechanic as you’ll only get the overlap of people who like games and actively check-in.

What will work? I have no idea. There are lots of smart people working on this. But I am a bit skeptical as to whether or not a check-in centric location based game can get really big today. Check-ins are the future, but location based game developers need a solution today.

I’m about a year into life as a first-time co-founder of a traditional product-oriented tech company. I’ve done two other services companies, but product companies are different. The one interesting thing about starting a product company is that you will get a wealth of advice from other people. Most of it centers around hiring the right team, building the right product, and making sure there’s a market for what you’re developing. As I talked to more entrepreneurs who had built larger, successful companies, there was one piece of information I regularly received and was not inclined to believe until very recently:

If you are going to do a product-oriented tech startup, it really helps to have at least 12 months of financial runway to cover your expenses and some investment in your ideas before you get started.

I have found it odd that of the many startup articles I’ve read, very few seem to hit on this point. It’s kind of an awkward thing to say – it’s not as if you can’t do a startup without 12 months of runway. And to be clear, there are a number of ways to have at least 12 months of runway, including some of the following:

-Savings and liquid investments
-Family wealthy
-Proceeds from previous successful ventures
-A spouse or a partner with a stable job that covers your expenses as a couple
-A low-cost, low-burn lifestyle
-You’re in school and someone else is paying your overhead and expenses

I had to hear the point about 12 months of runway from a few folks before I believed it. I think that I, like many others, had the same core reaction when presented with that piece of advice:

1. My ideas are good – it won’t take me 12 months to find a high quality idea to pursue. I found it hard to believe that it would take 12 months to find a good idea. After all, most people who decide to start companies tend to believe that a) they are above average and b) have the ability to spot really good opportunities. How could it take a whole year to find a good idea? Well, you have to think about the process. I can almost guarantee that your first idea will not be what you end up pursuing. I was told this by numerous folks, didn’t believe it, and it turned out to be true. More importantly, you’ll have many ideas that die at different points. Some will get killed at the concept stage. Some will only get abandoned after you prototype them. Others will make it all of the way to public launch before you decide they’re not worth pursuing. The point is that failure takes time and some of the things you ultimately abandon have to get pretty darned close to being live before you realize they won’t work or you’re not that into them. Even if you can get to a working, interesting product in less than 12 months, budgeting for a year gives you plenty of time to get there.

2. The idea of saving or otherwise acquiring 12 months of personal burn is kind of daunting. When you sit down and budget what you need for a year, the number can be daunting. How do you come up with that kind of cash if you don’t have it? It’s hard. But going through the exercise is really useful. It might turn out that you can only scrape together 6 months of cash. Knowing that is useful – it helps you understand how far you can go and the types of ideas you can pursue before you raise money or seek other types of financing. Whether you need 6, 12, or 18 months of financing, the process of going through a budgeting exercise is really useful and helps sharpen the mind around what you can achieve.

So why does all of this matter? Well, raising money provides you with funds to grow but also comes with a ton of expectations about what you will achieve. A lot of starting up is thrashing about and trying to figure out what it is that you want to build and how you’ll spend money to achieve that goal. Money spent prior to figuring out some sense of product market fit, market size, and growth plan comes at a very high price in normal markets. To the degree that you can figure out the basics on your own (and your co-founders) dime(s), the better the odds that you’ll be able to raise money at a time when you’ve figured out what it is that you’re trying to do and how you’ll spend the money.

Just a quick thought that’s been on my mind of late. I’m trying to figure out how two major changes I see in social and mobile games will be reconciled:

1. Many social games developers are gradually beginning to embrace deeper integrations of Facebook Credits into their on-Facebook social games. In a number of cases, developers are getting rid of their own intermediate cash currencies and just selling all items in FB Credits denominated prices. I’m not sure this is a smart thing to do, but I know a number of folks who have decided to go down this road. The decision as to whether or not this should be done probably warrants an entire blog post or Quora thread of its own.

2. Many social games developers are beginning to eye mobile and think seriously about how to either port their (or someone else’s) existing social games to mobile platform, namely iOS and Android. I can say confidently that social style games on iOS are monetizing well and I believe the same will be true of Android at some point. The tricky thing, though, is that the iOS payments environment is tightly managed by Apple. Right now, FB credits are not an accepted way to pay for in-app purchases for games or apps in the app store.

How is this all going to work out? As more social games developers continue to integrate more deeply with FB Credits as the sole in-game currency, how will they handle the move to mobile platforms? Obviously, things would be simple if Apple and Facebook were to do a deal whereby users could use FB Credits as a way to pay for in-game items in social mobile games. It’s clear to me that such a deal would be a huge boost to Facebook Connect as a mobile login and payment solution, but I’m not sure it would be a smart deal for Apple. Apple already has 150+ million (and counting) payment-enabled accounts that work for in-app billing. Unless the attach rate for FB Credits is 25% of the 600 million registered Facebook users (and I doubt it is), there’s clearly more for Facebook to gain than there is for Apple.

I’m curious to see how this all plays out. I can see a lot of advantages for developers who want to stick with FB credits as their sole payment solution on all games on all platforms. Problem is I don’t see what’s in it for Apple.

But you know who should seriously consider this? Google. They’re working on a good payment platform for Android, but they don’t have the same installed base of payment-enabled users that Apple has. And while a deep integration with Facebook might hurt Google’s internal efforts at social functionality, I’m sure it would be welcomed by developers looking for more ways to get distribution and accept payments.

I have been doing a lot of travel lately, some for work and some for fun. The one thing that continues to stun me is the dominance of TripAdvisor as a source of reviews whenever I go to a new place and start looking for restaurant or hotel reviews. It reminds me a lot of looking for restaurant reviews and only finding Citysearch before Yelp came along and shook things up. While generic search queries might return a diverse set of sources, specific queries (restaurant x in town y) almost always have several TripAdvisor responses in the top set of search results.

I know Yelp is continuing to expand globally, and it couldn’t happen fast enough for my tastes. When I saw TripAdvisor release their Instant Personalization, I thought it might be cool. But it doesn’t solve my problem. Some time you need to see someone else’s solution to really figure out what it is that you’re looking for. I’ve heard some of my friends who travel say that they don’t trust TripAdvisor rankings because they might be written by employees of the places being reviewed, by people who’ve never been to the place in question, or generally don’t feel “real” (whatever that means). I don’t care so much about the trustworthiness of the reviews and reviewers – I care more about relevance and utility. If someone astroturfs a review but it turns out that it’s a place I like, that’s not as bad as a genuine review whose conclusions strike me as odd.

Whenever I’m planning a trip to a new place, I always ask myself the same simple question:

For someone with my tastes and interests, where should I eat and where should I stay when I’m in a new town?

There are a number of reasons why I think the TripAdvisor status quo is ripe for some disruption. I’ll try to summarize them below:

1. My perception of TripAdvisor’s search results is that they are self-reinforcing
On my last trip, I sat next to a couple who described TripAdvisor as “their bible” – they only go to places that are highly rated. So I went to a number of the highest-rated places and they were largely filled with out of town people, many of whom were either clutching guidebooks, printouts of TripAdvisor reviews, or made comments that led me to believe that their decision to show up was influenced by something like TripAdvisor (if not the service itself). I’m sure some of those people will go back home and dutifully review those places. Which will add more reviews to the top places. And thus the cycle continues. I don’t know much about the TripAdvisor ranking algorithm or how it works, but I think most people tend to look for the highest-rated places and start there. If for some reason those places don’t seem interesting or appeal to them, they move on.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach – taking into account the density of reviews and the ratings seems like a rational way to do things. But it does have the overall effect of driving many casual visitors to the same set of places and concentrating reviews in a set of locations that already have lots of reviews.

One small hack I’ve been using to get around this is to just skip most everything on page 1. Those places are probably good, but there are so many other places that could be great, will probably have fewer tourists, and might be more my style. I usually start hunting on page 3 of the results, where the review density is generally lower and then I ask the concierge or some local people if the places that look interesting to me are any good.

One of the things I’ve always really liked about Yelp reviews is that I can generally get a lot of context about the reviewer. Is the person from San Francisco? Have they reviewed other places I like? Do they reference other restaurants in their reviews? Those things are what help me figure out the reviewer’s context, bias, etc for reviews.

2. I can’t make heads or tails of most TripAdvisor reviews once a place has been reviewed about 20-30 times
If you read the reviews of the top places in any given city, you often end up with the same pattern:
1. A bunch of really positive reviews about the place
2. A few people who had wildly different experiences and call the place overrated, terrible, or not worth a visit
3. A bunch of reviews in between that are very measured in tone

That’s simply not useful to me. Yes, you could read through 10-15 reviews to try to get a complete picture of the restaurant or place in question. That’s time consuming. And at the end of the day, you don’t know anything about the people behind those reviews. You don’t know where they like to stay, what their standards are, what they’re accustomed to in terms of service, and what their idiosyncracies are. I bet there’s probably a review buried in there written by someone like you – I challenge you to find it.

There’s another, more subtle problem that I often find with reviews. Many times, people make comments about the quality and price of the food, especially at restaurants. I think it’s fair to say that not everyone has the same idea of what constitues “cheap” or “expensive” or “best meal we had in town” – this can make it extremely difficult to figure out what to expect. Sometimes people will give you clues in their reviews – they’ll say things that tip their hand about what they consider to be fair prices or other places they’ve been that rank highly to them. This drives me nuts. Even services that include some kind of rough price expectation, the actual bill can vary wildly depending on what you order. I have another hack for this. I often tend to look for reviews written by people who travel without children and as a couple, which is a rough proxy for how I often travel. But that takes some detective work on my end to figure that out. It should be easier.

3. Using my social graph is not good enough – I want people with my tastes, not people I know.
While I do put a lot of stock in personal recommendations and referrals when I’m traveling, there’s no guarantee that my friends will have the same travel or lodging tastes that I will. Some are into ultra-deluxe. Others are really into hostels and low-budget accommodations. Ditto on food. Like most people, I’m generally able to filter the appropriateness of a recommendation based on the source.

But that doesn’t work at web scale. There are probably many other people out there with my tastes in dining and lodging who are not inside my social graph. Those are the people who’s opinions and thoughts I’d like to read. As I mentioned above, one of the hardest things to figure out about TripAdvisor is who the person is behind the review. I don’t mean whether they’re a shill or a real person – I mean you don’t know what they consider good, bad, or other.

I haven’t used Hunch, but maybe that’s something that Hunch or a similar service can help deliver.

3. There’s lots of other really good sources of data out there that could be used to help me find similar people.

The reason I’m so excited about this problem is that we now have more data sources that could be used to address this problem. For example, I have almost 2,000 foursquare checkins and a decent number of Facebook checkins too. That tells you a lot about the places I like to go and the intensity with which I like to visit them. Why not use that data (as the corpus grows) as a key input for restaurant or travel recommendations? Look, you know where I like to go and you can find other people who like to go to those places too. It seems like a critical, and previously-unavailable, data source that could be an important foundation for a next-generation service here. I have to believe this is on the roadmaps for foursquare and Facebook

Okay, that’s a lot of stuff to post. Hope you enjoyed it. As always, feel free to leave some comments.