Pandora Mobile highlights awesomeness but also severe lame-itude

Do you know Pandora?  If you’re in the United States, where Pandora is legally available, you may have come to enjoy this awesome uber-customizable music radio over the past years.  If you’re not in the U.S., perhaps you’ve discovered the beauty of anonymous proxies :cough:, which I’m not going to mention here :p.

But perhaps you didn’t know that Pandora has become available on mobile phones!  More good news:  It’s available for free on phones that run the Windows Mobile operating system, free on Sprint phones, and free on (some versions of) BlackBerry phones.  Ironically, it’s also free on the iPhone, and I say ironically because AT&T apparently is charging—I swear I am not making this up—$8.95 per month to its other mobile customers for the privileges of using Pandora.  I mean, I love Pandora and all, but even if I were insane enough to be contributing to the income of the evilness that is AT&T, I sure as heck wouldn’t fork over that much dough for Pandora.  For an on-demand mobile music service?  Perhaps.  But for streaming radio?  You’ve got to be kidding.

One other note on the Pandora Mobile offerings:  Apparently, I’m not supposed to be able to access Pandora Mobile because T-Mobile phones are not supported.  Which is odd, because I’m enjoying streaming music via Pandora on my BlackBerry Curve (on T-Mobile) right now.  Go figure.  I also shouldn’t mention that I was also able to do this while in Ireland a couple of weeks ago (listening to, appropriately enough, The Corrs on St. Patricks day :-D ).

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Anyway, if you’re an iPhone user or a non-AT&T subscriber, give Pandora Mobile a go!  If you’re an AT&T subscriber, well, heaven help you, and for reasons way beyond this Pandora issue.

[Gee, Adam, tell us what you really think about AT&T :D]

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Okay, okay, I’m thinking I should flesh this entry out a little bit :-)

Some stuff I like in the mobile app:
- Seems to work internationally (though I can imagine this being “fixed” [sigh])
- Works as a true background app on my BlackBerry!
- Can play through my BB’s speaker (actually sounds decent!) or a headset
- Song-to-song time isn’t bad
- Nice graphics, simple, intuitive interface.
- Access to all my stations :-)
- Can even view “Why [did Pandora play] this song?”
- Thumbs up / thumbs down works.

Some stuff I don’t like:
- Takes a while to start up the app
- No way to see detailed info on artist or song

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All in all, pretty damn cool! :-D

My experiment testing user engagement on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter

What did I do?!
I posted an identically-phrased note on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter at around 1:30am PDT Friday morning. Specifically, I posted this: "Could you kindly help me with a super-quick experiment (takes less than 30 seconds)? I'll share results :-) Thanks!"

Why?
I was curious to see which set of friends/subscribers (henceforth referred to as "contacts") would be more apt to read my note and reply.


What happened?
As of nearly 40 hours after posting...

So does this mean Facebook is better than Friendfeed and Twitter?
No. Is a particular service a better fit or a more powerful promotional vehicle for some people or for some needs or interests? Probably. But my experiment doesn't prove that. This is based upon my sets of contacts, and was limited to a single test. I know it would make for a far more popular blog entry to trumpet this with a title of "[servicename] the [other servicename] Killer?!?!?" or "[servicename] Beats the Pants Off [other service name]" or -- best yet -- "[servicename] Set to Trounce Google?!?" -- but I refuse to support such memes or pageview-increasing tactics. At least until I receive a very lucratic offer and then decide to sell-out :D.

So what does your little test suggest?
It means that -- with my sets of contacts -- I'm significantly more likely to get engagement and actions from my contacts on Facebook.

Huh?

When looking at contact interaction, I think we have to take a few things into account:

• What's the contact acquisition rate? e.g., how many folks subscribe to / follow you each day?
• What's the contact retention rate? How many people stick with you (vs. defriend or unsubscribe)
• What's the attention rate? How many actually read what you post?
• What's the engagement rate? How many click on your links?
• And lastly, what's the action rate? This is just subtly different than engagement, but I mean this to distinguish between clicking on a blog post link and actually posting a comment there.

And, from my limited test and experiences, here's the more detailed comparison:

• Acquisition: I've found that I acquire contacts on Twitter far more rapidly than on either of the other services.

I've been gaining followers at a much faster rate on Twitter than on Friendfeed... typically more than 7-10 a day on Twitter vs. 1 a day on FF. In fact, I even plugged Friendfeed to nearly 100 of my buddies via a friendly (albeit form) e-mail, and got a sum total of zero friends subscribing to my FF feed from that. Bummer :-(. FF's a much harder sell, at least amongst my non-geek friends, than I previously assumed. Balancing that, though, two friends I personally referred to FF a while back are now two of the service's more active users :-D. Also, note that my Twitter subscriber count got a HUGE boost because I was recently subscribed to by the wildly popular Google account on Twitter.

• Retention is a bit harder to assess.

For a while, I used the third party service Twitterless to let me know who unsubscribed from my feed each day. Seemed like I lost about a follower a day on Twitter, which was a little depressing, so I'm glad that feature of Twitterless ceased to function a while back. Though I've culled my own Facebook friend list, I haven't really noticed if/when my friends have unfriended me there. And I've also not tracked/noticed people unsubscribing from me on Friendfeed, though I'm sure it's happened, despite the consistently scintillating quality of my FF posts (HAH!).

• Attention: Not sure how I could possibly measure that. There's no user-available "analytics for Friendfeed / Facebook / Twitter" that I know of. Bummer.
• Engagement, or click-thru rate... in the past, I've found that I've gotten proportionally the most clicks from Twitter contacts, followed by Facebook and then Friendfeed.

Contemplating Attention and Engagement... I'm guessing that Friendfeed's generally-helpful/intriguing "Friend of Friend" option could nonetheless be substantially diluting the total attention that feeds-of-friends get. In other words, when someone subscribes to me on Friendfeed, they then start getting (by default) a stream of not only my content, but also the content of my friends' items I comment on or Like. More to look at means, understandably, attention spread across more items = less time looking at my items. Then again, one could argue that this is balanced out by the fact that people who aren't subscribed to me are likely to be seeing my items in their feeds when their friends Like or comment upon my entries. Hmm.

I'm not quite sure why Facebook engagement seems to be proportionally so much higher than on the other services, but I think it has to do with the friendship-vs-content orientation of my respective contacts. More specifically, I believe my FB network consists of more strong / moderate friendship ties, whereas people following me on Twitter and FF may be more apt to be reading my stuff because, well, they like my stuff (funny comments, links) vs. liking me personally. So given this, when I asked for a quick favor, it makes sense that I'd get a higher response rate from friends vs. fans.

• Action is where things get a lot more complicated.

When looking at the magnitude of action -- that is to say, getting a single reply (minimal action) vs spawning a lengthy thread of comments (extended action) -- then the services are quite different from my experience. On Twitter and Facebook, I've found that I quite often get one reply or a small handful replies to my posts. On Friendfeed, more of my posts go without any comments, but... on Friendfeed, I'm more likely to see a post get a large collection of comments. This isn't surprising to me. Though Facebook has moved more towards facilitating a Friendfeed style of item+comment, Friendfeed's been IMHO by far the strongest service in town for conversations. In contrast, on Twitter it's quite easy to post an @ response, but rather frustrating to follow a conversation. I think this explains why I tend to see more robust conversations on Friendfeed, but more frequent (albeit less voluminous) replies on Facebook and Twitter.

The tone and content of a post also plays a large role in determining the extent of replies for me by service. Examples of post-types that are most likely to elicit replies on the various services (again, for me; your mileage may vary!)

- Facebook: "Having a rotten day, could use a hug!" [expression of emotion, change in personal status, in-joke shared amongst friends]

- Friendfeed: "Whoa, check out this robot who recites poetry! WANT! You, too?" [early link to article highlighting a new geek toy or popular geek meme, profound observations or statements of concern, anything about the Kindle, Apple, or Obama]

- Twitter: "At big electronics store in Japan. Should I buy digital camera here or wait 'til Korea?" [questions that don't demand a complicated response, simple but unexpected notes (e.g., "Now in Bora Bora for 3 hours!", "Just got engaged!")]

General caveats:

• Interconnection: Lots of interconnection between the services! Twitter is integrated into FF and FB, for instance. However, I don't import my twitter feed into my Facebook account, and I also immediately deleted the twitter-post in Friendfeed to help mitigate this issue.
• Facebook UI change: Facebook just switched over to a new format. This could have increased or decreased attention to my link.
• Timing: The timing wasn't necessarily optimal. Posting it so late on Thu night meant that -- by the time most people accessed their account on the various services -- they likely already had a ton to look at... e.g., my post was no longer "fresh" at that point.

Personal caveats/notes:

• Difference in contact symmetry:
  Anyone can follow me on Twitter and FF (assymetry / self-selection), but I pick (and am picky about) who I friend on FB (due to both its symmetrical friends model and my own preferences).


• Difference in contact type:
  My contacts on FB are far less geeky than my contacts on the other services. They also tend to be typically personal friends rather than acquaintances or fans. In contrast, my contacts on Twitter seem to be largely online marketers, SEOs, and geeks. Same on FF, but with a much higher emphasis of online marketing / uber-geeky folks who are deeply excited about stuff online. Many of my FB friends just dabble a little bit online and most tend to be buddies from school, work, dance, etc.


• Why Friendfeed / Facebook / Twitter and not [blah blah blah]?
  Because these are the social networking/broadcasting-type services I predominantly use. I have also tried Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Tribe, Multiply, Jaiku, and likely many other services I've forgotten about, but the three above are the ones I'm active on.

And now for some notes from the respondents:

In addition to the main survey question asking people where they clicked on the link from, I also invited people to leave a freeform comment. I'm not sharing all of them (due to privacy concerns), but have excerpted (and replied to in brackets) some below:

• Did worry it might implode my computer with malware, but hey, I'm leaving the company in two weeks! :-)[Yeah, I hadn't even thought of how my impersonal-sounding click-here request might be misperceived. Wonder if that lowered the clickthru rate?]


• You're my hero, Adam!
  [Aw, and you wrote that even before you read this blatheringly long blog post. Hope you still feel the same way :-)]


• Uh, it's WAY too soon to be talking engagement -- I mean you just confirmed we were FRIENDS yesterday!
  [What if I added you to my Top Friends app list in FB? Would that win your heart?]


• When you write up the results, please keep emphasizing that these are just your friends and try not to generalize.:-D
  [I hope I've suitably emphasized that!]


• Although I clicked through from FB because I have FB chat turned on in Pidgin and it shows me status updates right there.
  [That's a very good point. I wasn't thinking about how use of third party tools could skew this experiment.]

• Good idea Adam, though I wonder if it may be slightly different results for others. After all, you are "the Adam Lasnik". [I doubt my micro-celebrity status (in the webmaster world) would affect things one way or the other. Might be responsible for getting me more subscribers on Twitter and Friendfeed, but that's why I listed proportional results above :-)].

I also got another interesting comment which further accentuates the complication involving the use of third party tools with these services... and also touches upon the frustration of data silos:

Hmm, I think you're missing a subtlety. I selected Facebook because that was the source of the thing I saw. However, where I actually saw it was in Google Reader. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to get Facebook stuff *out* of Facebook and into the applications I prefer to use. FB does not really make this as easy as it should be. Also, I usually end up getting stuck with two copies of things when someone, for example, imports their Twitter posts to FB. But at least in Reader I can really quickly scan all the updates in a list, skimming over the duplicate or uninteresting ones. (I just wish I could get a FB feed for a friends sub-list!)

Oh, and Vinny... thanks for the hat! :-)

Wow, that experiment was neato! Can I do that, too? Should I do it? Are you gonna repeat it to see how things change?!

Yep! Technically. Probably not. Unlikely.

Frankly, I'm guessing my friends would get highly annoyed with me if I identically repeated this experiment, and -- worse yet -- I bet that people in the webosphere would get really pissed at you (and me) if this experiment was duplicated ad nauseum. So sorry, I've got first-mover advantage. Take solace in the fact that I likely won't get rich and famous from this, though. Unless I'm offered a book deal along the lines of, "A Completely Unscientific Experiment Exploring User Engagement With Three Darlings of the Interwebs -- The Untold Story" for one MILLION dollars. But that also seems at least somewhat unlikely.

Thanks for reading, though! And hey, while you're at it, go subscribe to my Friendfeed and Twitter streams :D

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P.S. -- You're welcome to check out the click-thru data of my original request via bit.ly :-D.

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And now... YOUR turn!

Do my experiences match yours? Do you see similar demographic differences in your friend/follower sets amongst the services? What kind of response rates have YOU seen? Other thoughts?

A short tribute poem to Dr. Seuss on his birthday

My colleague Sha-Mayn noted that today is Dr. Seuss’ birthday.  I originally penned the short poem below to post as a facebook comment, but I thought I’d share it with you all instead. :-D  With deep apologies but much love to Dr. Seuss…
—

I hadn’t known this fact before
I miss Dr. Seuss now even more
I read and re-read all his books
‘til my parents gave me funny looks!

“Green Eggs and Ham” still rocks today.
I wish for more like that, I say!

In a hat, on a moat, with a cat, on a boat,
In a car, on a plane, with a star, on a plane!

I would not could not write like Seuss.
So now I’ll stop the poetic abuse.

[Video below is of two girls lipsync’ing to Moxy Früvous’ awesome a cappella take on “Green Eggs and Ham”]