Craig's posterous

Real-time Product Idea

I have a problem (aka a new business opportunity).

I have many interests—ranging from music, graffiti art, technology, business, sports, angel investing, macroeconomics, gadgets, Washington DC (birthplace), San Francisco (post college home) and on and on…

This has lead to me either connecting and or “following” a large number of people and organizations through my various online and mobile networks (Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn). Which is cool.

Here is the problem: I am only interested in a subset of information from a given individual or organization.

For example, I mostly follow Jack Dorsey because I like getting his updates on Square.

I follow Ted Leonsis because of his personal investments

I follow Fred Wilson because of his very practical web product & investing thoughts

However when you look at the last 10 tweets from these individuals, the breakdown is as follows:

  • Jack: 2 posts are expressly about Square / 8 are not
  • Ted: 1 post is expressly about investing / 9 are not
  • Fred: 8 posts are expressly about web & investing / 2 are not (pretty good Fred!!)

Therefore, of 30 posts in my feed, 10 are relevant to what I am actually looking for.

That means there is a lot of noise. And considering three people generate 20 lines of noise, it becomes unbearable when you follow or are friends with or linkededin to 1000 people.

Facebook’s feature of allowing you to hide people from your feed reduced a bunch of noise. But it didn’t solve the problem because in general, I don’t want to hide all of their stuff (just most of it). Specifically, I am only interested in their real-time thoughts related to a very specific reason.

So what next?

Option 1: Facebook, twitter and or LinkedIn could innovate and produce a solution

Option 2: Someone in the twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn eco-system could create a solution (I heard Xobni built a Facebook app that delivered the actual contents of Facebook mail to your email because they found it annoying that Facebook didn’t already do that…and it was a huge hit); I also heard the entire team at Posterous scored above 1500 on their SAT’s so they could probably figure something out

Option 3: I’d be willing to invest in and work with a team to try and solve the problem ourselves.

I’d love to hear from people (craigjshapiro-at-yahoo.com). See if you have the same frustration. And if so, if I am missing any options.

-Craig

(download)

GOOD 2010 / A Look Back and Forward

Hey Everyone,

This was originally drafted and sent on Dec 30th 2009 - as an internal letter to the team at GOOD - looking back at our history and looking forward into 2010 and beyond. After discussing with the team, I thought it would be fun to put it out there (most of it anyway) and let everyone in. Enjoy! 

GOOD’s mission: to celebrate and enable individuals, businesses and non-profits (help each other) live well and do good.

In the fall of 2006, GOOD launched as a magazine to celebrate the sensibility of giving a damn. The market responded favorably and in less than one year, over 20,000 people had subscribed and raised over $500,000 for our non-profit partners. And today the magazine—which was named one of the 10 best magazines of the entire decade—continues to flourish in its new quarterly format. 

However, it quickly became evident that while the magazine effectively started a dialogue and helped launch our brand, the web would be a more effective platform to connect us with businesses, non-profits and each other—driving greater impact and returns. 

So in late 2007, we began migrating from a magazine-centric site, to a more robust community-based blog. This new platform allowed us to start the evolution from a top-down content publisher where we were speaking to our subscribers, to a more collaborative environment where we could speak with members of the community—of which we are a part. 

To represent this significant shift, we decided to shed our goodmagazine.com URL (despite having a ridiculously high Google PageRank) to something much broader. Naturally good.com came to mind. Unfortunately, Motorola owned the domain from their purchase of Good Technology and did not want to part ways with it. So we looked at dozens of alternatives and ultimately decided on www.good.is (the .is comes from Iceland). 

In www.good.is we saw the potential to open GOOD up— to ask the question that we grapple with everyday: What is good? 

So on September 8th , 2008, www.good.is was born. 

The Growth Story 

With a renewed focus, several business development deals, fresh content and a lot of hard work, we’ve seen our number of visitors grow at a nice clip. We now are approaching two to two-and-a-half million unique visitors through our doors each month. 

The blog has become a vibrant daily expression of our mission and ability. We launched specific hub pages for 10 different categories. All the pages are starting to generate traffic and a following in their own right, three pages (environment, design, food) have their own full-time ambassadors, and are starting to attract other bloggers contributing guest posts, making them a home for vibrant conversations about our core categories. 

Our vast transparency archive continues to grow. Week in and week out we produced a compelling, visual representation of some important or entertaining data set—52 in all in 2009. This has been and continues to be a core function of our brand (and a driver of many pageviews). 

We have grown the network of people contributing to the site regularly by leaps and bounds - including folks like: Boing Boing, Wooster Collective, ReadyMade, Yes Men, IDEO, Frog Design and Creative Commons. In the last year, nearly 600 different voices added their thoughts to www.good.is, in the form of blog posts, essays, and design work. 

This year also marked a significant growth trend across all our social media efforts. From our exciting and well-received Flickr page to our flourishing YouTube channel to our active Facebook following, 2009 was a banner year for engaging with our audience beyond the walls of www.good.is. And finally our (+350k and growing) Twitter community was perhaps the most exciting trend of the year. 

On the Tech front, the big gains in 2009 were heavy on the restructuring side. What was once a group of outsourced vendors become an in-house team of 4 developers. 

With the new development team in place, we implemented some exciting new product features including the introduction of Facebook Connect, which helped push user registrations up by 46%. 

Below are some fun facts from the database: 

**Last but not least: we recently saw a post from the community blog become the most commented item on our site. This is an exciting vision of things to come, and a reminder of where we will turn out attention in 2010. 

Now on to Corporate Partnerships. 

What a frickin effort!!

Early in 2009 ad dollars seemed frozen and it was looking like we may need to reduce our costs. However, the sales team stayed focused and using creativity and sheer will, we hit our third quarter revenue target. And it wasn't a fluke because the sales team did it again in the fourth quarter and is already significantly on the way toward early 2010 goals. 

So what’s next? 

For one, we just announced a landmark partnership with Pepsi. This is a game changer for GOOD on multiple levels. But strictly from a revenue perspective, this has the potential to eclipse our entire 2009 achievements! 

From a product perspective we are going to invest heavily in evolving the enablement portion of our mission. While maintaining an editorial voice, we will be launching several new products that are more meritocratic and reward our community for participation & action. These products will quantify our community’s impact on a collective and individual basis (much like Digg or Wikipedia). 

This is an incredibly exciting time for the company and if you have made it this far into the post, we appreciate ALL of your support!

-Craig