MADE IN DETROIT

Slicing and dicing the iPhone App Store

In the past week or so we’ve (AppStoreHQ) launched a bunch of new features that allow you to discover the exact iPhone app you’re looking for. Now, you can browse by price, rating, and category. Then you can drill down based on any of those parameters as well. Search works much the same way. So, I figured I’d take it for a quick test drive and try out a query:

1. Start with a search for pyramid.
2. Drill down to apps between $2.00-$4.99.
3. Find me only the Games in these results.
4. I only want 5 star rated apps.

AppStoreHQ Latest Blog Posts widget

We just released our new Latest Posts widget. Basically, it’s an embeddable widget of our homepage, showing the latest blog posts about all mobile applications. Here’s an example:

Flight Control iPhone App

For the past week or so, I’ve been playing Flight Control, one of the most addicting games I’ve played in a long time.

For those who haven’t yet heard of Flight Control (it’s possibly the top selling iPhone app), basically your goal is to take some planes and make them land on a runway without crashing into each other. Simple. But addicting.

Anyways, if you haven’t played Flight Control yet, I highly recommend checking it out at AppStoreHQ and reading the description, seeing other blog posts about it, and reading reviews.

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Dear Facebook's 200,000,000th user, here's what you missed...

With all the backlash recently against Facebook, I’ve been thinking about writing a post about the Good Ole’ Days, back when I joined in college. UChicago was probably 10th or 15th on the list of schools allowed to join Facebook, and within UChicago users, I was number 28 to sign up (you could tell this back then because your user ID included the ID for your school followed by your ID, in my case it’s: 2900028). Now that there are 200 million users on Facebook, I felt it’s time to share some things that later users may have missed or that were never publicized.

So, user 200,000,000, here are some things you missed in the last few years:

1. The Creator: Every time Facebook would open up at a new school,user ID 1 would be reserved for The Creator, aka Mark Zuckerberg. He would friend all of the early users for each network. At some point, he must’ve thought this was unprofessional, didn’t scale, or something, and he got rid of this account. Now if you go to a URL like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=2900001, you’ll see it just redirect you back to the homepage with no warnings or errors.
2. The Official Beer Pong Tournament: Back when Facebook didn’t know how to make money (oh wait…), they tried lots of questionable tactics. One of the more “successful” ones, at least until the lawyers got involved, was the annual Facebook Beer Pong tournament. They would invite people from all networks to come to a beer pong tournament where they charged entry fees and took a cut. Sadly, I don’t think this lasted more than one or two years.
3. No outside network contacts: It took quite a bit of time before you could friend people at other schools. This meant that Facebook really was just a directory of the people at your school and nothing more. There was no connecting with high school friends, business colleagues, or anyone else. If they didn’t go to your school, they didn’t exist.
4. Date Registered: For bragging rights, there was a field on every profile page for the Date Registered. Being one of the only features of the site at the time, it was actually something that people cared about and took more seriously than I can rationally explain now.
5. Lack of…: Speaking of lack of features, as the 200 millionth user here are some you’ll take for granted, but were not always part of the system:
   • Photos. It was years before there was any photo system in Facebook, so feel lucky to keep up with your friends visually.
   • Wall. The wall did come pretty early, but it wasn’t always there. This was really the first step to interaction on Facebook. Before that, it was just a directory.
   • Status. These days, keeping up with someone is as easy as following their status. Back then, not so much.
   • News Feed. The news feed was by far the most revolutionary thing that Facebook ever did. It not only changed the way people interact with Facebook, but really with the web as a whole. It’s probably the most copied feature of Facebook, and for good reason. Facebook is nothing today without the News Feed.

Welcome, 200,000,000th user, and enjoy yourself.

Sincerely,
Ian

Leaving Amazon: What I learned over the last four years

Most of the people who read this blog likely already know this, but for those who don’t it’s worth making public.

Last Friday — March 20, 2009 — was my final day working at one of the greatest, most innovative and well-run companies in the world: Amazon.com. This comes after three years of full-time work and a summer internship in 2005. Surprisingly (or not, if you know Amazon’s growth), that made me older than something like 80% of all Amazon employees in Seattle, the headquarters (and older than a much higher percentage of ALL Amazon employees).

I wanted to write up a quick note about my experiences at Amazon as well as some hints as to what’s in store next for me.

In my opinion (which is, admittedly, very biased since Amazon has been the only company I’ve ever worked for full-time) Amazon is perhaps one of the greatest companies led by one of the most brilliant CEO’s and leadership team in the world.

During my final one-on-one with my manager, he asked me what my biggest takeaways from my time at Amazon were. It wasn’t a question I had necessarily thought about before that time, but it didn’t take me too long to come to an answer:

1. Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company. Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?

   I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.

2. Frugality and Innovation are not only both extremely important, but also work hand-in-hand. One of Amazon’s core values is Frugality. In my opinion, this was born out of necessity and intelligence. It’s no secret that Amazon didn’t make a profit for quite some time and the media was predicting their demise (Amazon.bomb), so they simply couldn’t spend money frivolously. Anywhere they could save money, they did; even including the desks they give to employees (“door desks” made out of 4x4”s for legs and a door for the top). They worked hard and spent little to become the successful, profitable, respected company they are today.

   But, I don’t think this is the only reason Frugality is a core value. Amazon’s focus on customer experience means that they are always trying to lower prices. If the company can do something more cheaply and pass those savings on to the customer, they will.

   This focus on frugality means that the company has to be highly innovative. It it always trying to find new ways to do things more cheaply and efficiently in every aspect of the business. Amazon is a well-oiled machine in that regard. They never stop exploring and never settle for the status quo as the only way to do things. From my vantage point, the rate of change at Amazon is unrivaled.

These two core values from Amazon will last a lifetime and will be there in every subsequent job I do.

If you’re wondering what’s next, I’m not going to spill the beans on everything quite yet, since it’s all still very early, but I’ve begun working with a couple great and super-smart folks on a project I’m really, really excited about.

Forget Skittles, WeAllHateQuickbooks is brilliant

I was undecided how I felt about the Skittles marketing gimmick (showing the Twitter search results for “skittles”). In the end, I decided it was brilliant, at least short-term. I’m still on the fence as to whether it amounts to something good long-term for a huge brand like Skittles.

However, for a smaller brand, like Less Accounting, who are competing against an established competitor whose product everyone hates, it really seems brilliant. Which is they they launched WeAllHateQuickbooks. It seems like the perfect way to position themselves as the solution to the Quickbooks problem.

P.S. Here’s their take on it.

[via Jackson Fish Market]

The Business Is Evil Argument

Today I overheard some people talking about Twitter and Facebook. They were talking about lots of uninteresting things, in my opinion, but there was one thing in particular which caught my attention. I call it The Business Is Evil Argument. It goes something like this:

Person A: Facebook recently claimed that they own all your data you place on Facebook forever.
Person B: Really? Wow. That has interesting Intellectual Property fallout. What if you ask your friends via Facebook whether they like an idea you have for a startup? If you then go pursue that idea, Facebook could wipe you out by saying the idea is actually theirs because they own the data where you conceived of the idea.

This is what I call The Business Is Evil Argument. It’s the equivalent of spreading FUD. Consider me naive, but I believe the majority of companies actually like their customers and users and want to provide them with a valuable service. They wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t, and they certainly wouldn’t be successful.

In this case, why would Facebook ever want to steal your idea that you happened to message to a few friends on their service? Doing that would bring such punishment from their users (remember the News Feed/Beacon/TOS/etc backlash?) that after just once, everyone would flee the service.