Developer Day Notes 1: Opening Keynote

by Jay Virdy, speakerrate

Nice visualization of ratings… instead of showing an average of reviews, it shows a gradient of worst-to-best, a horizontal stacked bar chart.

Started from Amazon, do text analysis to figure out if they were for or against.

Realized they weren’t getting any attention from search engines, so they decided to aggregate content. Then they started indexing blogs and rating products, examples: Iron Man movie and Audition: A Memoir (book).

So they figured out topic, then aggregated reviews and comments.

Had a nice bit of launch traffic from a TechCrunch article and Google indexing, but Google booted them out of results along with PayPerPost.

Switched to indexing Twitter in 3 weeks as they were running out of money and their investors gave up on them. Launched Apr 11 2008.

50-100% traffic growth week over week; acquired by Twitter in July.

Takeaways:

• Solve problems for innovators/early adopters in your target market.
• Strive for good enough, not perfection.
• Build something simple and the market will pull you in.

Q&A: Real-time, scaling, and trending were the hard parts. Plugging in Twitter was easy. 6 people in the company. Have to be prepared to capitalize on opportunities.