“Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it” – Barry Brand

Last week I read the various notes on the presentations by famous startup founders at Startup School 2009 and found a lot of the anecdotes interesting but wondered if they were truly useful to startup founders. I tried to think of some of the products I started using in the past five years that I now use a lot today and couldn’t do without. In looking for the common thread in these products and the quote above came to mind.

Finding an underserved market sounds like getting the winning ticket in a lottery, unlikely. In truth it isn’t hard to find underserved markets if you recognize the patterns. The hard part in turning it into a successful business is execution. 

There are two patterns I’ve used in looking for underserved markets that were invigorated by products I now use regularly today. The first pattern is looking for activities people like doing where the technology has been stagnant for a while. For the past few decades, we’ve been in world where the technology products you use can be made smaller, cheaper and faster every few years. There is some notion of waiting for the stars to align such as hard drive sizes shrinking until you could fit gigabytes of data in your pocket (e.g. the iPod) or AJAX and online banking becoming ubiquitous (e.g. Mint). However for each product category where some upstart has changed the game by leveraging modern technologies there are still dozens of markets where decade(s) old tech is dictating the user experience.

Another patterns is looking for an activity or task that people hate doing but assume is a fact of life or a necessary aspect of using a product. I remember when I’d buy video games like Soul Calibur and lament about how I could only find people to play with when I went to visit friends from out of town who were also fans of the game. To me, not being able to play multiplayer games without having friends physically in the same room was just a fact of live. This is no longer the case in the world of XBox Live. I also remember almost cancelling my cable subscription about five or six years ago because I resented having to tailor my TV watching schedule around prime time hours which to me represented prime hours to decompress from work and hack on RSS Bandit. The entire notion of “prime time TV” has been a fact of life for decades. Once I discovered TiVo, it stopped being the case for me. Some of these painful facts of life have been with us for centuries. For example, take this quote from John Wanamaker

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”

with modern advertising solutions like Google’s Adwords and Facebook’s Advertising platform this is no longer the case. People can now tell down to minute levels of detail exactly what their return on investment is on advertising.

I’d love to see more startups attempting to find and satisfy underserved markets instead of going with the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing. Less Facebook games and iPhone fart apps, more original ideas that solve real problems like Mint and Flickr. If your startup needs a few hints at what some of these markets are in the technology space, there’s always YCombinator’s list of Startup Ideas they’d fund. 

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On the MSN blog there's a new blog post entitled The New MSN Homepage Unveiled which states

Today is an exciting day for our team at MSN because we unveiled the most significant redesign our MSN.com homepage has seen in over a decade. We spent thousands of hours talking with customers; testing hundreds of ideas; experimenting around the world and carefully evaluating what our users want, and don’t want - to deliver a homepage that is designed to be the best homepage on the Web. We hope you’ll agree.
…
So, we started from scratch to cut the clutter on our homepage and reduced the amount of links by 50%. There’s also a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle that lets you drill into information topics that interest you, without being overwhelming. Local information from your neighborhood is important to you and so is high quality, in-line video – so we offer both, right on the homepage. And, you told us you want the latest information not only from your favorite sources, but also from your friends, and the breadth of the Web – so we now offer convenient access to Facebook, Twitter, & Windows Live services and the most powerful search experience on the Web from Bing, empowering you to make more informed, faster decisions. And this is just the beginning - keep visiting our blog for more MSN news in the coming weeks.

This is a really exciting release for my team on Windows Live since we're responsible for the underlying platform that powers the display of what activities your friends have been performing across Windows Live. Working with the MSN home page team was a good experience and its great to see that the tens of millions of people who visit the MSN home page regularly will now get to experience our work. Kudos to the MSN team on a very nice release.

You can try out the new home page for yourself at http://preview.msn.com

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Last week John Panzer, who works on Blogger at Google, wrote about some of the work he’s been doing on creating a protocol for syndicating comments associated with activity streams in his post The Salmon Protocol: Introducing the Salmon Project. Key parts of his post are excerpted below

A few days ago, at the Real Time Web Summit, we had a session about Salmon, a protocol for re-aggregated distributed conversations around web content.  I was hoping for some feedback and to generate some interest, and I was overwhelmed by the positive reactions, especially after Louis Gray's post "Proposed Salmon Protocol aims to unify Conversations on the Web". Adina Levin's "Salmon - Re-assembling distributed conversations" is a good, insightful review as well. There's clearly a great deal of interest in this, and so I've gone ahead and expanded Salmon's home at salmon-protocol.org with an open source project, salmon-protocol.googlecode.com, and a mailing list, groups.google.com/group/salmon-protocol.

Louis Gray’s post on the topic includes an embedded presentation which captures the essence of the protocol

Before talking about the technical details of the protocol it is a good idea to understand the end user problem the protocol solves. For me, it solves a problem I have in the way that RSS Bandit integrates with Facebook. The problem is that although there is a way to get regular updates on changes to the user’s news feed by polling Facebook’s stream and getting data back in the Activity Stream format there isn’t a mechanism today to get updates on the comments on items in the feed. What it means in practice today is that once an item rolls off of the news feed, there is no way to keep the comments up to date in RSS Bandit.

The Salmon Protocol aims to address this problem by piggybacking on PubSubHubBub as a way for applications to get real-time updates on comments on items in an activity stream not just updates on new activities.

There have also been several mentions of Salmon being a way to aggregate distributed conversations on an item (e.g. this blog post is syndicated to  FriendFeed and there are comments there as well as in the comments on my blog) but I am less clear on those scenarios or whether Salmon is enough to solve the various tough problems that need to be solved to make that work end to end.

Any API for posting comments to a site needs to solve two problems; identity and dealing with comment spam. I decided to take a look at the Salmon Protocol Summary to see how it addresses these problems.

The meat of the Salmon Protocol format is excerpted below

A source provides an RSS/Atom feed of content. It includes a Salmon link in its feed:

<link rel="salmon" href="http://example.org/salmon-endpoint"/>

An aggregator reads the feed (ideally via a push mechanism such as PubSubHubbub), and sees from the link that it is Salmon-enabled. It remembers the endpoint URL for later use.

When an aggregator's user leaves a comment on a feed item, the aggregator stores the comment as usual, and then also POSTs a salmon version of it to the source's Salmon endpoint:

POST /salmon-endpoint HTTP/1.1

Host: example.org

Content-Type: application/atom+xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

    <entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>

    <author>

      <name>John Doe</name>

      <uri>acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com</uri>

    </author>

    <content>Yes, but what about the llamas?</content> 

    <id>tag:aggregator-example.com,2009:cmt-441071406174557701</id>

    <updated>2009-09-28T18:30:02Z</updated>

    <thr:in-reply-to xmlns:thr='http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'

       ref='tag:example.org,1999:id-22717401685551851865'/>

    <sal:signature xmlns:sal='http://salmonprotocol.org/ns/1.0'>

        e55bee08b4c643bc8aedf122f606f804269b7bc7

    </sal:signature>

    <title/>

</entry>

The commenter is identified in the published comment using the atom:uri element. How this author is authenticated in situations outside of public comments on a blog such as RSS Bandit posting a comment to Facebook on my behalf isn’t really discussed. I noticed an offhand reference to OAuth headers which  seems to imply that the publishing application should also be sending authentication headers as well when publishing the comment. How these authentication headers would flow through the systems involved is unclear to me especially given the approach Salmon has taken to deal with spam prevention.

The workflow for dealing with spam comments is described as follows

A major concern with this type of distributed protocol is how to prevent spam and abuse.  Salmon provides building blocks to allow in-depth defense against attacks.  Specifically, every salmon has a verifiable author and user agent.  The basic security flow when salmon swims upstream looks like this:

1. aggregator-example.com: "Here is a salmon, authored and signed by 'acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com'; please accept it."
2. Recipient: "I know that this is really aggregator-example.com due to its OAuth headers, and it has a good reputatation, but I do not trust it completely; I will do a double check."
3. Recipient: Uses Webfinger/XRD to discover salmon validation service for acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com, which turns out to be hosted by aggregator-example.com.
4. Recipient: "Given that johndoe has delegated Salmon validation to aggregator-example, and I know I'm talking to aggregator-example already, I'll skip the actual check." (Returns HTTP 200 to aggregator-example.com)

The flow can get more complicated, especially if the aggregator is not also providing identity services for the user.  In the most general case, the recipient needs to take the salmon, discover a salmon validator service for the author via XRD discovery on the author's URI, and POST the salmon to the validator service. The validator service does an integrity / signature check against the salmon and returns 200 if the salmon checks out, 400 if not.  The signature check means that the given author (johndoe in this case) signed the salmon with the given id, parent id, and timestamp.  It does not attempt to do a full, XML-DSig style verification, though such a service is another reasonable extension.

This flow seems weird and it is unclear to me that it actually solves the problems involved in distributed commenting. So let’s say I post a comment to Facebook from RSS Bandit, in step 3 above they are now supposed to use WebFinger to lookup my email address provider and determine which service I use for digitally signing comments. Then they ask it if the comment looks like it was from me.

Hmm, this looks like a user authentication workflow in disguise as a comment validation workflow. Shouldn’t the service receiving the comment (i.e. Facebook) in the example above be responsible for validating my identity not some third party service? Maybe this protocol wasn’t meant for sites like Facebook?

Let’s say this protocol is really meant for situations when the comment recipient doesn’t intend to be the sole identity provider such as commenting on Robert Scoble's blog where he allows comments from anyone with just an email address and an optional web page URL as identifiers. So each commenter needs to provide an email address on an email service provider that supports WebFinger and validates digital signatures in the specific situation related to the Salmon protocol? Sounds like boiling the ocean. I wonder why this can’t work with OpenID validation or some other authentication protocol that has already been validated by developers and is seeing some adoption?

At the end of the day, I think the problem Salmon attempts to solve is one that needs solving as activity streams become a more popular and intrinsic feature across the Web. However in its current form it’s hard for me to see how it actually solves the real problems that exist today in a practical way.

Of course, this may just be my misunderstanding of the protocol documents currently published and I look forward to being corrected by one of the protocol gurus if that is the case.

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Robert Scoble had an epiphany on one of the key problems with FriendFeed’s design that he now realizes now that he’s no longer a fanatical user of the service in his post The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor) . Robert writes

Twitter got lists.

This let us throw together a list of experts. For instance, I put together a list of people who have started companies. Compare that feed to your average Facebook feed and you’ll see it in stark black and white: your Facebook feed is “fun” but isn’t teaching you much.

It becomes even more stark when you do a list like my tech news brands list. See, this is NOT a forum! It is NOT a chat room!

No one can enter this community without being invited. Now compare to FriendFeed. We could have built a list like this over there, but it would have gotten noiser because of a feature called “Friend of a Friend.” That drags in people the list owner didn’t invite. Also, anyone can comment underneath any items on Facebook or FriendFeed. That brings people into YOUR life that YOU DID NOT INVITE!

Again, at first, this seems very democratic and very nice. After all, it’s great to throw a party for the whole world and let them drink your wine and have conversations with your kids. But, be honest here, would you rather have a private dinner with Steve Jobs, or would you rather have a dinner with Steve Jobs and 5,000 people who you don’t really know?

As someone who works on a platform for real-time streams for a living I always find it interesting to compare the approaches of various companies.

I agree with Robert that FriendFeed’s friend of friend feature breaks a fundamental model of the stream. In an earlier post on the problems with some of FriendFeed's design decisions I pointed out the following problem with the feature

FriendFeed shows you content from friends of friends: This is major social faux pas. It may sound like a cool viral feature but showing me content from people I haven't subscribed to means I don't have control of who shows up in my feed and it takes away from the intimacy of the site because I'm always seeing content from strangers.

One of the things I’ve learned about how people interact with activity streams and news feeds is that it is important to feel like you are in control of the experience. FriendFeed’s friend of friend feature explicitly takes that away from users. I can understand why they did it (i.e. to increase the amount of content showing up in the stream for people with few friends and as a friend discovery mechanism)  but it doesn’t change the fact that the behavior can seem like a nuisance and even lead to lamebook style socially awkward situations. 

However unlike Robert I don’t really agree with his characterization of the differences between streams on Facebook versus Twitter. On both sites, I as a user choose who the primary sources that show up in my stream are. Facebook is for people I know, Twitter is for brands and people I find interesting. I find both sites fun but I agree that I’m more likely to learn something new related to work from Twitter than from Facebook. Whether I am “learning” something new or not isn’t what’s important but whether I feel like I’m getting value out of the experience. As Biz Stone wrote in a blog post on Twitter's new terms of service 

At the start, critics often said, "Twitter is fun, but it's not useful." At one point @ev responded dryly with, "Neither is ice cream."

Although comments in the news feed on Facebook bring people I didn’t explicitly add into my stream, they are often OK because they are often people who I consider to be part of my extended social network or at least are on topic. This would never work on Twitter with retweets being shown inline (for example) since anyone can follow anyone else or retweet their content which would lead to the same sort of chat room/forum noise that Robert decries in his post.

Looking at the sketches from Twitter’s Project Retweet

I don’t think Robert’s concerns about retweets polluting the stream are warranted. From the above sketch, it just looks like Twitter is fixing the bug in the retweeting process where I have to use part of my 140 character quota to provide attribution when retweeting an interesting status update. This leads to interesting behavior such as people keeping their tweets under 125 characters to enable retweeting. I have to admit I’ve wondered more than once if I should make a tweet shorter so that it is easier to retweet. Project Retweet is fixing in a way that encourages an existing user practice on the site. That deserves kudos in my book.

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Over the weekend, Torsten and I shipped a new release of RSS Bandit. Besides bug fixes there is one key new feature in the release, the ability to view and comment on your Facebook news feed. The flow for adding Facebook to the application is as follows. Go to the File->Synchronize Feeds menu option then select "Facebook"

then go through the Facebook Connect authorization flow including optionally signing in and granting the application permission to view your news feed

This creates a new feed source containing your Facebook news feed complete with inline comments as shown below

You can download the new release from here. More details about the bug fixes in the release are in the official RSS Bandit blog post on the release.

The primary purpose of this release (codenamed Colossus) was to bring stability to the code base before we made radical changes. With this release out of the way, we will start working on the Gambit release right away. The purpose of the next release is primarily to make RSS Bandit a more modern application that looks like it belongs on Windows 7 and Windows Vista instead of harkening back to the Office 2003 look of yesteryear.

You can see our plans for updating the RSS Bandit user interface in my blog post and prototype screenshots of the RSS Bandit ribbon. We will also support new features of Windows 7 such as jump lists. As usual, comments and feedback are welcome.

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