A VC - Latest Comments in The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:08:35 -0000

Its a great example prokofy

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

A Reader — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:46:44 -0000

Don't want to derail Fred's discussion, but Guy's Alltop seems to provide wider coverage. For example, compare ensembli and alltop on topic = education:

http://ensembli.com/topic/e...
and
http://education.alltop.com/

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Prokofy — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:59:09 -0000

This issue is where Second Life was accused of overhyping its product in 2006-2007 when it spoke of "millions" of signups. Even today it has figures like "14 million residents" by which they mean "14 million people who once tried to download this software and make an account". The more important figure to look at is the 60-day uniques, those who have logged on at least once in the last 60 days, a figure the MMORPGs look at carefully. That figure then is more like 1.5 million. Then there is what I call the real number beyond that, 460,000 people who spent more than one dollar of virtual currency.

While it's important to focus on the active people, and to an extent you're right that if you support and privilege them, they will do more to make others attract, you should also be careful not to punish the other people. That is, their account or their inventory or whatever shouldn't be deleted without notification, and redundant and repetitive notification. I'm still furious that Yahoo put out a notice that they were deprecating the Yahoo Briefcase, they put a mistaken date on their notice, I thought I had longer than I did, and then all my files were deleted. And why? If they can give me unlimited storage in Yahoo email, what was their problem in holding some documents?! And no way to get them back.

To be sure, services that we use for free don't owe us an awful lot, really. And that's the problem. People will value services, and service providers will value people more when they pay subscriptions or at least have a wallet with currency for micropayments.

The way SL and Metaplace and other virtual worlds try to make that log-ons number go up is to give people coins just for logging in, or various presents, points, etc.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

paramendra — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:30:44 -0000

You may even have an answer! Ha!

Okay, I have a hat for you. You are my very first FriendFeed friend.

Let's celebrate by getting on each other's blogrolls.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Mark Essel — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:03:59 -0000

The goodies are shared. If you have any other friendfeed questions feel free to ask. I may even have an answer.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

paramendra — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:58:26 -0000

Let's end up on each other's blogrolls.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

paramendra — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:57:53 -0000

Done. Now share the goodies.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Mark Essel — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:42:36 -0000

subscribe to messel (that's me). I'll like a bunch of content and you can go from there. I have a post on my blog about my favorite friendfeed sharers. I'll dm you a link once you're setup on friendfeed.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

paramendra — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:32:02 -0000

Any pointers you want to share if you are already active at FriendFeed? Any tips?

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Mark Essel — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:18:17 -0000

Great move paramendra, super impressed with what those gents have put together

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:13:09 -0000

Thanks. I'll check out the white paper

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:47:14 -0000

Its fine carl. Its not like you are showing up once just to spam us.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Kevin Chan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:02:54 -0000

This is a really good post that sparked off ideas from everyone around.

I love the fact that it started with how relative are active users against total users, to how to enhance the customer experience to attract active users, and build on the inactive users.

I would agree with saas, as more companies are looking at the user experience level closer, and how to tweak the work flow, simplify existing features, make small user interface changes and hope that it is the catalyst for a customer to identify to the application itself, and say, "This is me."

I believe that this would be a more viable possibility without a major revamp to an app itself.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

jer979 — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:34:04 -0000

If I may, I will take it one step further. Active users are good, but it's the super passionate users (aka Raving Fans) that are the key to spreading the WOM. So, focus on them. It's like a series of concentric circles. The passionates pull in the actives and the actives pull in the inactives. The inactives scale it out to broader. Ripple in the pond. Less is more or as Seth might say "small is the new big."

<shameless plug=""> I wrote a whitepaper (endorsed by Guy Kawasaki, so it's not total crap) on the subject of the power of Raving Fans: http://bit.ly/HijCT) </shameless>

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:00:49 -0000

That's enlightening. On seven regularly used services. Wow

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Carl Rahn Griffith — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:36:42 -0000

Spot on, saas.

For fear of being accused of shameless self-promotion I try and avoid referencing our personalised news service - ensembli - but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as this is exactly our objective:

http://www.ensembli.com/

FYI, I'm @egoboss on Twitter. Cheers, Carl

(Hope that's OK, Fred!)

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:35:03 -0000

got it. i've leared a lot from seth!!

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Carl Rahn Griffith — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:27:56 -0000

Good point/example, Fred - and a salient reminder that one must never forget to be agile in any business - especially this one.

Prompted me to do a rough audit of my own repeat usage patterns vs registrations - hardly scientific but a personal insight nonetheless:

I'm registered (in bookmarked terms - ie, i thought to be of some substance at some point - there will be many others I chose to not even bookmark, being just a transient peek at something new that didn't make an impression to warrant bookmarking) with 48 web services/apps and a repeat user of (ie, I visit more than once a week - often daily) just 7.

As aggregation/personalized news services become more mainstream this becomes an even more interesting topic/metric ...

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

Carl Rahn Griffith — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:14:50 -0000

Interesting Sony disclosure re: PSN 'Develop' conference: only 25-30% of their 20mm registered users only visit more than once:

http://ensembli.com/stories...

(videogamer.com)

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

PeterDunn — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:54:33 -0000

Great post. I bet the # of active Myspace account was 30-50% higher two years ago than now. Most of the people that left it probably still have their account but don't use it much or at all. They still have an active user base I hear, but I think it's much lower than before.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

ShanaC — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:43 -0000

Really early Facebook User here. A lot of us old schoolers' (aka us young kids) are at least slightly uneasy about the process of opening up Facebook, irrellevnt of APIs.

It is a hangout for us, as we form our identities. A number of people my own age keep mentioning to me how much they dislike all the moves made to open up FB, because it means losing the security of that zone to explore our coolness (or fake coolness, alas).

If there was a way to conformable switch over to something as clean and nice simply, with massive amount of identity protection- a lot of people would. We've been a bit burned by the opening up process- our pictures that we wanted to share easily got shared a little too easily...Same with comments and other thoughts.

I miss the old days when it was clearly more sex drugs and rock and roll...now your bosses boss could theoretically check in.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

dofus kamas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:39:07 -0000

the difference is obvious, I doubt whether there're some guys can't identify it.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

paramendra — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:41:46 -0000

On that note, I think I am going to become active on FriendFeed.

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:59:19 -0000

I'm not sure I can live up to seth level insight

Re: The Difference Between Total Uses and Active Users

fredwilson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:59:18 -0000

That's a sign that the repeat user numbers suck