Language Tweak

There appears to be some confusion by the text in our site’s footer. Until today it read “we can no longer offer free accounts for users with fewer than 1000 followers”. This was because we used to charge only for accounts with more than 1000 followers. Then we stopped that policy and started charging all users.

However, the language wasn’t sufficiently clear. Some users took it to mean that free accounts are only offered for users with more than 1000 followers. Not the case.

So as of today the language has been tweaked and now reads: “GraphEdge is a paid service”.

Sorry for any confusion. I think it’s very clear now (if not entirely popular!). 14 day free trials are still in effect for now, but we’re actually considering doing away with them. We get a lot of curious-but-not-serious passers-by, so our new-user pipeline/funnel has to be enormous to handle the demand.

We’ll see. There’ a lot of work to do on reporting & data before we go there.

Thanksgiving Day DB Crash

It’s a holiday in the U.S., and I’m out of town, so of course we’ve had some kind of trauma to our database. Trouble seems mostly confined to a table that is not central to reporting, so you should still be able to see your data. We may have lost two new-account sign-ups, but I think I can manually correct that.

If anything seems strange with your data or your user-experience, please let us know at support [at] graphedge [dot] com. Meanwhile I’m going to get to work & see if I can fix this sucker!

UPDATE
Was able to repair the offending table, and it looks like we’re back on track. I think we were able to on-board the “stranded” new accounts as well. If not, I’m sure we’ll hear about it!!

Short-Term Roadmap

We have a lot of travel planned through the rest of the year. While that will definitely slow things down, we have a lot on the roadmap, and I think we’ll be able to get most of it done. Here’s what we’re planning:

• Reporting Features: ranking your followers on availability, viral potential, and overall value to your network. Identify top followers on these measures. Tweet stats on your followers (then they’re online… times of day, days of week)
• Changes to Registration Flow & Requirements: as outlined previously. Require email, eliminate any potential for unintentional or even “casual” sign-up.
• More Reporting Features: your own tweet stats, and (possibly) a first pass at textual analysis of your tweets and your followers’.

As always, feedback very welcome and encouraged.

Changes in the Offing – Part 2: How it Will Be

A previous post outlined our current user onboarding flow and early experience, especially with regard to messaging. I have concluded that we should make some changes, and I’d like to outline them here.

1. Users should no longer be able to sign-up for GraphEdge simply by following the @GraphEdge account.
2. Users who sign-in to GraphEdge using their Twitter account—but who do not currently have GraphEdge accounts—won’t automatically get GraphEdge accounts, as they currently do.
3. We’ll add an email collection step to the sign-up process. All accounts will be required to give us a valid email address.
4. Email (not Twitter) will be the default mode of communication from GraphEdge to its users. There will be a way for users to choose to receive their messages via Twitter, however.
5. An email authentication step (user must click a link in an email we send) will be required before users can see their reports.

This list represents a real departure from one of our early principles: sign-up should be dead-simple. I think it’s still fairly simple, but not “dead” simple!

It also represents rather a lot of work. It might be some time before it’s implemented, especially since I’m queuing it behind other big work to add some awesome new features (can’t wait to blog about those!). I think it can wait because of the many steps we’ve taken to make it so simple to opt out of both messaging and GraphEdge accounts. For example, starting tomorrow, the standard message from GraphEdge will read:

GraphEdge update: 100,000 Fol’s and Unfol’s in the past X days. Click to view OR to stop these updates: http://bit.ly/URLhere

Stay tuned for more details on when these changes (and the new features!) will be released. Please do contact us at support [at] graphedge [dot] com to give feedback, or I can be reached on Twitter at @WaldronFaulkner

Changes in the Offing – Part 1: How It Is

I’ve lately given a lot of thought to our registration process, and I think we need to implement some changes.

I’ve been spending a lot of time enabling more and better ways for users to quit GraphEdge or to stop receiving updates. I think that’s all good—if people don’t want the service they should be set free—but the fact is that it’s just too easy to join GraphEdge right now.

Currently, there are two ways you can join: you can follow the Twitter account @GraphEdge, or you can go to the site , click “Join”, and authenticate via Twitter. That’s all that’s required. The app will start collecting data, and will message the user several times.

We currently have two ways to message users, and the method we use depends on whether you follow @GraphEdge or not. If you do follow us, we send our messages via Twitter direct message. If you don’t follow us, we use our messaging Twitter account, @GraphEdgeMsg, to post a status update starting with @yourName, which you will (probably) encounter in your Twitter feed in one of several different ways, depending on your client of choice.

We use this alternative account because we don’t want to clutter up the @GraphEdge feed with a lot of repetitive, user-specific messages. We want to use that channel for community-wide messages, such as to announce new features or alert users to bugs.

We currently message users according to the following schedule. This is also outlined in our policies page:

• Users receive an immediate initial “acknowledgment” message to let them know that their sign-up succeeded. This is especially useful if you sign up by following @GraphEdge (else there’s no feedback). NEW: the welcome page that new users see now has a link directly to the dedicated cancel page, in case any user signed up “by accident”.
• We send a “welcome” message either 2 or 3 days later (depending on what time of day the user signed up), with a link to view their report. This will be many users’ first look at their own GraphEdge report.
• After this our regular, recurring messaging takes over. We send updates every (currently) 5 days. Of course this frequency is user-editable, including to never receive updates.
• The Report page—which is linked to in both the Welcome message and the regular messaging—now contains controls that allow users to change their messaging settings (including to never receive updates), and even to cancel the account—right there on the main report page.
• After 14 days, the free trial is over and users will be asked to join GraphEdge when they try to view their reports. If they don’t do so within a couple of weeks, their application is completely deactivated, we stop collecting data on that Twitter account, and of course stop messaging.

Some of these policies, practices and interfaces are new, and I’m hoping they will help all GraphEdge users have a good experience, whether or not they end up liking or purchasing the service.

A few users have signed up for the trial, never clicked the links (therefore never returned to the site), and then complained that the service keeps messaging them. They try to block the @GraphEdgeMsg account, which I think should work, and they try to revoke the GraphEdge application’s access to their account within Twitter’s settings, which won’t work because we only use the Twitter app for account validation. All data collection is via Twitter’s public, open API, which does not require users’ permission. We prefer users cancel directly on the site. That way we know about it, and it’s good to know not only for feedback but because we can stop wasting bandwidth collecting data on the account.

I really hate to see users unhappy with the service. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it bothers me tremendously, and unwanted messaging seems to be the crux of the issue.

So I think it’s time to make some changes, to make registration a little more “intentional”, and require more from users in exchange for their accounts. In another post I’ll give more detail on what I’m planning, and a time-line on when we can expect to get it released.

Policies Review

Saw a very upsetting tweet tonight accusing the app of hijacking someone’s Twitter account. Obviously I’ve reached out to that person to try to find out what precipitated the misunderstanding. What’s most upsetting about it is that we employ the least invasive, most secure possible methods/practices to sign users in to Twitter, and still this appears!

Just a reminder that our new Policies page is here, and I’d like to call out the Authentication section of that document, here.

To review some of the technical details and policies which make us the very best from the consumer’s perspective:

• We use OAuth to authenticate users, rather than asking users for their Twitter credentials. This means that Twitter verifies users’ identities for us, we never see a password (or even a screen name, ’til after you’ve signed in). More info about Twitter’s implementation of the OAuth standard is on their developers’ wiki.
• Our Twitter application is read-only, rather than read/write. So we can’t change anything in your profile, and we can’t tweet on your behalf. We encourage all Twitter users to look for this before they blithely sign-in to 3rd part Twitter apps.
• The OAuth process results in a special token we can use to retrieve information about your account. This token does not expire, but we do not store it. This is why you need to sign in to GraphEdge every time you visit (we get a new token for each session). This may change in the future to allow users to keep their computer signed-in to GraphEdge between sessions, but we would certainly not keep the token for any other reason.

I feel great about these policies. One of the nice things about starting a company is that you get to do things the right way. There’s short-term a cost to doing business by making the most consumer-friendly decisions, but I’m counting on there being a long-term advantage. Of course, it would SUCK to incur the costs of doing the right thing and still being accused of nefarious activity! Let’s hope we don’t have too many more repeats of this kind of thing.

Please please, GraphEdge users, current and prospective: if you have any problems, concerns or questions, reach out to us! support [at] graphedge.com, or my personal Twitter account: @WaldronFaulkner

Update – Nov. 7, 2009

Worked with the Twitterer in question to clear the matter up. We still don’t know which app it was that tweeted his stats without his knowledge, but at least he now knows it wasn’t GraphEdge. Watch out of the word “update” in the Twitter authentication form. “Access” is good… “access and update”: think twice.

Revenue Positive!

So GraphEdge is now revenue positive! Very small steps, but as every experienced entrepreneur will tell you, there’s a huge jump from $0 to that first $1.

Those users who are on-board, please stay connected… tell us what you like, what you don’t, what you want/need to see next. We’re overjoyed to have you as our first real customers!

Small samples so far, but the conversion rate is good at these rock bottom prices. The laws of Lean Startup dictate that we may need to play with the pricing more before we finally dial in a final number, but I think it can only go up from here (or at least roll back the $2 offer to 5K followers rather than 10K). We’ll see. I wanted to find the numbers that ensured good conversion and I think we found them.

Onward!

Updates

Many updates to the GraphEdge site over the past few days.

First, we finally made good on our promise/threat to start charging for accounts with more than 1000 followers. Only a few users have seen the payment wall so far—we’re rolling it out slowly—but if you’ve been a GraphEdge user for a while and have more than 1000 followers, your turn to help support the project is near! Additionally, about a week ago we changed the wording on our site: we can no longer offer free accounts, even to users with less than 1000 followers. Everyone still gets a 14 day trial. Pricing is published on the site.

Users who wish to forgo their free trial and don’t want to wait for registration to re-open may join immediately by subscribing. Users may subscribe here.

When you sign in via Twitter, we now display handy links in the top-right of the window, for Report and Account. Hoping people will use the account page to dial-in their update frequency to a number that makes sense to them.

And last but not least: we’ve published our Policies for all to see. I hope this will help users understand that we’re the good guys, and feel more comfortable about signing-in via Twitter and signing-up for GraphEdge.

Please comment regarding pricing, policies, all the above.

Bugs in New Release

There are a few bugs we’re still working out, related to our latest release where we moved to a new hosting provider.

In some cases, users’ accounts have been disabled. Don’t fear, we can get them back online, no problem.

In other cases, users have been told that their trial period has ended, and taken through the subscription process. Although this may well happen in the near future, it isn’t supposed to happen now, so this is an error. And if you have under 1000 users, the service will remain free for existing users, until further notice.

If you’ve experienced any of the above, or other odd behavior (eg, being asked to log in twice), please let us know at support [at] graphedge [dot] com. Don’t forget to include your Twitter handle, so we’ll know who you are!

Update: 1:30 PM Eastern

We’ve discovered the source of many of the login-related problems and are addressing them now. Further updates will follow.

Update: 6:15 PM Eastern

Known bugs have all been addressed. Definitely contact us if you have any issues at all. Thanks!

Beta closed… for a while

So I decided to close the beta program temporarily while we catch up with recent increased demand. We’ll be moving soon to a new hosting provider and when we do, we’ll be able to handle more accounts. As it is, we’ve spent too much time propping up our over-burdened back-end. It’s hampered new development. So prospective new users, be patient! Won’t be long!

Speaking of new development… the party will be ending soon for those of you enjoying our magical, never-ending “14-day” free trials! Payment provider will be Amazon. Pricing structure to be determined soon. It’s going to be based on the number of followers you have, and should be in the $15 to $50 range, per month, depending on number of followers and users to be tracked. Feedback welcomed.

Onward!