Online Community Lessons from Photojojo

If you received a dollar for every online community idea that has been tried on the Internet for the last decade, you’d probably be a very rich person by now.

Launching an online community it’s quite easy.

The options to launch an online community are endless: you can create a Ning community, launch a Facebook Page or Group, use a simple online forum, create a Myspace page, etc.

However, the hard part comes when it’s time to keep your community members engaged and interested enough to let others know about how cool your community is.

On this post you’ll learn from the experiences in running an online community by Photojojo’s Founder, Amit Gupta.

Continue reading “Online Community Lessons from Photojojo”

Language and Regional Analysis Google’s Picasa using Google Trends

First of all, it is important to point that it is not possible to see the Daily Unique Visitors graph of http://picasa.google.com using Google Trends. Also a big mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian!) to fellow Photo Lover, Katharine Osborne, for showing me Skitch. This great little image capturing & editing tool for Mac has made my blogging much easier.

Why Picasa?  Well, in my personal opinion, the 2 main players for desktop applications in photo organizing & sharing for Mac OS are:

Teaser: what are the differences between the 2 of them? : ) Coming soon!

Since it was not possible to look for the Daily Unique Visitors graph, I looked for the Search Volume Index of the term “picasa”.  Here’s what you get:

The letters correspond to relevant news, here’s the list:

The biggest spike, highlighted with the letter A, happened after the release of Picasa 2.0 by Google, back in 2005 which included a series of improvements such as picture captioning and blog-posting ability (for the whole list check here).  A spike in the search volume of the term “picasa” is expected around the date of a new release.  This is supported by event F, because on September 3, 2008, Picasa 3.0 was released.

What was really interesting is that the United States does not appear among the top 10 regions where the term “picasa” is searched for!!

Is this possible? Is it an error? Let’s analyze the following:

Notice that there appears no U.S. city on the top 10 cities that search for “picasa” and that English does not appear on the top 10 languages!

This finding is very interesting so I adjusted the upper right setting for region from:

to:

and I found that English is the 3rd language of the region when searching for “picasa”!

Conclusions:

  1. The term “picasa” is searched more around the release date of a new version of Picasa.
  2. Google’s Picasa has a stronger presence abroad than in the United States.
  3. Google MUST consider that the majority of its users come from outside of the U.S., so web sites version in different languages might be needed to support its users.  This situation is not strange, the same thing happened to Flickr.com.

Why are these conclusions relevant?

Consider the following for Apple’s iPhoto, when looking for the term “iphoto”, this is what I found:

Notice that:

  • United States is the second region where most searches happen.
  • 8 of the top 10 cities, where the searches happened, are inside of the U.S.
  • English is the top language of the queries.

This illustrates the difference in strategies between Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa.

What do you think?