After an incredible three and a half years at Compete, I have decided to do it all over again, and go work for a very small start-up. I “graduate” from Compete (now a TNS company) this Friday.

At Compete, I had the privilege to work with the most incredible, talented, and fun group of people I have ever met — together we worked hard, played hard, believed in and executed on our vision for compete.com, achieved what some thought impossible, delighted clients, pulled all-nighters, and during all that developed special friendships. I learned A LOT, and had a lot of fun. Most of all, I am very proud of the teams accomplishment and what we were able to achieve in a very short duration of time. You can expect a lot of great stuff from Compete in the very near future.

As you can tell, it was a very hard decision for me personally to leave my fellow Competers, but they are all excited for me and understand that my next opportunity is a big one. Thank you Team Compete for an incredible experience — I love you guys.

what’s next?

I will soon be joining David Cancel (founder and former CTO of Compete), Scott Rafer, and the rest of the crew at Lookery, leading Product Development & Strategy.

About Lookery (blog):

Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. Lookery is in the process of assembling anonymous profiles on 100+ million people. Using this data and Lookery’s 1.5 billion+ page-per-month Facebook ad network, we will raise the price paid for billions of remnant Internet ad impressions each day. Part of that course is becoming the anonymous user data king and expose that via APIs, widgets for site owners, etc. Lookery collects profiles from and with the permission of social networks, dating sites, ISPs, and e-commerce sites.

A whole new adventure is just about to start, and I am very excited by all the possibilities that lie ahead! …and in case you’re wondering… for now, I am going to be based out of Cambridge, MA.

Published on the Compete.com blog on 17 March 2008

Every single year that I have prepared my own tax return (yes, I still do my own taxes), I’ve prepared them the weekend before they have been due. Examining traffic to IRS.gov for the past few years, it looks like my tax filing behavior may not be the norm!! –

My observations:

• Traffic to IRS.gov peaks in February each year (and not in April
• After several, mostly flat years, more people are visiting IRS.gov this year. However, my guess is that some of this increase was likely driven by people curious about the Economic Stimulus Payments. Compared to February ‘07, traffic is up 27% this year. According to Compete data, the 24.4 million unique visitors in Feb ‘08 was also the biggest month ever for IRS.gov (data goes back to 2001).

Details here.

Published on the Compete.com blog on 22 Feb 2008

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.

Published on the Compete.com blog on 19 February 2008

Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.