1) Improving visibility
2) Improving clicks with machine learning
3) Growing your Network

1) Improving Visibility

When the widget is in the sidebar, people don’t see it. Our data shows that sidebars load significantly later than the main pages of our beta sites. Why? It’s the the number and size of the other widgets on the page. Just to load the 5 largest external services on a seemingly straightforward beta site requires 144 browser requests, and transfers 985,000 bytes of data(!) Considering the main HTML page is 41K, the other widgets represent a significant size/delay.

The consequence of the “slow sidebar” problem is that for users who rapidly want to change pages, the widgets aren’t even rendered yet. And those who are reading a page will have scrolled past sidebars widgets by the time they appear. If they don’t see the widget, they can’t click.

Indeed, our measurements indicate that less than 5% of all page loads yielded any click anywhere that generated a second page view. (95% bounce rate).

In with the fix

Our new footer bar is a fast, lightweight solution that will work seamlessly on nearly every site. A small 30px tall footer appears at the bottom of the page and when a user hovers with their mouse, it expands to provide instant access to your best content and and the best links from blogs you follow. You have FULL CSS control, so color/font, etc. are fully customizable to look like your site and there’s no Liveflows branding. This is all about you.

The footer bar will work no matter where you have the js installed, but it’s so small and sub-second fast that it can be part of the main page. To upgrade, just login to your admin page and click [ ] show footer.

2) Improving clicks with machine learning

Once you switch to the footer bar, Liveflows uses more intelligent algorithms to improve clicks.

Our machine learning / genetic algorithms framework becomes active and we advance from static variations of “most popular” to multiple dynamically-selected algorithms to present other links “You might like”.

The links in “You might like” are determined by a half dozen algorithms that each use a combination of different inputs (such as user history, page popularity, referrer, click paths, time spent, etc.) and each is continually being A|B tested against the other algorithms.

However, this isn’t a simple winner-take scenario. As the system learns from interaction, we’ll be able to match selection algorithms that work best for each user, so sites can enjoy better results across the board. We’re also looking forward to adding more selection, wording and display components into the mix, while our machine learning framework automatically promotes the better-performing tests. With the first set of algorithms, we expect that the biggest gains will be from repeating visitors who view more than 7 pages in a month.

3) Growing your Network

Perhaps the biggest improvement to footer bar is that your network is now featured (instead of hidden on a 3rd tab) so your ability to expand your reach and be promoted on other sites increases significantly.

Liveflows’ networking component allows “blogs to follow other blogs” in a simple twitter-like manner, and links to your best posts can appear on blogs that follow you. It’s now very easy for like-minded blogs to follow each other and effectively expose all their best content to the traffic of the whole group. More exposure and more promotion of the good stuff.

This is an “open-web” approach to networking, since the destination sites are the blogs themselves and Liveflows is simply providing the plumbing and displaying the best posts.

As always, please contact us at beta@liveflows.com if you have any questions.

Cheers!

But when you visit your own blog (and you are logged in as the administrator of that Liveflows widget) we automatically turn off the “New to Me” functionality, so you can see some of the general stats.

You’ll know you are an administrator if you see the Edit controls:

If you want to experience your site as a user, please logout and clear your Liveflows cookies or simply open a separate browser. For example, if Firefox is your usual browser, do Liveflows admin work with Firefox, but use Safari to view your site as a user and see the New To Me functionality working on your site.

When you surf other sites that use the Liveflows widget, use your favorite browser that has you logged in as a Liveflows widget administrator. New to Me will operate when you view other blogs (you’re not an admin of that widget), and you’ll be able to add that blog to your network with just one click.

This will allow that blogs posts to show up in your network tab, and provide your readers more great content to view once they have finished reading your posts.

A typical experience of aggregator users is simply to go to the aggregator, click though to a recommended site, read that one page, then go back to the aggregator to find more content. Rinse and repeat.

But this behavior is considered to be “bad” traffic because visitors didn’t make any additional clicks on the destination blog. Visitors come, and they may even really like the content , but then they often leave without making another click. And when they don’t make any additional clicks, the blog’s bounce rate increases and blog owners talk about getting bad traffic from that domain.

Is it “bad traffic” or lazy users?

Perhaps bad traffic could often be better characterized as lazy traffic. Lazy visitors won’t click around if it’s not obvious and likely rewarding. Lazy visitors just want the next link to click be easy to find and provide high value.

Let’s face it: Most visitors are too busy to learn new navigation, manually dig through archives, or guess which of the many, many links might contain more content they want.

Aren’t we all lazy like that sometimes? Perhaps users “puked” when they had to figure out where they they should click next, all by themselves. Perhaps the strength of aggregators is their consistent interface that provides lazy visitors easy way to find the next great thing?

Liveflows helps everyone

By putting the free Liveflows widget or plug-in on your blog, you can improve the click-thoughs (and reduce the bounce rate) from every visitor to your blog whether they are lazy visitors via aggreggators or your hardest core dedicated fans.

Liveflows gives everyone an obvious and easy place to click for the NEXT great post on your blog.

Liveflows delivers high value by learning what pages and paths people enjoy most, so it explicitly shows each user the best pages to click next from the page they are currently viewing.

Simple. Easy. Free.

So keep writing great content, keep promoting your posts to show up the the homepage of techmeme, and keep getting lots of likes on friendfeed. And when these visitors click through, let Liveflows surface the best content for each user to click next and engage more with your blog.

How do I get Liveflows for my blog?

Just follow our free sign up, and simply put our javascript snippet on your blog. Customize it with a graphic and color to match your site’s branding. When your page loads, anonymous cookies are sent to our distributed database. We process and analyze that data in real time to show each user what other people are reading now, and what they should click next.

How do I optimize my blog for liveflows?

For best readability, the name of your blog should not be repeated in every line the widget. Instead, you want the title of your post to come first. This is also good for your site’s search engine optimization.

To optimize your titles, change the HTML <title> to start with the title of the post.

Blogger and some other platforms default by making the <title> start with the blog’s name.

More information:

• Liveflows installation guides
• How and why to optimize titles
• Customize Liveflows for your site

It shows each person the most enticing posts for them: New readers see your top content, search visitors see the best pages to view next, and dedicated fans see the posts they haven’t read yet.

Liveflows isn’t a spider or a robot, but instead processes user attention and activity in real time to learn which paths users find most interesting, and what people are enjoying right now. Anonymous cookies allow Liveflows to personalize the results to show each visitor your best posts they haven’t read yet!

live: actually being performed at time of viewing;
alive; possessing life;abounding with life and energy

flows: to move or progress freely; continuous progression; to proceed smoothly and readily; to have a smooth continuity

Catching up on an old Economist (yes, I still love magazines and happily subscribe to many) I came across a great article on counting:

How do humans develop our sense of numbers? What faculties do babies start with, and how does it develop? I learned that Babylonians used base 60 math, and that in the 1940’s a German animal behaviorist named Otto Köhler trained ravens to open boxes with the same number of dots on the lid as a card held by the scientist. Animals dig numbers too.

But what caught my attention was this beautiful nugget:

Babies are born with many ways of making sense of what they see and hear. When shown the same things repeatedly, babies eyes wander; when the scene changes, their gaze return.

I already knew this is how babies behave.

But this time it finally hit me: NEW. It’s all about NEW.

NEW is a strong force

We are born with an innate interest in NEW. It’s a fascination we have from the beginning of life that we never lose. Babies have it. Adults have it. We love the new.

Even as infants, our eyes literally wander if we see something repeated too often. That explains so many behaviors, and yet there’s still more we could do to scratch this itch.

Addicted to twitter? You love the new. Deep into your feedreader? You love the new. Can’t get enough of friendfeed or blogs or news sites? Don’t worry, you’re normal. You love the new.

We love the new, too. And this is What Liveflows is about.

The start of a new idea

After Juniper Networks bought our last company [network switching / loadbalacing] in 2005, we turned our attention to that database layer. What would a really big database look like? Could you scale a db to web-size? If so, what could you do with it?

Personalization was always interesting to us, but what would web-scale personalization look like? What exactly would it do? How would it be deployed?

We read an NYT/ IHT article which talked about online news headlines, and how much editorial oversight was required to keep big stories around long enough to catch the infrequent users, but not so long that the site became boring to the super fans.

“Excuse me, but why can’t everyone just get the news they haven’t read yet? You know, the NEW stuff?

It was obvious this problem was begging for personalization, but wasn’t obvious to us how to tackle it.

In a not-so-clever move, we started building the core technology of how to do very flexible personalization before we had–ahem– an exact idea of what the front end of the app would be like. Oops. So it took us longer, but we’ve learned a lot and have had a good time along the way.

Now we hope that Liveflows will be the tool / application that lets everyone easily add personalization to their site.

GFS and Cassandra, Hadoop and Hbase are probably excellent at what they do. But ours is a completely independent approach that targets different workload.

We’ve traded batch processing strength for greater flexibility, event-driven processing and real-time results. But since our approach is new, (and very beta) we’re sure to experience some hiccups. Please bear with us when that happens.

What is Liveflows about?

The goal of Liveflows is to add value directly to websites, by providing a richer, easier experience for readers, through the use of advanced technologies not commonly found in publishing platforms. Users and publishers alike want more views, easier consumption, and more fun.

We have a long way to go, and a lot of ideas to explore. But it’s an exciting start, and with help from YOU, our beta testing users and beta testing publishers, we can continue to mature and enhance the product. So thank you.

Our small team is as distributed our database model, but we’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback, questions or ideas:
hello/at/liveflows/dot/com.