Patent Lawyers

ClutterMe is a relatively innovative technology and we decided to file a provisional patent. Choosing a lawyer is a lot like choosing a physician or dentist, it's best to have one you feel comfortable with.

We settled on someone that was in our price range and who had, surprisingly, a good technical background. Anyway, it took us about a month to prepare our provisional patent from first phone call to filing date.

It's been an arduous and tedious process but hopefully in the end it will be worth it.

Now we just have to get back into the mindset of coding.

Mark

A second round of Google millionaires?

Google's IPO minted more than 900 millionaires. But there's another possible untapped google gold mine, and that's ironically through Facebook.

At ClutterMe we manage both our Facebook Apps and ClutterMe.com. It's interesting to compare CPC on both channels. On Facebook the CPC is ostensibly low at $0.12. Our web apps do much better with a CPC of $0.60. That's a $0.48 difference despite Facebook's rich userbase.

For Google, the obstacle is technical. In order to put AdSense inside a Facebook app, iFrames are needed. The iFrames however are not contextually relevant even though Developers have access to users interests, age and sex. There is an option to use Google_hints but this isn't publicly available.

So there's $0.48 available to anyone that can contextualize ads for Facebook Developers.

The first to do so, Google, Facebook or otherwise, will have the distinction of minting the next millionaires (or at least quintupling their revenue) and make a pretty penny themselves.

Combining sources in Google Analytics using a filter

Understanding where our users come from and how they use our site is essential to improving it. Google Analytics is a great tool for this purpose. One drawback is that traffic from sources which use different subdomains for load balancing - such as Hotmail - shows up as hundreds of different sources.

It's simple to use a filter to combine certain traffic sources into one. With a bit of help from the Analytics Help group, all it takes is to create a custom filter, set the type to "Search and replace", the filter field as "Campaign Source" (NOT "Referral", which was my first attempt), a regular expression for the search string (for example "[a-zA-Z0-9]*\.[a-zA-Z0-9]*\.mail\.live\.com"), and a consolidated string for the replace string (for example "mail.live.com"). The filter might look something like this:



That's it! The filter will be applied to any new traffic, but unfortunately it won't be retroactively applied to old data.

Early adopters needed !!!

We are looking for Early adopters for our Reddit and Digg type site called ClutterMe News.

We are looking to grow this feature with input from early users. Let us know if you are interested and we can make sure we work closely to fit your needs.

Thanks,
Mark and Alex

We've been on a roll...

A couple of new feature announcements...

- After you sign up you can choose a page template to use.
- There is now a footer at the bottom of most pages with some more information about the site (to be improved definitely).
- The Google Search Results look a lot better.
- Links have no follows to make it a bit more difficult for spammers.

Also, if you haven't already, check out our social news feature and make some comments!

We've now officially released our 'News' Feature

Check out ClutterMe News to see what the vibe is.

We now have aspects of Google, MySpace and Reddit making ClutterMe your one stop shop in web browsing.

Watch throughout the week as we're going to iterate and improve our story selection algorithm.

Back on track...

Look for some new and major updates coming soon to ClutterMe. Everyone always asks me, 'How many users do you have?'. The answer is about 4000 but a lot fewer actives. The core idea behind our upcoming changes is to enhance ClutterMe's appeal as a portal.

The task is to convince the average web user to start their day with ClutterMe.