Like Gilt, they offer quality products at a discount to standard retail, and their site features rich descriptions and photos.

They’ve also taken advantage of some best practices in flash sales, including:

• Daily emails to introduce the latest offering and drive traffic
• Limited quantities
• Time-limited sales
• Countdown “expiration” timer after you’ve added something to your cart

The last item is key, as I believe it’s one of the things that makes Gilt so successful: urgency.

Items are reserved for a limited time (10 minutes) when you add them to your cart, but once the time expires your items are no longer reserved and anyone can buy them right from under your nose.

Seeing that timer count down the seconds creates a sense of urgency and drives many people to buy things they might not otherwise, simply out of fear that they’ll lose a great deal to some other shopper. Having had a couple items purchased out from under me on Gilt, I know first hand the feeling of loss, which only reinforces the urgency on subsequent sales.

Lot18 is obviously taking advantage of this same tactic, but they have one glaring flaw.

With Gilt, when the timer expires the items remain in your shopping cart, but are marked as “no longer reserved” in red text. That means they’ve been released back into the wild and could be purchased by anyone. It looks threatening and is often enough to make you pull the trigger if you want the items.

With Lot18, however, when an item expires it is deleted from your shopping cart entirely. It doesn’t matter if you had 1 bottle or 5 cases in your cart – everything gets deleted when the timer runs out, and there’s no history of what you looked at or added.

I’ve experienced this first hand on Lot18 a number of times, but the reason I’m writing about it now is that yesterday I was halfway through the checkout process when the timer ran out on me and all my cart contents were deleted. I had just selected my shipping address and was about to confirm payment details when I hit an error page telling me the timer had expired.

I had to start all over again, and it was infuriating.

This may seem like a small problem, but in fact I think it’s indicative of a bigger issue. Lot18 is breaking a cardinal rule of e-commerce: make the checkout process as frictionless as possible.

Most smart retailers like Amazon and Gilt keep items in shopping carts as long as possible. The shopping cart almost serves as a way of bookmarking items that you like, so you can return to purchase them at any point. Heck, Amazon takes this to an extreme and even has a “save for later” feature that archives items instead of deleting them from the cart entirely. The goal should be obvious: putting things in front of customers reminds them that they might want to make a purchase.

Lot18, on the other hand, not only deletes items as soon as the reserved timer expires, but it includes the checkout process in that time limit! It doesn’t matter if you’re entering payment info – if you’re too slow, you get kicked out and have to start the entire buying process from scratch, finding each wine you want, selecting the quantity, adding it to the cart, and then re-initiating the checkout process.

I emailed Lot18 about this flaw, and I received a standard response saying the timer was necessary given limited inventory and the need to release items back into the pool of available wine. Yeah, I get that, but it doesn’t address the actual problem.

I suspect this is a flaw in Lot18′s fundamental architecture. Gilt built the timer and reservation process separately from checkout, whereas for Lot18, adding to cart = reserved. So “un-reserving” an item probably requires deleting from the cart.

These two things should be decoupled. Reserving should not be handled the same as adding an item to the cart. The shopping cart should always contain a list of items I’ve added, unless the item is completely sold out and unavailable (and even then, Gilt let’s you add yourself to the “waiting list” in case it becomes available again).

I’d be very curious to split test this feature on Lot18 and see whether it makes a difference on conversion. I also wonder what their cart abandonment rates are and how many people make a purchase after the timer expires.

I don’t know what back-end choices Lot18 has made in building their timer and shopping cart, but this should be an easy fix and one they should seriously consider implementing. Interrupting the checkout process is a major no-no. If someone’s trying to give you money, don’t stop them!

The best thing, though, is Verizon’s 4G LTE network, which kicks ass. I just moved into new office space in downtown SF, and we have AT&T’s DSL here. We’ll probably get a new provider soon, though, because the Internet speeds suck.

As an experiment I’m tethering my Thunderbolt to my laptop today, and after a quick speed test it’s clear that my tethered Thunderbolt kicks my office DSL’s ass:

Office Internet Speed

This is actually much better than average, maybe because it’s Friday and the office is half empty. Usually I see 3.5MB down and 0.5MB up.

Tethered Thunderbolt Speed on Verizon 4G LTE

Clearly MUCH better. I’m running Skype, Flash games in a browser, and occasional video, and my Thunderbolt doesn’t miss a beat. Now if only Verizon would keep data tethering free past the May 15 deadline, it would be perfect.

Be that as it may, Twitter just launched a redesigned homepage a few minutes ago, and it features search and topic trending front and center.  As I just tweeted, if there was any doubt about the direction Twitter might be headed as a company, I think the new design clears that right up.

Regular Twitter watchers should not find this surprising. Frankly, I think it makes a ton of sense. Real-time search is the new black here Silicon Valley, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to do something interesting in this space. Of course, the challenges are still great, because simply searching what people are saying or doing in real time doesn’t solve the problem of relevance, context or accuracy.

I’ve long been interested in both social search (e.g. mining one’s network for data) and real-time search, and I’m really excited to see what Twitter has up its sleeves.

P.S. Perhaps fittingly, it was launched on @Ev and @Sara‘s anniversary. Hooray for new beginnings!

Imagine my surprise, then, when nine days ago I woke up to discover that Twitter had suspended my account. I received no notice from them, and there was no apparent reason for the suspension. I’ve only ever evangelized Twitter to all my friends, and I’ve never done anything shady, so I figured the suspension must have been an accident.

Now, I know some people who work at Twitter, and even a few of their investors. But I also know the Twitter people are busy folks, so I didn’t try to get special treatment, but instead followed the advice on their site and submited a support ticket, alerting them to the fact that I was accidentally suspended.

Well, no sooner had I submitted that support ticket and refreshed the page than the ticket was marked “solved”. But my account was still suspended! No response, no explanation, and no solution – they just auto-closed my ticket.

So I reopened the ticket with a puzzled reply, and started to wait.

Three days later I still hadn’t heard a thing, so I emailed suspended@twitter.com to explain my situation. And I waited some more.

The next day I got a reply from Twitter saying that a bunch of accounts had recently been suspended, but that they should now be back to normal. Unfortunately, my account was still suspended. So I replied again, and waited…

Fast forward to today (9 days later). Still not a peep from Twitter. Fortunately, though, they’re located in SF, and I happened to be near their office, so I popped in to visit my friends there. I explained my situation, and my kind friend took pity on me and chatted with the support folks. Soon after I left the Twitter office, my account was reinstated. Hooray!

Sort of…

I’m finally back in the twitterverse, but now I have a new problem: none of the people I follow show up in my timeline. But if I unfollow and “re-follow” someone, they start showing up. I’m hoping the problem will fix itself, since I really, really don’t want to have to re-add all 490 people whom I was following before.

(sigh)

I like Twitter. I’ve always seen its usefulness and have evangelized it to friends who often scoffed as I sang its praises. As one of its very first users I’ve been through a lot with it – chronic down time, beloved features that have come and gone, user backlash, “Oprah-fication”. I’m still a fan, but there definitely comes a point when it starts to lose some of its luster.

This recent suspension, being so random, unexplained and unnecessary, definitely took the shine off of Twitter for me. And while I’m sure the good people in the support department are inundated and overworked, I’ve had nothing but horrible experiences with Twitter’s customer service. This was not my first time submitting a help ticket. Two previous, unrelated help requests were never even answered and still remain unsolved months later.

I understand that Twitter’s still a free service and expectations should be adjusted accordingly, but when you alienate your user base – especially early adopters and evangelists, that’s never a good thing. I’m crossing my fingers that maybe something will change for the better. But honestly, I don’t have high hopes, and that makes me sad.

[update: major thanks to my friend, Helga, without whom I might just have gone insane. Thank you!]

The source of the YouTube video content? None other than the AP’s own YouTube channel.

That’s right – the AP’s right hand doesn’t even know what it’s left hand is doing. I guess no one told their legal department that they actually have their own YouTube channel on which embedding is turned on… you know, to help videos spread virally across the web.

As funny as this all is, I mostly just find it frightening and depressing. That the Associated Press is so completely clueless when it comes to new media and how the Internet works is not a good sign. And draconian crackdown efforts which backfire so completely and publicly do way more harm than any embedded YouTube video ever could.

This past weekend Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur caused a bit of a fracas when he made a simple feature request for Twitter search. He wanted to be able to sort Twitter searches by the number of followers that a given user has, using that measure as some sort of indication of a user’s “authority”. That comment generated a surprisingly large and passionate amount of feedback from bloggers and Twitter users. Frankly, I was shocked that people felt so strongly about it, and I think Michael Arrington said it all with this post title: “Bloggers lose the plot over Twitter search“.

Be that as it may, it brings up a point that has long been talked about in the Twitterverse: how does one determine a Twitter user’s influence or authority?

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not we should even care about “authority” or influence on Twitter, I think that anyone advancing the notion of followers or followees as an accurate measure of influence is completely missing the mark. Twitter is social and interactive. The follower/followee model is overly simplistic. Sure, number of followers is interesting, since anyone with 15,000 followers has a “louder” voice than someone with 7, but what we still need is a dynamic, interactive measure.

Om Malik just posted an article about a study carried out by Bernardo Huberman (et al.) from HP’s Social Computing lab which examined the relationship between followers, followees (people a Twitter user follows), and “friends”. The study defined friends as people to whom a user has sent at least two @-replies.

As I have long suspected, measuring “friends”, as defined in the study, proved more meaningful a metric than simply counting followers or followees. A brief excerpt from Om’s post summarizes the study’s results:

On Twitter, [Huberman] found that regardless of the number of followers or followees, there were very few friends in a personal Twitter circle. He used a very weak definition of “friend” — anyone to whom a user has directed a post at least twice. And because of that, Huberman says that in order to “influence a person’s absorption of content, there is a need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.”

Huberman’s study found that:

• Users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.
• Even though the number of friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends starts to saturate and stays nearly constant.
• The number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.

Interesting results, but still pretty obvious/intuitive. At least this study is getting closer to the heart of Twitter interaction and the influence its users have. After all, Twitter is a social tool, so just counting followers or followees doesn’t nearly capture the interactive nature of the service. Measuring “friends” (as defined above) gets closer, but I maintain that this still misses two very important measures. If, as Om assumes, we’re using the traditional definition of authority as the “power to influence or command thought, opinion or behavior”, then I propose that the following metrics are even more useful:

• Number of @-replies per post for a given user
• Number of “retweets” per post

As I stated in my comment on Om’s original post, I believe that one of the most important factors in a measure of authority or influence is the extent to which a user is able to get people thinking or talking about a topic. By that logic, a tweet which sparks a conversation and/or a large volume of replies should be given more weight than a tweet which goes out quietly and generates no responses.

To create a normalized metric which translates well across users with different numbers of followers we would ultimately need to collect data and see what kind of conclusions can be drawn from the metric above. We might find that it’s best to take the number of replies per post and multiply it by the ratio of followers who replied to the total number of followers. Or we might come to a different conclusion altogether.

The second metric I mentioned above is the number of re-tweets that a given post generates. Although they are less conversational in nature, re-tweets are interesting because they highlight tweets which someone not only found worthwhile, but found so compelling that (s)he wanted to pass it on to others. In fact, re-tweets are the core of Twitter’s ability to spread news at lightning speed. For example, in the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Twitter was as good (if not better) a source of breaking news than any major cable news network.

I maintain, then, that any credible measure of Twitter authority has to take into account the spread of a re-tweeted post throughout the “Twitterverse”.

One of the main reasons I think my metrics are better than the “friend” metric defined in the HP study is because one can directly control (or even game) the friend count, whereas the reply/retweet metric is dependent on how other people perceive a given user.

For example, since “friends” are defined simply as people to whom one has directed two or more replies, I could start replying to tons of people throughout the Twitterverse, thereby increasing my friend count, but not really adding anything substantive to the community. Conversely, the reply/retweet metric is dependent on my ability to inspire and influence others. If I’m blathering on about pocket lint all day, my followers probably won’t find that noteworthy. Whereas if I’m funny, or a thought leader, or offering breaking news stories, my ability to inspire replies and retweets is likely to be much higher.

The bottom line is that while the study from HP’s Social Computing Lab is getting much closer to determining the influence of any given Twitter user, we really need more data to fully understand the interactive nature of Twitter and its users’ influence.

I would really like to see a more complete study which looks at the metrics I identified above. In fact, I have half a mind to get back to my statistics roots and put that ol’ masters degree to use in analyzing these metrics to see what conclusions can be drawn. If anyone wants to collaborate, drop me a line!

[UPDATE 12/29/08 - 13:45 PST]
It might not be obvious from my post above, so I wanted to go one step further and say that I don’t really think any single metric is sufficient to measure Twitter influence. While I strongly believe that two measures that I highlight above are more meaningful than follower count in a search for a proper influence metric, I think that they need to be looked at in context, and in combination with other measures (including follow numbers, total reach of a given tweet, etc.).

As a simple example, take the tweet from Loic which started this whole mess. Clearly it’s had a pretty major impact among the “Twitterati” and has elicited passionate feedback. But that didn’t just play out on Twitter. No, it’s been blogged, and retweeted, and remixed, and discussed both online and off (some would say ad nauseam). So perhaps any measure of Twitter “authority” is incomplete if it is confined to only measuring activity that plays out on Twitter.

One can extrapolate this problem even further and say that it’s directly related to the problem of measuring the full impact of anything that takes place on a blog, social network, or perhaps even the Internet. How does one measure the full impact of pay-per-impression advertising? Or a viral YouTube video? Or a popular blog post? Perhaps the best we can hope for is a good approximation.

In other news, death to IE!

This can’t be good for the almighty Jobs.

For all you party animals out there, here’s a quick list of the Web 2.0 parties going on this week. Compiled with some help. You can also find more info on the whole week’s schedule (both parties and expo stuff).

Monday, April 21

What: Pownce Brunch
Where: Dottie’s True Blue (522 Jones St)
When: Monday, April 21, 11:00AM -
Info: http://pownce.com/DigitalKNK/notes/1817275/

What: Pre-Web 2.0 meet-up with Flickr, Moo
Where: Kate O’Brien’s (579 Howard St)
When: Monday, April 21, 5:00PM – 8:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/469348

What: The Finns Are Coming to Web 2.0 Expo!
Where: Foreign Cinema (2534 Mission St)
When: Monday, April 21, 6:00PM – 8:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/491643/ (RSVP)

What: Social Media Club – San Francisco
Where: Adobe (601 Townsend at 7th St)
When: Monday, April 21, 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Info: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/110484462

What: Web Monday Silicon Valley
Where: Citizen Space (425 2nd St)
When: Monday, April 21, 6:30PM – 9:30PM
Info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7959317099

What: Love 2.0
Where: Harlot (46 Minna St)
When: Monday, April 21, 8:00PM – 11:00PM
Info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=11322066771

Tuesday, April 22

What: British beer tasting & European networking
Where: Hiller Aviation Museum (San Carlos Airport)
When: Tuesday, April 22, 5:30PM – 8:00PM
Info: http://crossingtheocean.net/seeda/hiller_event.html

What: GAB and Blogtropolis launch party
Where: Gray Area Gallery (1515 Folsom St)
When: Tuesday, April 22, 6:00PM – 11:00PM
Info: http://www.grayareagallery.org/

What: Official Digg Meet-up
Where: Mighty (119 Utah St)
When: Tuesday, April 22, 6:30PM – 11:30PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/471398/

What: Ignite Web 2.0 Expo SF II
Where: DNA Lounge (375 11th St)
When: Tuesday, April 22, 7:00PM-
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/467652/

Wednesday, April 23

What: Web2Open Takeout Dinner
Where: Yerba Buena Gardens (4th/Mission)
When: Wednesday, April 23, 6:00PM-
Info: http://www.eu.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?schedule

What: Photobucket Developer Party
Where: Roe Bar & Lounge (651 Howard St)
When: Wednesday, April 23, 6:00PM – 9:00PM
Info: http://mashable.com/2008/04/16/photobucket-developer-party-tickets/

What: Evolve – Chi.mp and Mashable’s Web 2.0 After Party
Where: Mighty (119 Utah St)
When: Wednesday, April 23, 7:00PM – 10:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/467885/

What: The Big Open Y! Party
Where: Yahoo! Brickhouse (500 3rd St)
When: Wednesday, April 23, 7:00PM – 10:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/469035/

What: South Park Crawl
Where: South Park (Brannan / Bryant / 3rd / 2nd St)
When: Wednesday, April 23, 7:00PM – 10:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/454850/
Leverage Software: www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=23295987864
Six Apart: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/connecting-with.html

What: Web2Open
Where: Moscone West
When: Wednesday, April 23, 8:00PM – 11:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/467423/

Thursday, April 24

SpringMix Party
Where: Ambassador
When: 6:30pm till the sun comes up
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=16723702463

What: Booth Crawl
Where: Moscone West
When: Thursday, April 24, 4:30PM – 6:00PM
Info: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/3484

What: Amazon.com Networking Party
Where: Jillian’s @ Metreon (101 4th St)
When: Thursday, April 24, 6:00PM – 8:00PM
Info: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6972960853&topic=4431

What: After Hours Event
Where: Marriott (55 4th St)
When: Thursday, April 24, 6:00PM – 12:00AM
Info: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/4238

What: Web2Open
Where: Moscone West
When: Thursday, April 24, 8:00PM – 11:00PM
Info: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/467423/

What: Web Mission 2008
Where: Redwood Room at Clift Hotel (495 Geary St)
When: Thursday, April 24, 9:00PM -
Info: http://www.webmission08.com/agenda.html