Collectors Welcomed - A New Welcome Page on Colnect + Usability Issues

Colnect has been said of having an ugly user interface that doesn't fit the cool Web2.0 scene. So in the last week I've been working on many usability issues trying to improve how collectors interact with Colnect. To compliment these additions a new welcome page now greets new comers. Below these pictures you'll find what has really changed lately.

Natural sorting is not straight forward on computer system. When sorting the numbers 1 to 10, too many computer programs will start with 1 10 2 instead of the natural 1 2 3. As natural sorting is not supported by the database, I sought different options for sorting catalog codes which may be anything like P-11b, XPK-987-33, Km#12.11 and whichever combination you may consider. So what is currently done is that all numbers are padded with spaces to some set length and so the database knows how to sort them properly. Don't worry, it's not the original information just a copy of it used for quick searching and sorting.

Another issue now settled is that of searching by 'Name'. This was my mistake to begin with as 'Name' on coin countries list, for example, would search a country name and on the main coins page would search a coin name. Now proper pages would have both "Coin name" and "Country name" search so prevent confusion.

A few duplicate catalogs and duplicate series have been merged using a newly duplicates processing script which would make it easy for editors to report such duplicates and process them.

On the multiple-language front an important change has been made. A user that has never visited Colnect will now have his default language according to his country (conferred by the IP address). That is, of course, if it's one of the 35 languages supported by Colnect. Once a user sets a different language, it's remembered and all subsequent URLs would contain the language letters. So even if a German-speaking collector send a /de/ URL to his Spanish-speaking friend, it'll be converted to /es/ for the Spanish-speaker.

And finally, a new improved welcome page is supposed to make more sense than the previous one. Yes, usability and design have to be re-thought and re-made on Colnect but there's nothing quite as bad as a horrible first impression, so here we go...

Colnect's Alexa Ratings goes up up up...

A previous post about Colnect's ratings on Alexa had been posted about 4 months ago. Colnect's Alexa ratings had kept climbing through the time and
now standing at ~103,000, whereas ~4 months ago it was ~184,000, ~7 months ago it was at ~360,000 and ~9 months ago ~500,000. Climbing up from now on will probably be slower on the absolute numbers but not on the actual traffic which keeps growing and growing as Colnect is offering its services to new crowds of banknotes collectors and bottle caps collectors.

Banknotes for Collectors on Colnect

Banknotes are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect, already with over 15,000 banknotes.

New categories can be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.

Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with ~157,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with ~15,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed. Colnect's new bottle caps catalog already has ~5,400 bottle caps listed.

Collectible Bottle Caps for Collectors on Colnect

Bottle caps are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect.

Colnect's catalogs are created by volunteering collectors and updated constantly. The initial catalog of bottle caps, already with over 5,000 bottle caps, has been contributed by one member of Colnect, Paul Giba.

More categories will soon be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.

Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with over 155,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with over 14,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed.

How Colnect's Winning Pitch Was Made

Colnect had surprisingly won the Startup2.0 competition in Bilbao, Spain. Out of ~160 companies, 11 made it to the finals where each company had 3 minutes to pitch and 4 more minutes for Q&A. This post will describe what I consider the key points that have made Colnect's pitch stand out and perhaps one of the reasons for Colnect winning the competition.

Planning

Perhaps 3 minutes don't seem like a lot of time but consider that some "elevator pitches" last only 40 seconds, so 3 minutes is a lot. In my opinion, a major mistake is to try and showcase all you have in a short amount of time. When time is of the essence the aim is to impress. So the initial plan was to use the 3 minutes to give a basic introduction and impress the audience without getting into any details. Considering the fact that 11 companies were going to display, Colnect would have to stand out.

Promotional Video

If you haven't watched it yet, you should now:



The idea to use puppets for the video came from my brother Ofer and help in creating the video came from my friend Matan and his friend Eric.

Impressive key points were emphasized in the video:
* Colnect's availability in 35 languages.
* Colnect having a great community with over a hundred volunteers.
* Colnect answering a real need for collectors - its target market.

Q&A

Intentionally, I have not answered the most common questions (business model, current status, competition, etc.) in my 3 minutes part. I guessed that it would mean I'd get to be asked these questions rather than (potentially hazardous) unexpected questions or (much worse) no questions. Detailed answers to the common questions were prepared and I could use my "cheat sheet" in answering the jury's questions.

As a minor gimmick, I put on the frog puppet (Frognector) from the video on my hand while the video was being watched and as the video finished showing, I opened with: "Frognector is now available to answer your questions". I actually expected a bit more laughs but I'm sure it attracted attention to myself. Some of the jury members were using their laptops paying half (or less) attention on other presentations. My "bending the rules" a bit ensured more attention. Though I risked being seen as a joker, I believed that the ready made answers would make up for any such impression.

Aftermath

Not that a good presentation would necessarily take you where you want to go but a bad presentation will most likely NEVER take you where you want. Try to think who your target crowd is and how they would look at it. For example: when doing a 1on1 meeting the gimmicks may be completely stupid but when you need to stand out from the rest, they're probably essential.

Colnect wins Startup2.0 competition!!! nonick 2009, Bilbao, Spain

An astounding surprise, Colnect has won Statrup2.0 competition held as a part of the nonick conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Startup2.0 featured ~160 companies from all over Europe, of which 11 companies made it to the finals. All members of the jury unanimously voted for Colnect! The greatness of the achievement is even more vivid in the light of the grave difference between Colnect and most other contenders. Colnect has never received any funding and has been run solely by its single founder, Amir Wald, also writing this post.

Second place went to Genoom from Spain, a social networking platform designed to build private family networks. Third place went to Twidox from Germany, a free, user generated library of ‘quality’ documents that allows individuals and organizations to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover them.

Official announcements are found here and here.

Colnect's new promotional video, created for the competition, was met with spontaneous ovation from the crowd. Here it is:


Colnect's founder, Amir Wald, receiving the award:


More personal notes about the event will soon be published. Thanks to everyone organizing, participating and supporting Colnect.

Colnect got the the finals on Startup 2.0 2009

Colnect was chosen as one of the finalists to compete on Startup 2.0 competition to be held 24-25/April in Bilbao, Spain.

This year, 157 start ups participated, of which 11 were chosen to present in Bilbao. Three of those will win by a jury's decision. Though I believe Colnect is an extremely unique, interesting and useful project, its lack of any external funding may make it a little rough of the edges and so I'm lowering my expectations (though not my enthusiasm) in advance. Not many stay awestruck and drooling when seeing the intelligent special girl walking on the beach, most reserve their saliva for the fit hottie in bikini ;)

From their site: "
Startup2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field of 2.0 technologies."

UPDATE: The finalists announced here

Phone cards catalog: biggest, most extensive, free

Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone cards catalogs, has now over 150,000 phone cards listed in it.

Colnect's catalog is an endeavor of many collectors from around the world who constantly improve it.

Using Colnect's catalog, collectors from around the world can easily manage their personal collection on Colnect and find swap buddies from around the world.

Special thanks goes to all the contributors, editors and translators of Colnect.

Happy collecting :)

Colnect Rising on Compete

Though I update about trends in site metrics for Colnect, I'm not really sure what they mean as they don't always coincide with my Analytics results. You're welcomed to check Colnect's rankings on Compete. It has risen 34% in the last month. Pretty nice :)

GMail turn 5 - still BETA??? Colnect will not follow.

Gmail's official blog announced that Gmail celebrates it's 5th birthday. 5 years is not a short amount of time. However, GMail is still in BETA. It seems that Google has changed the common meaning of "BETA" from "publicly available product about to go fully public when final fixes and additions are made" into "fully fledged public product that is expected to sometimes fail and we won't take responsibility for it when it does".
Google even created the 'beta' mark trend in logos of companies and services.

I personally find it rediculous and unfair to the customers. Of course products sometimes fail but we cannot abuse the term "BETA" for 5 (FIVE!!!) years.

Colnect has been marked as beta for less than 6 months since it went public before all key features were ready and prior to proper testing. Raising a site from grass-roots up is not a simple task. However, as of today, since Colnect is relatively stable and many of its key features (a lot more is to come but I'll elaborate on that another time) are ready and publicly available, the BETA mark will be removed.
Yes, my system may sometimes fail. Yes, it's not as perfect as I'd like it to be. However, it's public, it's working, it makes many people using it happy so it's not a beta anymore.

Japanese and Lithuanian languages added

Colnect is now available in 35 languages. The latest two additions are Japanese and Lithuanian.

Translations on Colnect are performed manually by volunteering translators who are members of the site. Whenever a phrase is not properly translated they can translate it easily. It's all explained here.

A recent addition is the use of automated suggestions. When a phrase has not yet been translated, it'll first be translated with an automated suggestion. An icon telling the translator he should translate (or confirm) that phrase still exists. The use of suggestions is intended for the period of time after a new content is published on Colnect (which is quite often) until a translator actually gets to translate it.

Yes, automated translations sometimes suck really bad. For example "FREE trial - 1 month" had a Hebrew suggestion that can be translated back to English as "Free trial - 1 year". What?!?! How did a month become a year? That is quite dangerous and I hope these mistakes are not too frequent. I hope that the automated suggestions many times "get over the net", meaning they are understood by the reader although acknowledged as improper language use.

Japanese is currently the only language for which Colnect yet has no translator and so we rely on the automatic suggestions. It's a sort of pilot to see if it can attract Japanese collectors and hopefully one of them will agree to become a translator. If this experiment succeeds, other languages may be added this way. A warning message will be displayed with languages that are not completely manually translated.

You're welcomed to check Transposh for translation solutions.

Twitter fails as a promotional tool?

Colnect has joined Twitter less than a week ago using a few Twitter profiles:
* Colnect news Twitter @colnect
* A personal Twitter for Colnect's manager @AmirWald
* Automated feed reporting new collectibles in Colnect's catalogs @ColnectCatalogs
* Automated feed on Colnect's catalog edits @ColnectEdits

During these days 28 visits came to Colnect from Twitter, a meager amount in comparison to the number of "followers" and energy invested. The bounce rate (visitors seeing a single page and leaving the site) was incredibly high as well. In comparison, a few posts on a relevant forum resulted in hundreds of relevant visits (with much lesser bounce rate).

It seems a lot of people use Twitter to self promote and so it's more of a bubble where "followers" is a rough indication of the number of people who will actually read anything of what you write. My guess is that for most people, a small percent of their "followers" actually read more than 5% of their tweets. Though some people think of it as a useful personal tool, it doesn't seem like they dominate Twitter.

Though less than a week may be a too short amount of time for a verdict, results so far are very unsatisfying. In the future, the automated feeds may be of use to some of the addict collectors on Colnect. Let's see what the future brings.

Colnect on Twitter

Giving up to the fad? Possibly...
Easier than blog posts? Obviously...
Useful? hmmm.....

Anyway, you're welcomed to follow the official Colnect on Twitter
All public updates regarding Colnect may be there before anywhere else.

Custom Personal Lists on Colnect

A new much-needed premium service had just been added to Colnect.

Custom Personal Lists

In addition to the common inventory lists on Colnect (Collection / Swap / Wish), premium members can create more lists. When custom lists are added, you can add and remove item to and from them in the same way you do for the common lists.

Common Uses

• Reserving items for a specific swap
• Offering many item for a single sale
• Marking items you wish to attend to later
• Creating a list to be shown to collectors on other sites

Biggest phone cards catalog for collectors - 142,000+ phone cards listed

For a long time, Colnect provides the world's most extensive collectible phone cards catalog. However, the phone card collectors on Colnect keep adding information to the catalog. It has just passed over 142,000 listed phonecards. The catalog is very organic and changes as the editors on Colnect receive feedbacks from collectors. It's freely available for browsing even without the need to register. Free registration to Colnect allows collectors to also manage their personal collection.

Coins catalog: over 14,000 coins

Quietly but surely, Colnect's coins catalog, being built by coin collectors for coin collectors, has surpassed 14,000 listed coins. It's freely available for browsing even without the need to register. Free registration to Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection.

Colnect's coins catalog is currently the world's biggest freely available resource for coin pictures and information.

Colnect rises on Compete / Quantcast / Alexa

I've been updating about Colnect's rank rising on Alexa and have now decided to include links to other rankings. So you can check out Colnect's rankings on Compete and Quantcast and start wondering what all these ratings are actually worth. So although it's nice to see Colnect gains momentum on all non-related meters, it's interesting to note the difference between what they report and between the reality. By "reality" I usually mean my reports from Google Analytics and, when really bored, the server's logs can be inspected. There's little connection between the real graphs and the estimated ones by these services. Colnect has been growing and growing throughout. Sometimes slower, lately faster. The graphs by Compete and Quantcast actually show a very inaccurate picture. Oh well...

Collectors premium services on Colnect

A few days ago, Colnect's premium services for collectors have finally opened up. Colnect has already been offering a respectable set of free services to collectors from around the world. These free services will continue to be offered for the benefit of the entire collectors community.

The announcement has been made:
"Premium membership gives you access to several features that will enhance your Colnect experience. If you regularly use Colnect, please consider supporting us by becoming a premium member."

Currently, not many premium services are offered but these will be added with time according to collector demands.

Happy collecting :)

Colnect's Alexa Rating Keeps Climbing

Since the last post about Colnect's ranking on Alexa, it has risen again, now standing at 144,039 whereas a month ago it was 184,627, ~4 months ago it was at ~360,000 and ~6 months ago ~500,000. More information on my previous post about the subject.
The ranking is coherent with Colnect's internal report, showing a significant increase in traffic during the last months.

Email Anti-Spam Tip

This tip will not completely prevent spam but will enable you to quickly deduce if you've got spam, how you the spam and help you decide what to do with it. It's quite simple, have your own email domain and give different email addresses at different places.

An Example

Today I've received this unsolicited (SPAM) email trying to frighten me into buying colnect.tw, colnect.cn and so on. Here it is:

From: kevin.wu

(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on March 3, 2009, One Japan company called "Path soft investment Corp" are applying to register (colnect) as internet brand name and domain names as below (colnect.net.cn colnect.org.cn colnect.mobi colnect.asia colnect.hk colnect.cc colnect.tw etc.).

After our initial checking, we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 15 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Path soft Corp" unconditionally.

We would like to get the affirmation of your company,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wu
Senior Director
TEL: +86 21 69929440
Fax: +86 21 69929447
Website:www.qpnic.org.cn
Shanghai QPNIC Web Property Solutions Limited

Now, this email was sent to management@ and webmaster@ (both of them at my domain colnect.com). However, since I never give these email addresses to anyone, it means that every email I get there is SPAM. Other common names such as info@ and contact@ and others are frequently used.
A short search on the Internet affirmed my suspicion of a scam, when I found this blog post and that one.

What About My Private Email?

Well, you can easily get yourself a free domain on any service that would freely forward your email (such as cjb.net). Then, whenever you register a website, make up an email site_x@mydomain.cjb.net and use it to register the site. You would always be able to receive such emails but when this address becomes 'dirty' (starts receiving much spam), you can filter out all emails coming to it. It's a better solution than one-time emails since sometimes you do actually want to allow the site to later contact you. It is also a completely legitimate email address.