Colnect, Connecting Collectors. Colnect offers revolutionizing services to Collectors the world over. Colnect is available in 63 languages and offers extensive collectible catalogs and the easiest personal collection management and Auto-Matching for deals. Join us today :)
They are supposed to be somewhat helpful in convincing users to click on one of your results and so that's good news for Colnect. I'd like to accredit it to some recent SEO efforts I've made but the truth is one never really knows...
The odd thing is how these links are chosen by Google's "automatic" process. The words chosen for quicklinks are "Stamps", "Phonecards", "Countries" and "Monedas". The first two seem a perfect choice as they frequently appear on Colnect and are really a part of what the site is all about. The last two are quite a weird twist of Google's algorithm as "Countries" actually refers to the Banknote catalog - countries list on Colnect and the second one goes to the Spanish version of the coins page, rather than the English one.
Any tips on how their "automatic" algorithm works and how I could optimize for it would be appreciated. Until then, I am, as most, at the mercy of the Google gods.
Colnect Colnect has passed the mark of 5,000 registered collectors. This is an increase of over 45% from 5 months ago. Considering the lack of true marketing efforts, it is an impressive achievement.
How do collectors learn about Colnect?
As Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection and semi-automatically manage swaps with other collectors from around the world, it's the collectors' own interest to have their collector friends join the site. Why would a collector go through the swap and wish lists of another collector manually when a match to his own lists can be done with a click?
So what's next?
Colnect will expand to more collectible fields as requests come from existing members of the community. There are currently already 5 categories (stamps, coins, paper money, phone cards and bottle caps) and a few more are now being worked on by collectors. Additional services, most of which were requested by the community, are being implemented and will soon be announced.
Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone card catalogs, has now over 186,000 phone cards listed in it.
Amazingly, the catalog keeps growing faster than before, with over 27,000 phone card listed during the last 30 days. By the time you read this post the number 186,000 may already be obsolete.
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.
In a previous post about what beta means, I've shared my opinion about Google abusing the BETA mark as to render it almost meaningless, as their example was followed by many other companies in the industry. I've decided that Colnect will not follow and remove its BETA mark as the system became widely used by real users.
Now it seems that Google decided to follow Colnect's way and remove the BETA: "We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.".
Yes Google, it's about time!
To those who didn't follow the humor, I doubt it that the post on Colnect's blog made the difference to Google but it's funnier to think that it did :)
Updates done on Colnect may be found on Twitter. For all collectibles added to Colnect see @ColnectCatalogs. For all edits done by our editors see: @ColnectEdits. General news are sometimes posted on @Colnect but this blog you are reading is more in-depth.
Do you have a Twitter account? Would you like automated tweets in your account about favorite collectibles? Send a direct message to @Colnect
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Updates done on Colnect may be found on Twitter. For all collectibles added to Colnect see 
