Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Grand Rapids Schmooze Report

I have just returned from a shareware schmooze in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  A schmooze is similar to a conference such as the SIC, except it is smaller and we do away with the pretense of a formal program. It's just a get-together for people in the industry to talk about stuff.

This schmooze was put on by Sheila Manning, who did an excellent job.

I drove up from Springfield to Grand Rapids on Thursday. The trip was uneventful and there wasn't much traffic, except in Grand Rapids itself as I hit town right at evening rush hour. I arrived in the hotel, managed to get a room (they only had 4 rooms left!), and found the Schmooze room to meet everybody.

Later that evening a group of us, including Gregg, Tim & Sharon, and Diwant walked across the street to the Smokey Bones restaurant and had an excellent meal. We returned to the hotel for more talking (As you will see, a Schmooze mostly consists of talking and eating).

On Friday morning, after a morning session of donuts and talk, we travelled a few blocks to the ITT Technical Institute, which is a small private college-like technical training institute. There we met with a group of students who have a game design club and are interested in becoming game designers/programmers. We talked with the students for a couple of hours and had an institutional lunch there. Then we returned to the hotel for more talking in the schmooze room.

Friday evening a group of us went across town to a restaurant called the Firehouse Grill.  The group included Eric, Rosemary, Gary, Gregg, and two local friends of Eric's. The meal was good and the gelato dessert was excellent. After the meal we had to walk what seemed like half a mile back to the cars as the restaurant was near a high school football game and every space on every street all around was just filled with parked cars.

Saturday was more of the same. A morning session with donuts became an afternoon session with a few leftover donuts. For lunch, Diwant, Rich Holler, Fred, Loren and Kim and I went to Big Boy (can you believe there are people from the midwest who have never eaten at a Big Boy?).

When I returned from lunch, I met my artist Rick for the first time in person. We have been working together for years over the internet, but we'd never met before.

Finally, Saturday night a group of us including Tim & Sharon, Loren & Kim, Gianfranco & Colleen and Gregg travelled about 30-40 miles to Gregg's cabin/trailer in the country, where we grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and after dark had a campfire. We made smores and told ghost stories. It was a beautiful night and was almost the perfect temperature (Michigan could have been a lot colder than it was). There was a full moon which really lit up the night.

Some people spent the night out there in tents, but I rode back to the hotel with Gianfranco & Colleen as I'm not big on camping out, not to mention that I had a paid-for hotel room to sleep in.

On Sunday morning I returned back through Michigan and Indiana back home. It was an excellent schmooze, my 8th one (I believe). Next year the unofficial word is that the schmooze will be held in Bloomington, Indiana.

The Slow Tail

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the Long Tail, which describes the large population of rare events, which applied to business means that the vast quantity of low selling items make up a large proportion of total sales. 

Jakob Nielsen has now come up with a similar concept called The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying.

Summary:
Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.

He quotes data from a large study where half of the sales occurred within 28 minutes of the first visit. However, the remaining sales took much longer. 75% occurred in 24 hours, 90% in 12 days, but the last 5% took more than 4 weeks.

He then goes on and gives some excellent implications of these numbers.  Read the whole thing.

The Slow Tail definitely applies to a shareware business. In fact, my experience is that the Slow Tail in shareware is much larger than Nielsen's numbers. This is probably because the download of a trial version adds another step to the process, delaying the sale in comparison to businesses without trial downloads.

The current practice in the casual game industry seems to be to ignore the Slow Tail altogether. The one hour trial has become very common. A one hour trial picks up only that first burst of business and ignores the remaining Slow Tail. The ideal would be to try to get that initial burst and then try to pick up the Slow Tail as it arises.

This data also shows a glaring weakness in Google and Overture (Yahoo)'s conversion tracking system. Both systems only track conversions that come within 30 days of the initial click. This needs to be 90 to give you accurate data.

Now Available on Amazon.com

Pretty Good Solitaire is now available on Amazon.com:

Amazon.com Pretty Good Solitaire order page

We are doing this through Kathy Salisbury's new Great Mind Software service.