Inside StyleFeeder: A Discussion with Founder & CTO Philip Jacob

If you are serious about online shopping then you are no stranger to StyleFeeder, the personal shopping engine that can make your online shopping nightmares disappear. However, if you've read the About StyleFeeder page on their website then you know exactly why I was so excited to get an interview with Founder and CTO Philip Jacob... here's a quick excerpt to get you up to speed (you can read the rest here and read more about what StyleFeeder does on my earlier post here):

"...Call them Bea and Phil. Call them us, who made this site for ourselves and now for you.

In the winter of 2005, Phil noticed that Bea was spending a lot of time emailing to her friends things she had found online. Bea didn’t know what Phil knew, that although email is good for many things, it’s a private and inefficient way to share links.

And Bea finds a lot. And Phil thought it would be nice if Bea and her friends could share things online, and maybe a hundred other people could watch.

So StyleFeeder is Phil’s answer to Bea’s obsession: some things are so damn cool that the world has to know."

I can definitely see why StyleFeeder is so successful, they have a great team of laid back and fashion obsessed employees, they treat every user like a rock star or celebrity stylist, and they focus on quality. I sent Philip a couple of questions about his baby, StyleFeeder, and I'm sure you will be as delighted about the responses as I was.

1. First off, amazing application. From your point of view, what does StyleFeeder stand for?
Thanks for the compliment :) StyleFeeder is a personal shopping engine, a service that uses the intelligence of the network to help you find new products based on your preferences. StyleFeeder is to retail what blogs are to media, netflix is to movies, last.fm is to music and so forth. We're reinventing e-commerce around the individual. E-commerce today is very much based on making it easy for sellers to get in front of buyers, which seems totally backwards to us. When you're shopping, you want to see products that are relevant and interesting to you - it's a simple concept, and the way we do this is to rely on the massive amount of preference data that we've collected so far and use that to power our recommendation service.

2. One of the best qualities of StyleFeeder is the concept of user personalization and customization. Basically I felt that when Phil made this app for Bea, Bea was me! In the development stages, was there a lot of user input, especially with the strong emphasis on user personalization?
Actually, at the very beginning, I developed StyleFeeder for Bea's needs and my needs. We wanted to create a service that made sense to us, so the best way to do that was to build it around our own usage patterns. Very quickly, though, we realized that this just wasn't going to be compelling, since we still didn't have a way to help people shop outside of their own little network of friends. One night during dinner, I had a conversation with Jason Rennie about the work that he was doing on his PhD at MIT, specifically, the power of the algorithms he'd worked on to help people filter large amounts of data based on preference. He subsequently joined StyleFeeder and still works on making our algorithms perform the magic that helps you find the cool pair of shoes found by someone in Sweden.

3. Online shopping has kind of been in limbo, everyone uses the same process, social networks and web 2.0 kind of skipped over the online shopping industry. Now we've seen a large amount of developers trying to fill the void through virtual dressing rooms and social online shopping. Some people say that StyleFeeder kind of paved a path for innovating online shopping. How do you think StyleFeeder fits into the online shopping world?
What's happening is that the ownership of the store catalog, an asset traditionally owned by the retailer, has started to transition to individuals. There are a lot of reasons for this, but you see it everywhere: people creating a collection of products that is appealing to them and merchandising their own virtual storefronts. All of this product information used to be in retailer's catalogs... when you wanted to see the latest J Crew stuff, you'd typically look in the J Crew catalog. Nowadays, you're more likely to find out about new products from your friends or people you interact with online, which, frankly, is much more interesting and compelling.

4. StyleFeeder does so much, how did you guys squeeze all of that into this sleek design that can fit into the corner of a blog, a profile, the side of your browser, or as a little button on your toolbar without feeling intrusive to the user?
We are pretty vicious when it comes to being concise about what we do, especially on the UI. Some of it is process and some of it is
instinct. But thanks for noticing ;)

5. A lot of widgets, although I would not necessarily give you guys the widget label, focus on providing services to one or two popular websites, i.e Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and kind of disappear behind the big names. Was it a decision from the start to not associate StyleFeeder with any one application, but to keep the brand strong and independent?
Funny - the decision was to stay out of the way of the users and just show them cool stuff rather than to focus on beating them over the
head with our logo. We are definitely independent and offer cool, customizable widgets for any platform (or RSS feeds if you care to
develop your own...).

6. Depending on the user, StyleFeeder can mean lots of things. However I'm curious of what could it mean for business users like upcoming fashion designers or magazine editors?
For magazine editors, it's an opportunity to come down from their ivory towers and see what people are really interested in and find out what looks from the runway are actually making their way to user's wishlists. There's a difference between style and fashion: style is your "way" of doing things whereas fashion indicates the preferred way of doing things. To us, it's more important that StyleFeeder is a way for you to explore your own interests rather than learn about what someone in an office in NYC thinks you should wear.

For business owners, StyleFeeder represents a huge opportunity. If you're a retailer, wouldn't you love to get to know a few thousand of your customers on a deeper level? To know what products that you don't sell are interesting to them so you can offer them something
new? To send a discount code to someone interested in your product? We've worked with a few retailers so far on initiatives like this and we're always eager to do more in that regard.

7. I'm personally excited to watch StyleFeeder evolve in the future, are there any plans for improvement?
Yes :) In 2008, you'll see the capabilities of StyleFeeder improve, by becoming richer and offering you a much more capable shopping
experience. Among other things, the UI will become more personalized, and we're focused on improving search. Stay tuned.

8. Finally, I know everyone whose has read the StyleFeeder start up story on your website wants to know about Phil and Bea. But what I want to know is where can I find Bea's StyleFeed...?!?
Aha... Well, her blog is here:
http://www.latartinegourmande.com/

... and her StyleFeed is here:
http://www.stylefeeder.com/stylefeed/beafleur

Be sure to add her to your watchlist!

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Tweet What You Eat: The New Way To Diet?

Searching the Internet last month, for innovative ways technology can be used in for me to keep up with my New Year diet goals, I stumbled upon a site that I absolutely love! It's called Tweet What You Eat (TWYE). The concept behind this web site is to conveniently create a food diary by using Twitter to tweet what you eat each day. I decided to go behind the scenes and TWYE for one day as well as talk with the creator Alex Weiss.

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My "Tweet What You Eat" Diary

9:45 am CST: I created myself a Twitter account today and followed the steps on the TWYE site to get ready to document my food intake for the day. The directions on TWYE were very simple. After setting up my Twitter account I typed in "follow tywe" into the "What are you doing box?" and clicked update. I made a mistake by immediately attempting to enter my food intake. You actually have to wait for the email to come to your inbox explaining that TWYE has is following you (twye tip: hold on to the edit code that comes in your inbox). So now that TWYE is following me and I'm following TWYE it's time to input my food. Okay, for breakfast I ate 2 fried eggs for 184 calories, 2 sausage links for 184 calories and water. In the "What are you doing box?" I type in "d twye 2 fried eggs:184, 2 sausages:320, water". So far so good!
1:30 pm CST: Okay lunch time is here. I run to Wendy's and grab a large chili with cheese and water. When I get back to my desk I twitter "d twye Wendy's chili". I start to realize that I am on a low carb diet and I kinda wish I could track my carbs to. I'll mention that to Alex for my interview. But for now, just being able to track my food intake is awesome. Now I need to find how many calories are in Wendy's chili so Google Wendy chili calories and find out that it's 310 calories. So I go to the TWYE website, look up my diary and edit the entry using the edit code that came in my inbox and add the calories to my Wendy's entry. Okay, now I got the hang of this!
4:30 pm CST: It's time for me to get off of work and I have a hair appointment at 5:30 pm so I need to be able to TWYE on the run. I set up my cell phone to send Twitter updates through text messages. This way if I eat I can text message it, I can always look up my calories later and add them.
9:00 pm CST: My mom, a biology teacher, is having problems setting up her Access database. I drive to her house and eat a salad their. Using a quick text message I twitter "d twye salad with ham and cheese, low fat bleu cheese dressing, sugar free Hawaiian punch".

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After one day of TWYE I was hooked and impressed with the ease of the application. I decided the ask the creator of TWYE, Alex Weiss, a few questions about his inspiration and genius.

Was there an “aha” moment for you that gave you the idea for TWYE?
It was mid-summer and my wedding was fast approaching. I wanted to loose 5 pounds for the big day. I was already exercising and figured if I just tuned my eating habits a little, I could achieve my goal. I wanted a tool that would simply allow me to keep an online food diary so that I see what I was eating every day and make small changes to my eating habits. I didn't need anything fancy, just a simple way to log what I was eating.

I had played around with Twitter with a close group of friends who like me are on the fringe of generation X/Y and like many, we just didn't "get it." I knew there was something to the Twitter platform though, so I decided to build the food diary using Twitter primarily because I knew you could send messages easily through Twitter using your Phone, IM or the web. That accessibility meant no excuses on skipping a day in the diary.

TWYE seems like a web app that would appeal to women more than men, was that your main audience during your brainstorming stage?
I built the tool first for my needs, though I had hoped it would also have broad appeal. I didn't think too much about the intended demographic. My concern was more whether the tool would be easy enough, and useful enough for a non-Twitter user to use. I suspected that my audience might be more female than male but if you go and look through the recently posted food items on the homepage you'll see it appears to break close to 50/50 female to male.

I love being able to track my calories as I eat throughout the day. However, right now I am on a low carb diet. In future developments do you plan on adding a column for fat or carbs to focus on different eating plans?
I haven't decided on that yet. There are a host of other improvements that I want to launch first. In creating TWYE I made a deliberate effort not to look at any existing food diary or diet websites, which is why I think TWYE turned out to be unique. I started from scratch, building something that I would use. Perhaps that's why so many guys use it? It's built on the natural language that you or I would describe what we eat. Now that the site is gaining in popularity, I want to take into account user needs and stack on neat new functionality allowing the tool to evolve. It's going to grow organically though as I don't want to compromise its simplicity.

The only difficult moment for me using TWYE was tracking down how many calories are in what. Are there any plans on adding a look up feature that helps you find how many calories are in basic items, or list of resources that can help you find your calories faster?
Yes! I'm looking forward to launching this feature. It's been in the works for a while. I know what I want to do and it's going to be unique. Without giving too much away, TWYE users will have the ability to look-up calorie amounts for food items that they don't know.

I can see this concept catching on at a colossal rate, for young and old. My mom is always on a diet and when I taught her how to use it, she’s been text messaging TWYE every since. What are your future plans for TWYE and how do you plan on reaching an even larger audience?
I am very impressed (and happy to hear) that your mom can use it! The plan is to build up TWYE with more features before working on efforts to build on the audience. So far TWYE has a pretty strong and loyal following. Some simple things that are missing include a print view for your diary, the ability to export to .csv, and a calorie look-up. Once those enhancements are done, I plan to get the word out in a bigger way.

If you could tell future developers and/or designers any encouraging words, what would you tell them and why.
I'd tell them to go with their gut, stick with it and see it through. You never know. I was struggling to complete the last 5% of the project and fighting myself to contain feature creep as I headed into launch. I was close to scrapping the project but instead I pushed through and launched the site. The day after launch and one email later TWYE was featured Lifehacker.com and at the end of the day there were 500 new food diaries. That far exceeded my expectations and that feeling and accomplishment made it all worthwhile.

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