It’s free – that’s good. Lots of space – also good. And its spam-filtering is second to none. Very good.
But, really, please, couldn’t they hire one cheap just-out-of-college usability professional?
Imagine only using Gmail once a week or so, and then mostly for checking, not sending. Where is the Reply button?
Not as big as it should be, that’s for sure.
[tags] gmail, send mail, google, usability, HCI, john koetsier [/tags]Google Book Search is now releasing full books as downloadable PDFs … in some ways similar to what Project Gutenberg has been doing for years.
To me, Google is saving books from themselves. Not hit books, of course, and not recent books either. But the long tail of books.
Related:
Project Connexions … ripping, mixing, and “burning” books:
I started this post about 3 months ago.
The paradox of choice – why more is less is a great video of Barry Schwarz talking at Google about his research on choice. His counter-intuitive result was that more choice leads to less satisfaction.
More products, less happiness. More options, more stress. It’s fascinating – check it out here:
But I didn’t publish the post … something was missing. Now I know what.
I’m currently reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. He mentions this Schwarz’ research too. But the follow-up tells the real story.
The problem is not too much choice. The problem is too little help.
Online, more help is easy. Top 10 lists. Recommended by lists. People who bought this also bought that. Affinities. Reviews. Owner blurbs.
Offlline, all that is missing – so choice is hard. Without guides, we miss the path, and it’s stressful.
Which is why the long tail wags best online.
[tags] long tail, barry schwarz, paradox of choice, poverty of help, chris anderson, google video, john koetsier [/tags]I hate to say I knew it would happen, but 3-4 months ago I put together this strategy map of where I thought Google was heading.
I focused on education because I work for an education company. But this will happen in the corporate world too.
Google will offer an integrated suite of single sign-on private labeled applications in all of these areas, and more:
All roads lead to Rome? All roads lead to Google.
If anyone is still wondering why Microsoft increased their projected R&D spend enormously just a few months ago, you can stop. Now you know.
Private label Google apps are here … for business and education:
In other words, you can package up Google’s apps under your own label and distribute them for free. Currently, for education, this is limited to email, calendaring, and IM, but more are coming.
(Education is near and dear to my heart, because that’s the area my company focuses on.)
What this means is that any provider of basic technology services to education will have to work hard – very hard – to sell them to schools and districts. That includes features like word processing, spreadsheets, web authoring, presentations, you name it. Not just the standard email and calendar.
Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Blogger, Google Page Creator, Gmail, Google Calendar … these are all coming, but these are just the beginning.
Sucks for Microsoft, maybe, but more than that: sucks for lots of web 2.0 application companies. It’s not necessarily deadly for them, but it is a competitor, and a tough one.
The one challenge in education: currently most of these apps are ad-supported. And that’s obviously Google’s long-term strategy. So ad-phobic educators will look for alternatives.
This reminds me of what Nicholas Carr recently wrote about: the death of IT as competitive advantage (because of ubiquity). In a different, nasty way that might come true: in the long term educational technology vendors will have a very hard time competing with free.
Written from my (free) Gmail account …
[tags] google, apps, private label, writely, spreadsheets, gmail, calendar, page creator, blogger, free, nicholas carr, john koetsier, death of IT [/tags]This whole past week we’ve been hearing that Kiko being eBayed was:
Well, looks like the people behind Kiko are having the last laugh: Kiko sold for over a quarter of a million dollars.
Let’s put that in perspective: 2 guys, a year, and $50,000 investment. Not too shabby? Not too shabby!
[ update: Scoble agrees ]Is Google allowing scammers to market themselves via Google AdWords? It seems unbelievable, but when I was searching for “paypal scam” while researching a recent story, some very odd results popped up.
Right there, in the sponsored link ads:
Work at home scams
Revealed! Learn which programs
Really work. Minimal start-up fee.
Unbelievable. But here is photographic evidence … or at least screen-shot evidence:
They don’t show up when you just search for “Paypal.” Nor did they show up when I just searched for “scam.” Someone obviously wants their ads to appear only when a Google visitor is searching for both paypal and scam.
That someone apparently includes Derek Hart, a 24-year-old “retiree.” He’s selling a multiple income stream that involves “NO Cold Calling, NO Selling, NO Talking to Family & Friends, NO Answering questions, NO Speaking to prospects, and absolutely NO telephone calls.”
I don’t know if it’s really a Paypal scam or not – but my guess is that it is some kind of scam.
[tags] google, paypal, scam, mlm, quick rich quick, john koetsier [/tags]Question: do you design an application for power users or novices?
Ideally, your design is so mindblowingly uber-good that it works perfectly for both. In the real world, however, you make compromises.
Take Gmail, for instance.
I have a Gmail account – mostly so I can publish an email address baldly on this blog and not worry too much about spam. First of all, Gmail’s spam protection is very, very good. And secondly, it’s not my primary account, so I don’t really care too much.
So I’m a Gmail novice … I go there about once a week. (Mail sent to my Gmail account is forwarded to one I check daily.) When there, mostly I just look at what comes in … any email I write, I send from my primary, sparkplug9.com account.
But occasionally I want to send an email from Gmail. And it never fails: I always have to hunt, sometimes for 20 seconds, for the Send Mail button. Of course, there isn’t one:
It’s called “Compose Mail.” And it’s hidden, almost – certainly way less prominent than the Archive, Delete, or Report Spam buttons. (To say nothing of the Search button.)
Is this good design?
There’s no question Gmail is great technology. But I doubt anyone would call it great design … even if it may work for power users.
. . .
. . .
Other thoughts on Gmail’s design
Joel on Software forum, Paul Kedrosky (a great speaker, btw, heard him once at VEF), Walt Mossberg, Richard MacManus, Dan Brown (very comprehensive piece!), Topix blog.
Why is Alexa so freakishly clueless about sites that link into Sparkplug 9?
I’ve never really cared about Alexa, but it seems all the rage lately among people comparing the reach of various sites, so I thought I’d check my main domain. And it tells me that precisely one site links into Sparkplug 9.
Ummm … nonsense.
According to Google, the actual number of links into Sparkplug 9 sites is “about 15,300.” Hmm … about 15,300 is not 1. Not even close to 1. Never mind not being in the same ballpark, it’s almost not on the same continent!
I repeat: how could Alexa be so clueless?
[tags] alexa, web search, google, pagerank, inbound links, clueless, john koetsier [/tags]Almost exactly a month ago I started using Flock on all my computers. Now it’s time to evaluate: was it worth the switch?
Still, it’s hard to beat Safari for pure elegance – I still find myself hankerin’ for some brushed metal.
Slight edge: Safari
But opening up a new window seems to take a looong time – almost 4 seconds – on my 1Ghz PowerBook G4. Not great.
Also, Flock tends to run down with use. I’m a power web user, and it’s not unusual for me to have 10 or 15 tabs open. After a day of that – or several days, I reboot my Mac only every month or so – Flock slows way down, and the dreading spinning beachball of death becomes a constant companion.
The solution is to quit Flock and restart it, and presto, it’s as fast as usual. Perhaps Flock’s memory management is not the best – I’m not sure. It took me a while to figure this one out, but now that I have, this is no major trouble.
Advantage: Safari
Uploadr is just better, seems quicker, and lets me properly tag and categorize (add to sets, in Flickrese) all my photos before they even get to Flickr.
In a walk: Flock
But I’ve actually decided that I like writing my posts in WordPress‘ admin interface better. It lets me write, then Save and Continue Editing, view what I’ve written in the context of my actual blog look and feel, and repeat the process until I’m ready to publish.
Still, major kudos to the Flock team for incorporating this functionality. I’m certain that some, and maybe many, will really appreciate this feature.
Decision: have to give the nod to Flock
(Aside: oh how I detest Windows Media Player for the Mac.)
So I figured that Flock – being based on the mighty 15-20% market share Firefox – would be superior. Actually – not always.
Not only does Safari render just about as many sites as Flock, it lets you lie. After enabling the Debug menu in Safari, you can tell websites that your browser is Internet Explorer, even MSIE 7.
Which comes in very handy when you want to get a free domain name from Microsoft, but need IE on a PC to access the site. No you don’t – just set Safari’s user-agent to MSIE 6 or 7, and away you go. Some things won’t work, but most will … and that free domain name will be nicely wrapped up in your hot lying little hand.
On the other hand, there are sites that say: only works in MSIE and Firefox (and Flock). Google, of course, has released many tools that are initially MSIE and Firefox only, such as Google Calendar. Usually Safari support comes along, but usually a little later.
Verdict: hung jury
But no longer: the unreadably understated Flocker to the rescue. And, if that does not suffice, no worries, Flock’d is there to help.
Since you can now convert just about every Firefox extension to a Flock extension (note to Flock: it’d be a good idea to do this proactively, and offer the converted extensions on your site), and since Safari has a small (though growing) list of extensions, this one is farily easy to call:
Advantage: Flock
But you still want to.
Browser bookmarks are passe and have been for years now. Locked in one application on one computer (or on two or three, if you happen to be paying for .Mac), they not accessible, they’re not contextualized (other than one single attribute: category), can’t be mashed up and re-published as a clickstream elsewhere, and they’re simply not cool/social/hip and so on.
Social bookmarking and tagging are in, bigtime.
Safari integration (and Firefox and MSIE, for that matter) is limited to a toolbar link. It contains Javascript; it redirects you to your del.icio.us homepage, you wait for that to load, you tag your page and enter anything else you want, hit save and get redirected back to the page you just bookmarked.
Flock, on the other hand, lets you click a little star just in front of the browser address bar, and, if you set it right in your search/bookmarking preferences, automatically tag the page right on the page, save it to del.icio.us, and stay right where you are the whole time. Easy, fast, clean, integrated, sweet.
Distinct advantage: Flock
Safari was the first browser to recognize this and to incorporate search right into the browser itself. (I wonder how much money Apple makes from this; Firefox makes a significant sum via a relationship with Google on proceeds from the ads clicked by people searching with Firefox.) Who actually goes to www.google.com to search anymore? The only times I’m there is when I have to do a complex, advanced search.
Flock also lets you search right from the browser interface, but it defaults to Yahoo! (Yup, revenue-sharing deal.) Well, sorry, Flock – I don’t want to deny you the revenue, but I think Google results are better and the result pages load faster.
No fear, you can change the default, which I did. But here Flock shines, because you can change the default to a variety of search engines – and key sites, like Amazon.com, and Technorati.
But a feature that Flock adds for the Yahoo! results is live search – similar to the Ajaxy live search you see on cutting-edge blogs or on Google suggest. And while I don’t use Yahoo! as the default, you can bet I am check that list as it appears, and if something stands out as a potential good choice, I click it. Fast, friendly, not in my face, but occasionally useful.
Advantage: Flock
This one is too tight to call. Safari is probably just a little more standards-compliant, but Flock, being Firefox under the hood, is more often used in testing by web developers.
Overall, I can say I haven’t had a significant problem with either.
Upshot: dead heat
Well, those are some of the vectors that came to my mind when comparing browsers and trying to decide whether or not to stick with Flock or go back to Safari.
By my count, Flock wins 7 to 4.
And therefore, Flock remains my default browser.
“Email me at blah (at) blah (dot) blah.”
Seen enough of those email addresses online? I know I have. And I know why.
People are sick of spam, and the days when you could put your email address online in hypertext clickable – or even plaintext – are long over.
Or are they?
For the past three months, I’ve put my email addresses in full click-and-you’re-emailing-me out-there spammers-suck-me-up brazen glory. Actually, to be more truthful, I’ve put my Gmail address up. On three different blogs. On public pages. On sites that get spidered daily by dozens of known and who-the-heck-is-that robots.
And the grand total of spam I’ve gotten over the last three months?
Three!
One on a great opportunity to help someone move millions of dollars from an eastern European country, one on a personal enhancement device guaranteed to improve my life immeasurably, and one begging for links.
Three! Three spams that actually made it into my inbox … and 298 more that Gmail correctly pre-identified as spam and sequestered before I had to look at them.
Three spams in three months is beyond silly. It’s ridiculous. In fact, I get more spam at my corporate email account – which is never published online and sits behind a corporate spam filter – than I do in my Gmail inbox.
All I can say is that Google must have the best spam-filtering software available. And, I assume that it’s built with social intelligence, just like Akismet, the WordPress comment spam filter. When a few people ID a spam, Akismet knows that it’s spam all across the network.
Gmail does not provide any details on how its spam filtering works, but Gmail spam filtering must work that way as well, or I’d have way more spam in my inbox.
I’m just happy I can once again publish my email online without silly linguistic gymnastics: john (dot) koetsier (at) gmail (dot) com – as if some spammer couldn’t build a robot that could parse and recombine that.
I just don’t want my visitors to have to. Email me if you agree.
[tags] gmail, email, spam, akismet, filtering, spammers, john koetsier [/tags]It’s fun. You know you want to. Just do it!
Or, if you prefer, the site will also give you a custom Yahoo! logo.
[tags] google, logo, john koetsier [/tags]There’s been a lot of discussion in the Mac community about .Mac lately.
.Mac is Apple’s $99/year online service that is basically the online publishing component of the iLife application suite. It incorporates:
Much of the talk in the Mac community has been around price: is it really worth it? After all, Google gives you Gmail with 2+ GB (free), there are other sources of online file storage such as Yahoo’s Backpack (free), and $99 would easily buy you your own domain name and server space at a lot of web hosting companies … in fact, it could easily be a lot cheaper.
There’s no question that Apple’s integration of the tools with iLife, and the quality of the presentation is worth something. But the number of Mac owners actually using .Mac has to be minimal, even tiny.
So my question is: would Apple make more money if they made .Mac free, and slapped Google AdWords on it?
How much do they make?
Well, even if the percentage of Mac owners paying for .Mac is not high, there’s still a lot of money in it.
If 500,000 people were paying for .Mac, Apple would gross $50 million a year. I think that number would be very high. There’s a story at C|Net from 2002 claiming that Apple had almost 200,000 subscribers, but I seriously doubt that it’s grown immensely, even though pageviews on Alexa have grown somewhat over the past few years. Most of that increased page viewing is likely due to visitors, not subscribers.
Let’s say there are 300,000 subscribers today, and Apple makes $30 million/year from them. Could they do better?
Plentyoffish
Well, let’s take a look at an AdWords example: PlentyofFish. It’s an online dating site, it is entirely free and AdWords supported, and its owner just cashed a million-dollar check. Well, almost a million.
He says his CPM (cost per thousand) pageviews is under $1. Well, let’s do some math:
– $500,000 for a month
– CPM of about $1
He must have gotten about 500 million pageviews. Adjust the number up or down a bit, depending on your inputs, but that’s about where it stands.
A free .Mac: show me the money
Let’s assume, given that .Mac is a fairly good service and it’s tightly integrated into iLife, many, many Mac owners would be users of .Mac if it was free. I think a conservative guess would be that 10 times more owners would use .Mac … meaning that you’d have 3 million people instead of 300,000.
Well, if you compare .Mac and PlentyOfFish pageviews at Alexa, you’ll find that today, they’re almost neck-and-neck.
In other words, .Mac should have about 500 million pageviews a month.
Multiply that by 10, and you’re at a whopping 5 billion pageviews a month. Apply the same CPM metrics of PlentyOfFish, and a back-of-the-envelope analysis would tell you that a free .Mac would make Apple about $5 million each and every month.
Apple, set .Mac free: you’ll make more
Which means, that at $60 million/year, Apple would double its revenue by reducing the price of .Mac to free. Which would seem to be a great idea …
Plus …
A free .Mac would also be an excellent selling point for new Macs. And don’t forget: a wonderful marketing tool for all the non-Mac-owning relatives of Mac users who would visit .Mac to see their cool relations’ funky digital creations.
.Mac is already free as in speech. Maybe it’s time for Apple to make it free as in beer.
. . .
. . .
Some thoughts on the argument above:
And whatever else I might be missing …
[ update ]A quick note spurred by one of the comments below: I did pay for and use .Mac for two years … so I do have some clue as to what the service is. However, if you think I’m missing the real point of it, or a large part of the value of it, please, please do enlighten me (and everyone else) in the comments. Thanks!
[tags] apple, .Mac, web 2.0, iLife, free, CPM, google, adwords, adsense, john koetsier [/tags]Just a few months ago, I blew up my existing blog on gilgamesh.ca and moved it to this domain.
Gilgamesh.ca was a domain name that was personally attractive, but it had no relationship to my consulting company, Sparkplug 9 Technology Services, and it didn’t brand me at all. Plus, I wanted to blog about multiple subjects, but felt I needed to split up those posts so that pictures of my daughter would not be next to stories about the latest web 2.0 company.
Moving domains is like moving your store: will all the old customers still come? And I knew my Google and Technorati ranking would take a huge hit.
But the sooner you make a directional, strategic move like that, the better. Prolonging it will only make the eventual move harder, and more painful.
So I finally pulled the trigger, and instantly, I could feel the pain. As I mentioned here, my Technorati ranking went down from the high 90,000s to almost 1,000,000.
Ouch!
Just a couple of weeks after that, my ranking had improved a couple of hundred thousand spots, but was still horrible.
I buckled down and worked hard to improve it:
Today, is a good day for bizhack: not only is bizhack finally above water, its Technorati rating is higher than gilgamesh.ca ever got: 89,899.
From an overall perspective, that’s not much to celebrate – if I had stayed at gilgamesh.ca, I’d probably be in the 50K range right now. So I’m only just above water.
But it’s been a tough 2 months to move up over 900,000 places on Technorati, and I’m pleased with that. And now bizhack is well positioned to continue to improve.
If you have any ideas on that, by the way, I’d love to hear them – just add a comment!
[tags] blogging, pagerank, technorati, bizhack, gilgamesh.ca, john koetsier [/tags]My wife and I are thinking of redoing our roof, so I naturally turned to the web as my first place to research the project.
But why did on earth did an Australian home improvement site come up in the adwords section? I happen to live near Vancouver, Canada.
Someone is an AdWords newbie. Someone needs to learn about restricting your ads by country and region. Someone just wasted 50 cents or a buck.
[tags] adwords, geotargeting, google, marketing, john koetsier [/tags]What’s up with Yahoo!’s Slurp?
That’s the question I was asking myself last week as I was peering at my blog stats. More specifically, the stats for which robots had been visiting, sucking, spidering my sites.
Yahoo! Slurp is visiting my sites almost constantly … in this 7-day period it requested a file (image, page, you name it) 12,521 times. That’s about 9000 more hits than the Googlebot.
Here’s the graph. (Note: this is only the Mozilla-compatible spiders, which in total account for about half of the spidering on my sites.)
There are a ton of bots that hit any blogs that have more than 20 posts and a few links to them. I think I once counted 50 or 60 – and that was a year or more ago.
But why would Yahoo! Slurp account for 65% of the spider hits to my site? During the same period, the MSN bot accounted for about 1200 hits. I confess I don’t get it.
Somehow, Yahoo! wants to know everything, immediately, repeatedly. That’s OK, I’m just wondering why.
. . .
. . .
Interestingly enough, the Technorati bot is almost nowwhere to be seen, with something like 90 hits on my site in the 7-day period.
[tags] technoratibot, yahoo slurp, googlebot, spiders, MSNbot, john koetsier [/tags]Is there anyone out there with a Writely account and a spare invite?
Writely has not been accepting new accounts for over a month – every since they were bought by Google – and won’t be for another month, and I’ve been dying to try the service and also have a place to store/create/search some of my documents.
If you do, please leave a comment and I’ll get in touch.
Thanks!
[ update June 9 ]
Thanks, Matthew Mullins, for the invite!
[tags] writely, invite, begging, google, john koetsier [/tags]A couple of observations after using Google Calendar as my exlusive calendar for the past 3 weeks:
Cheers
Plus, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyways: it’s very nice to have the same calendar on my home computer and work computer, without having to do any work whatsoever to make it happen.
Jeers
In other words, I can have all my events in one calendar, or I can have color-coding. Categories would solve the problem.
Typically, my main and initial calendar will render immediately, but the other calendars will take a second or so more to draw in on the browser. Once everything is up and running, actions are quick and easy. But when starting sessions, I find myself opening up Firefox and then doing something else for a few seconds, allowing the app to load. That’s not ideal.
I saw this story on Digg about Google insider trading going off the charts, literally, and was a little interested.
You can, if you want, click to see just CEO Eric Schmidt’s results … which is even more interesting. And you can even, if you choose, copy and past the tables directly into Excel … which is most interesting of all.
Mad Money
Turns out, Eric Schmidt has sold a quarter billion dollars worth of Google shares this year alone. Yup, since January 1, he’s sold $250,285,406 (and 44 cents) worth of Google shares.
And over the past three years, he’s sold more than $717,450,284.88 of shares, almost all of them Google shares (an insignificant $3 million were Siebel shares).
Obviously, I don’t know what his strike price was on those shares – what he paid for them before selling them. But he’s definitely above water and not doing too badly at all.
Gotta love capitalism!
[tags] eric schmidt, google, money, shares, insider trading, john koetsier [/tags]Digg: Digg this here
I’ve been playing with Google Trends a bit lately – who hasn’t?
So, for instance, it’s interesting to know that Yahoo! is in the news more than Wall Street darling Google:
And that relatively tiny Apple generates almost as much press as mighty Microsoft – the gap is even narrowing lately:
But this is a rough ruler. There’s got to be an awful lot more specificity in Google’s database.
For instance, while normalizing for various regions is nice for tiny Singapore, which now shows up near the top in a lot of searches, it may not be very useful for an entrepreneur in North America.
And, to be blunt, the graphs are simply pretty lines on the wall right now … infoporn … chart cruft. There’s no actual magnitude data (500 million searches for Apple over the past year), only comparative data (hmm … the blue line on that chart seems to go up and down a lot).
While the trends are still nice to see, you have to think that there’s something bigger here that Google will pull out of its sleeve sooner or later: a paid trends analysis tool.
I mean, if you were XYZ BigCorp™, wouldn’t you pay $1000 a month for access to data like this:
That would be incredibly valuable information, drawn from a huge sample, that companies would pay big dollars for. I’m wondering when Google (or Yahoo!, or any other search engine) will come out with a product like this.
The only question is: how will people using Google or the other search engines react? Will we view this as a privacy assault, or as simply a smart way to generate revenue from the wisdom of masses?
[tags] google, trends, product, marketing, competitive intelligence, yahoo, john koetsier [/tags]I recently received an email from clicksettlement@xmr3.com claiming that I could be a party to a class-action lawsuit.
It looks reasonably legit, but phishing scams are a dime a dozen these days, and XMR3.com resolves to this email marketing firm.
This court-ordered notice may affect your legal rights. Please read it carefully. If you purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present, you are a class member in a class-action lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas. This notice is to inform you of the Court’s certification of a class; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement. Please read the attached notice.
You can get more information at: http://www.clicksettlement.com.
The Click Settlement website looks legit and does not ask for any personal information – at least not yet. All it actually says right now is to return on June 19. It does have an 800 number (800-899-6701) that appears to check out … though I did not ask to speak to a live operator.
The email contains the same information multiple times in 22 different languages, and a 2-page PDF attachment. (Here’s the enclosure.)
If you purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present, you are a class member in a class- action lawsuit, Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles et al. v. Google, Inc. et al., Case No. CV-2005-52-1, in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas. This notice is to inform you of the Court’s certification of a class; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement. If you purchased online advertising from Google on behalf of another party, please forward this notice to the advertiser.
My question is: is this legit? A couple Google searches brought up this page, which is inconclusive.
[tags] google, adwords, adsense, class action, lawsuit, Lane’s Gifts [/tags]This month I’m using Google Calendar exclusively for my calendaring and scheduling.
I don’t really know if I’ll continue to use it or not, but I’m immersing myself in it as part of a project at work in which I’m investigating a variety of different media/applications for staying organized.
One thing that bugs me (beside the fact that I need to use Firefox – Safari is not supported yet) is that it appears to always start the page view only at the first event. So if my first scheduled event for a week is at 10:00, that’s where my calendar view starts. There’s no configuration or preference for what hours of the day you want your to display.
But I like to see more of my work day … about 7:30 to 6:30. So here’s a work-around:
Create an event on Sunday morning at 7:00 AM (or however early you want
your average day to start being viewable. In event details, make it
repeat weekly.
Presto: all your calendars now show from 7:00 AM on …
I’m sure Google will eventually come up with a feature to make this
work-around superfluous, but until then it works!
(Also published in Google Calendar help.)
[tags] google, calendar, tip [/tags]I set up this tester account at WordPress.com months and months ago, when I was still running off the gilgamesh.ca domain.
I’m wondering if most of the development on WordPress (the blogging platform) is now happening on improvements for WordPress (the blog hosting platform). So I went back today and updated some of the links, added a first article, and so on.
It’s hard to say, but what I think is probably happening is that Matt & Co actually are focusing on WordPress.com, but not to give it more features than WordPress the blogging software. Rather, they seem to be trying to get it to feature parity: multiple themes, using your own domain, and so on …
Although, in a couple areas, they’re ahead of a default WordPress install on your own server. Blog stats and feed stats are nice touches that, of course, because it’s on their servers, they can offer.
Overall, WordPress.com is not bad … if it had been where it is now 6 months ago, I’m not sure I’d have needed to move my server to Media Temple, or have needed a server host at all.
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for having your own space – and for having someone taking your money and therefore being accountable for the quality of your site’s hosting (and uptime!)
One thing’s for sure: my site definitely loads quicker.
I really wonder how WordPress.com is going to make money. Will they put Adsense on all accounts? Or start charging a minimal fee?
After all, they’re not Google – I doubt they can keep doing it for free.
The Wall Street Journal posted an article about the possibility of Microsoft acquiring or merging with Yahoo! as part of Microsoft’s ongoing fixation on beating Google.
I think it’s highly unlikely. But if it were to happen, I think the big winner would be Google.
Why?
Yahoo would be instantly less cool, first of all. So some of the geek cred that it’s built up with the APIs and developer AJAX tools that it’s released would be gone at one fell swoop.
More importantly, however, just imagine the integration challenges, the our-tech-is-better battles that would be fought at a million different levels. Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail? MSN Search or Yahoo! search? Both Microsoft and Yahoo! have hundreds of web tools and properties with tens of millions of users … and in an ideal merger situation, those would come together, user management on all the systems would be unified … the list goes on.
Working on integration on that scale would take years, likely. Google is winning because it is focused. Mergers and the resulting integration headaches are classic focus disrupters.
OK.
You want to be cool. You want to be an entrepreneur. And you want to start a shiny new web 2.0 company. Here’s an idea for you:
You 2.0. Or myspy.
I can’t decide which name I like better. But here’s the idea in four words: persistent painless personal history.
Got that?
The idea’s free. If you do it, let me know. I’d love to help in any way I can. But I’m not doing it myself, for a perfectly valid reason that might stop you too.
Here’s the idea
The business is simple: build a Firefox plugin and an Internet Explorer toolbar that do nothing but report what websites you’re visiting to a server. That builds a list of sites that you’ve visited.
That’s basically it. A few details:
Over time, you build in more cool features by spidering and auto-tagging pages that people are visiting, and building pretty (but oh-so-useful) tag clouds on users’ home pages.
Pretty cool, huh? Neat for an individual, and cool because a community could develop around it. As digital becomes a huge part of our identities (Flickr, blogs, MySpace, etc.), wouldn’t you want painless personal history?
There’s only that one problem I mentioned earlier. Actually, there’s two:
1: Filthy lucre, or lack thereof
I can’t figure out how to monetize it. And without monetizing it, it would just be a cool project that, if it got popular, would bog down under its own weight of server and bandwidth costs.
In other words, I’m not convinced AdSense would cover the bills.
2: Competitors
There are three or four potential competitors that could totally and completely kill it:
All four of these already have or very easily could have toolbars that install and essentially phone home on every click. That done, the rest is easy. And for Alexa and/or Google, it would be right up their alley.
Tempting
Still, it’s tempting. You 2.0. Myspy. Persistent painless personal history. Inherently social.
Spyware where the spy-er and the spy-ee are the same person.
I like it!
Full disclosure: I ran this idea past Guy Kawasaki, and while he thought it was cool too … also did not see a viable business model. He’s a pretty clueful guy. But if you decide to prove us wrong and try to make it work: go for it!
Congratulations Rastin Mehr on being named a project mentor for Joomla’s entrants in the Google Summer of Code.
Rastin is a good friend and colleague, and will be a great mentor.
While I was doing some education/technology research today, I ran across a tutorial for Finding Information on the Internet.
9 major sections, 5-6 subsections, and a whole page of “things you need to know before starting.”
I find it incredibly how educators can be so incredibly … ummm … how can I say “stupid” nicely? They seem to think that learning something requires exhaustive dissection of the thing to be learned, categorization, and step-by-careful-linear-step progression through a series of stages.
How adult of them.
Here’s my tutorial on web search:
Oh, there’s more to learn. And people learn more as they go. And there’s different places to find different kinds of information.
But the key is starting, and learning while you are doing. Why don’t teachers see that?
Richard MacManus at ZD Net Blogs has a great post about the coming web office, in which he argues that Google is much better positioned to succeed at creating a web office – simply because it’s a native web company, and Microsoft is not.
Note: the web office is coming, but not coming soon – as MacManus states:
My basic Web Office premise is that office software will slowly but surely migrate to the Web.
As I was reading his post, something occured to me about printing.
Printing has been one of the things that an installed, desktop software tool has always been better at than anything web. And actually, that might continue to be true.
But I wonder: how important will printing be? I think that when we are working on some kind of web office application, printing will actually, finally, long-awaitedly go (mostly) away.
Printing will be replaced by publishing.
Why print when you can just publish? And the web office will publish automatically, bloggishly. RSSishly. Mashupishly.
I don’t know anyone who is web-savvy who prints out web pages anymore – something I saw a lot of just 5 or 6 years ago. Bookmark it. If the page moves, Google still has a copy. If Google doesn’t, maybe the Wayback Machine does. Really paranoid? Save it to your hard disk.
I think the same will happen with documents. Why do you print? Well, sometimes I print to give myself a better view of what I need to edit. That may not go away. But mostly I print to share.
When sharing’s built in, printing goes away. And when work is done online (web office), you publish instead of printing.
